Bursting forth to the sound of Gregorian chants and the signature sounds of one of Malta’s most recognisable contemporary composers, the video dance La Pietà promises to be a considerable departure from traditional Holy Week imagery.
Ruben Zahra speaks to
Lara Zammit about his latest project and the ideas that spurred it into being.
Your video dance project was formed as a reproduction of Michelangelo’s Pietà. What about Michelangelo’s sculpture inspired you to create this piece?
The Pietà is a subject depicted by many artists portraying the Madonna cradling the dead body of Christ. Undoubtedly, the most famous Pietà sculpture is by Michelangelo Buonarroti which depicts the Madonna as a young woman. I always found this detail very intriguing. The Madonna seems to be younger than her son.
The Swallowed Man
, by Edward Carey.
The story of Pinocchio is something that has taken several shapes in my life. The first of course was the Disney story, known to most Americans by now. The second involved the discovery of Carlo Collodi’s
The Adventures of Pinocchio, a life-changing event the original novel which would seem to have served as the loosest possible inspiration for Disney’s Pinocchio. The relationship between the Disney and the Collodi was like the mask and the face.
Now we have, in a sense, the mirror, too:
The Swallowed Man, by the writer and artist Edward Carey, imagines Geppetto, inside the impossible five story cave that is belly of the massive dog-fish shark that swallowed him, awaiting what seems to him to be death, and writing, at last, the stories he has not told before now of his life as the creator of the wooden puppet who transformed into a human boy. Illuminated by Carey’s exquisitely textured original illustrations, the passages take on the