Le Carnaval, Mascarade Royale
The masterpiece by Giovanni Battista Lully is reborn in a contemporary stage vision

A masterpiece of seventeenth-century French culture comes back to life in a spectacular, contemporary interpretation: Le Carnaval, Mascarade Royale by Giovanni Battista Lully, a musical ballet created for the court of the Sun King Louis XIV, receives its modern-day world premiere under the musical direction of Federico Maria Sardelli.

The production arises from the encounter between musical research and the scenic imagination of Emiliano Pellisari, who signs the direction together with his dance company NoGravity Theatre. The result is a visionary reading of the Baroque, far removed from any attempt at philological reconstruction. Here the Baroque becomes living matter—pure theatrical energy—capable of speaking to the present through the power of the body, music, and stage illusion.

Inspired by the form of the ballet de cour, Le Carnaval, Mascarade Royale unfolds as a sequence of autonomous tableaux, inhabited by the typical figures of the masquerade—Spaniards, doctors, Turks, lovers, musicians—parading according to a logic of continuous metamorphosis. It is a Carnival that presents itself as a game of wonder, while concealing within it the great carnivalesque archetypes: the reversal of roles, eroticism, death.

The choreography, conceived and created by the artistic duo Pellisari–Porceddu, builds aerial images of extraordinary visual power, designed to captivate the eye first and only afterwards the mind. Dance constantly dialogues with song and music, overcoming any separation between voice and body, between dancers and singers, united on stage in a single aesthetic vision.

Carnival thus becomes a space of absolute freedom, a suspended time in which everything can enter the scene and hierarchies are overturned. Le Carnaval, Mascarade Royale stands as a tribute to the power of imagination, to the centrality of the body, and to music understood as a meeting place between eras, languages, and visions.

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World Premiere
Teatro Comunale di Ferrara “Claudio Abbado”
14–15 February 2026

Open dress rehearsal
12 February 2026

Third and fourth performances
Teatro Comunale di Modena “Pavarotti-Freni”
27 February – 1 March 2026