THE BALLADE OF ZERLINE

During her theatrical career she has been directed, among others, by Strehler, Visconti, Ronconi, Harold Pinter, Susan Sontag, Alfredo Arias interpreting with recognized mastery great characters of classical and modern theater. 

She has inspired writers such as Ginzburg, Siciliano, Patroni Griffi, Cesare Musatti and Franca Valeri, who created unforgettable protagonists of our scenes for her. 

For many years she has also been acting in French language on stages in Paris introducing some of her heroines with great success. 

She wrote two plays, Caro Professore and Alcool, which ran for more than 200 performances, and two novels published in France, Rue Ferou and Se souvenir et oublie.

She has participated in over 60 films directed, among others, by Visconti, De Sica, Pasolini, Bertolucci, Bolognini, Brass, Giordana, Techiné and Bunuel. 

Her new role as singer has been demonstrated with Stramilano her city in nostalgia music, and Ja das Meer ist blau, poems and songs from Brecht and Weill, shows conceived by her. 

For her performances she has won the prize Ennio Flaiano, three Maschere d’oro, four Nastri d’argento, the David di Donatello, the Grolla d’oro, the Premio De Sica and the Ciak d’oro. Since 2004, she is Grande Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana. 

In 2009 Robert Wilson directed her in Happy Days by Samuel Beckett. 

In 2011 she was awarded the title of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et de Lettres. 

In 2014 she has been Alice in The Dance of Death by August Strindberg directed by Luca Ronconi. In 2017, Adriana Asti talks about herself in the show Memorie di Adriana, drawn from the book Ricordare e dimenticare, conversazione tra Adriana Asti e René De Ceccatty, directed by Andrée Ruth Shammah, and in 2018 she plays the role of Donna Fabia in the film and installation by Marco Tullio Giordana, based on the poem by Carlo Porta. 

Lucinda Childs began her career at the Judson Dance Theater in 1963 where she choreographed thirteen works and performed in works of Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Robert Morris. Since forming her dance company in 1973, she has created over fifty works, both solo and ensemble. In 1976, she collaborated with Robert Wilson and Philip Glass on the opera Einstein on the Beach, as principal performer and choreographer for which she received a Village Voice Obie award. Childs has appeared in a number of Wilson´s major productions among them, Marguerite Duras´ Maladie de la Mort, Wilson´s I Was Sitting on my Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating, Heiner Muller´s Quartett, and Wilson and Glass´ opera White Raven and Arvo Part’s Adam’s Passion and collaborated with Robert Wilson and Mikhail Baryshnikov on Wilson’s production Letter to a Man which premiered in Spoleto Italy in 2015. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979 for her collaboration, Dance, with music by Philip Glass, and film décor by Sol LeWitt. Since 1981, she has choreographed over thirty works for major ballet companies which include the Paris Opera Ballet, Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, and Baryshnikov´s White Oak Dance Company. She has also worked as choreographer and more recently both choreographer and director for sixteen opera productions including Mozart´s Zaide for La Monnaie in Brussels, Stravinsky´s Le Rossignol et Oedipe, Vivaldi´s Farnace, and Handel´s Alessandro, voted "Opera of the Year" by Mezzo-TV 2013. In 2014 she directed a new production of John Adams Dr. Atomic for the Opera du Rhin and Jean Baptiste Lully´s Atys and Gluck´s Orfeo ed Euridice for Opera Kiel in Germany. Childs received the Bessie Award for Sustained Achievement in 2001, and was elevated from the rank of Officer to Commander in France´s Order of Arts and Letters in 2004, and in 2009 she received the NEA/NEFA American Masterpiece Award. In 2017, she was awarded the Venice Biennale de la Danse Golden Lion Award, and the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Lifetime Achievement Award.

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1940, Pat Steir studied art and philosophy at Boston University and received her BFA from the Pratt Institute in 1962. In 1963, she was invited to participate in her first group show at The High Museum in Atlanta. The next year, her work appeared in group shows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and in The Museum of Modern Art’s Drawing exhibition, making her a key figure among the first wave of women artists to gain prominence in the New York art world. Best known for her Waterfall series of splashed, dripping paint on canvas, Pat Steir had her work featured at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She rose to prominence in the 1970s when she began to create monochromatic canvases that had Xs through them, as seen in the Lannan Collection. Since then, her style has branched to include many other transformative forms of Abstract painting. She explained, “I wanted to destroy images as symbols. To make the image a symbol for a symbol. I had to act it out—make the image and cross it out. …no imagery, but at the same time endless imagery. Every nuance of paint texture worked as an image”. Steir has had retrospectives and exhibitions all over the world, including the Tate Gallery in London, as well as two shows at the Brooklyn Museum and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York that traveled throughout Europe. In 2008, Steir received the Pratt Institute Alumni Achievement Award.  She has been an art instructor at Parsons School of Design and Princeton University, as well as the Art Director at Harper & Row Publishing in New York.