TURANDOT

From the Chinese reality to the fairytale

An Italian fairytale based on a Persian fairytale from The Book of One Thousand and One Days, full of chinoiseries, emerging from the tradition of commedia dell’arte, written by Carlo Gozzi in 1762 and then an opera by Puccini in 1924.
Turandot is double vision juxtaposed against a fantasized China of two periods: a country far away, immense, with obscure laws and densely populated. All one knew in Gozzi’s time was what was known in Venice by way Marco Polo and the Silk Road.
Silk worms, as precious as spices, must one day become butterflies. That is what was known.
Turandot is double vision juxtaposed against a fantasized China of two periods: a country far away, immense, with obscure laws and densely populated. All one knew in Gozzi’s time was what was known in Venice by way Marco Polo and the Silk Road.
Silk worms, as precious as spices, must one day become butterflies. That is what was known.
Barely into the Twentieth Century: far away, over there, an ancient civilization conducts its small affairs separate from the rest of the world. A country swarming with inhabitants. An ant colony?
From the Chinese reality all that is preserved is a legend: how a butterfly emerges one day from a sacred maple tree. How this butterfly is married to an air bubble and lays 12 eggs. How it is that one of these eggs gives life to the first man, the Miao man, Jiang Yang, who went on to create his people. A man butterfly? And then, it’s commedia dell’arte: laughter and mime. Improvisation.
Above all else it must amaze. And still today, it is often like that.

What is our fairytale today? Science? Technology?
Natural sciences: our never-ending astonishment constantly renewed through nature’s ingenuity. And her cruelty. Micro cosmos: meaning the human within the animal. To understand through them the law of natural selection: kill or be killed. Devour or be devoured. The image of the praying mantis appears to us so inhuman… and nevertheless, this strange insect resembles us.
But the spectacular always prevails over reflection, over comprehension. We want to be astounded. Technology astounds. Technology is fireworks. Technology is the marvel of the 21st Century. Everything is waves and particles, light and speed.
Human behavior, from the perspective of an extra-terrestrial, would be harder to understand than that of insects.

China and its butterflies. Natural selection. Wonder. Could the social life of insects inspire the social life of humans? Inside of ant colonies not unlike that of a thousand year old imperial court, and like the commedia dell’arte, individuals are identified by their function. They are their function. They look like their function. Queen, ministers, soldiers, workers. A differentiated world which cuts into the complexity of our own. There are those who fly and those who crawl. And then there is, here on earth supporting the vault of heaven, the Son of Heaven, the Emperor. He reigns amidst the thorny stems, the dangers of the world.
Is a sense of wonder still possible when, beholding from afar, we recognize ourselves?