World Premiere: 12 December 2026 - Ferrara, Teatro Comunale
directed by Manuel Renga
music publishing Universal Music Publishing Ricordi
music by Lucio Dalla
based on an original idea by Marcello Corvino
musical direction and arrangements by Roberto Molinelli
dramaturgy and text by Emanuele Aldrovandi
featured soloist Pierdavide Carone
choreography by Michele Merola
dancers MM Contemporary Dance Company
Orchestra Città di Ferrara
Coro Teatro Comunale di Ferrara
choir director Teresa Auletta
video direction Fabio Massimo Iaquone
set design Matteo Paoletti
costume design Nuvia Valestri
lighting design Marco Cazzola
actors Gabriele Martini, Marinella Manicardi
production Fondazione Teatro Comunale di Ferrara, Fondazione I TEATRI di Reggio Emilia, Fondazione Ravenna Manifestazioni, Fondazione Teatri di Piacenza, Fondazione Teatro Comunale di Modena, Fondazione Teatro Regio di Parma, Azienda Teatro del Giglio – A.T.G., Teatro Comunale di Bologna Fondazione, Comune di Rimini - Teatro Galli
co-production MM Contemporary Dance Company
in collaboration with Fondazione Lucio Dalla e Pressing Line
Premiere: 12 December 2026, Teatro Comunale di Ferrara
DIRECTOR'S NOTE
A Night That Is a Dream
On New Year's Eve, guests from very different walks of life arrive at a grand seaside hotel: a young couple on the run, a piano bar singer searching for a lost love, a musician weary of life, and a businessman exiled from himself. They are welcomed by a porter who seems to know the fate of each of them.
As the orchestra rehearses for the New Year's gala and the dancers bring the hotel to life like a living organism, their stories intertwine with both irony and melancholy. Gradually, the realism of the opening situation dissolves into a dreamlike world that appears to emanate from the very spirit of the porter, who is ultimately revealed to be a Keeper of Dreams, inhabiting a liminal space between reality and imagination.
At midnight, the lights go out, time stands still, and the songs of Lucio Dalla become the only possible language through which to tell stories of longing, regret, and hope. When dawn finally returns, no one knows whether a new year has truly begun or whether it is simply another turn of the same melody.
Lucio Dalla, the Keeper of Dreams
This new pop opera does not tell the story of Lucio Dalla's life. Instead, it draws deeply from the richness of his music, transforming the vast human landscape portrayed in his songs into a theatrical experience.
For us, Lucio Dalla becomes the Keeper of Dreams: the one who could perceive with extraordinary clarity humanity's fears, desires, aspirations, and disappointments, and transform them into songs that are immediate, deeply moving, and universally accessible.
The production unfolds as a dream journey, where each character embodies those hopes, fears, and longings. Their lives intertwine through Dalla's music, which becomes the language that binds together this suspended world between dream and reality.
At Lucio's Court
To tell these profoundly human and universal stories, the production brings together a symphony orchestra, a choir, three actors, a singer, and a contemporary dance company. An unconventional ensemble for the world of opera, yet one that lives, breathes, and moves as a single organism.
In 2026, at a time when haste, speed, and superficiality increasingly define our society, taking the time to listen to a story has become an essential gesture - almost a revolutionary act. And revolution, after all, was something that only Lucio truly knew how to achieve.
Manuel Renga
CHOREOGRAPHIC NOTES
Following the success of The Wall, MM Contemporary Dance Company returns to the musical work of Lucio Dalla, an artist whose music has left a profound mark on the collective imagination. With L’anno che verrà, the challenge is to enter his poetic universe - not to illustrate his songs, but to inhabit their emotions, transforming them into movement and stage presence.
The starting point is the extraordinary humanity of his lyrics, shaped by fragility and strength, lightness and melancholy, irony and hope. Each song holds truths that continue to speak to us with remarkable relevance. Dance thus becomes a space for listening and exploration, a contemporary language capable of making visible what remains hidden within words, of giving shape to silences, expectations, desires, and contradictions that run through the human experience.
The intention is not to construct a didactic narrative, but to create an authentic dialogue between music and body, allowing movement to convey the essence of Dalla’s work, freeing it from every stereotype and from any purely nostalgic interpretation, while highlighting his extraordinary ability to tell the story of the human being.
Through an ongoing choreographic exploration and a deeply contemporary theatrical approach, MM Contemporary Dance Company seeks to bring new life to this artistic heritage, translating it into the language of our time. The body becomes memory and vision, poetry and matter, capable of transforming music into images and words into shared emotions.
This project also stems from the desire to offer younger generations a different way of encountering Lucio Dalla, allowing them to discover the modernity of his writing and the universal power of his vision, while at the same time giving those who already love his work the opportunity to rediscover its depth through a new perspective.
L’anno che verrà is a journey into the soul of an artist who continues to speak to the present. It is a tribute that does not look back at the past with nostalgia, but towards the future with the awareness that true poetry does not belong to any particular era: it continues to live whenever it finds a new body, a new voice, a new gesture.
Michele Merola
MUSICAL NOTES
Approaching the music of Lucio Dalla means entering far more than a catalogue of songs: it means entering an entire world. A world of theatre, poetry, storytelling, profound melancholy, and sudden bursts of visionary imagination.
For me, Lucio Dalla also holds a deeply personal significance. It was with him, in the 1980s, that I created my very first arrangements - an experience that profoundly shaped both my musical journey and my understanding of the relationship between song and orchestral writing.
In this project, my arrangements are driven by the desire to revisit that world from a different perspective while remaining faithful to its identity. The symphony orchestra, choir, and solo voice are not intended to dress these songs in grander orchestral clothing; rather, they are a way of entering into them, questioning them, amplifying their narrative power, and revealing new, often unexpected, sonic possibilities. The orchestra does not simply accompany the songs: it deepens their meaning, broadens their emotional scope, and brings to light colours and depths that often remain hidden.
The choir adds a collective voice, almost a musical conscience: at once a popular echo, a human landscape, and a shared memory. Pierdavide Carone's solo voice is woven into this musical fabric as a narrative presence, uniting word and music.
My aim has been to create a Lucio Dalla who is instantly recognisable, yet capable of surprising us.
Not a nostalgic celebration, but a journey of reinvention, allowing these songs, so deeply rooted in our collective memory, to open themselves once again to a new life.
Roberto Molinelli
Photo: Photo archive Pressing Line - photo by M.Viola © All rights reserved
