SHINE - Pink Floyd Moon, a rock opera by Micha Van Hoecke, arrives Feb. 3, 2023 at the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, with live musical accompaniment by Pink Floyd Legend and dancers from the Daniele Cipriani Company.
It is the music of Pink Floyd that inspired this work for renowned choreographer/director Micha Van Hoecke. and unforgettable timeless songs, a bridge between rock and classical music, are not only the soundtrack of his youthful years, but "music that has a soul and that, in the collective imagination, is linked to the inner youth of all of us," Micha van Hoecke points out.

The starting point of the creation is the famous song "Shine on You Crazy Diamond," in which the four Pink Floyd members-Roger Waters, Nick Mason, Richard Wright and David Gilmour-paid tribute to their comrade Syd Barrett who was lost in the unknown regions of the "moon," understood as mental illness.

In SHINE - Pink Floyd Moon, Syd is played by Raffaele Paganini, former étoile of the Rome Opera Ballet. Syd/Paganini has a young, darting alter ego (Mattia Tortora) and is joined by the brilliant talents of Compagnia Daniele Cipriani, while the psychedelic sound and haunting lyrics of Pink Floyd are performed live by today's acclaimed Italian band Pink Floyd Legend (musical director Fabio Castaldi).

More than half a century after the "physical" moon landing, a clever interplay of lights, lasers and video projections transforms the stage space of SHINE - Pink Floyd Moon into a surreal moon in which dreamlike visions intersect to create sidereal worlds, seemingly far away yet very close, because inside us. A journey into the world of the inner moon of the human being: not only (or perhaps no longer) a place of madness and lost sanity, but a symbol of poetry, imagination, and life itself.

"It is my autobiography that also tells the life of every man - explains Micha van Hoecke - the story of our lives proceeding in cycles, with a circular motion like that of the music and dance of the stars, the rotation of the moon: a motion marked by a continuous process of birth-death-rebirth". He adds, "Life is nothing but the fabric of dreams of which Shakespeare wrote, a fabric that is constantly being warped, plotted, unraveled and rewoven.

SHINE is a work steeped in hope, in which imagination becomes the weapon to combat the raging materialism, power and lusts that loom today." To those who asked him how to describe SHINE - Pink Floyd Moon, Micha van Hoecke replied without hesitation, "It is a rock opera."

Nearly a year after Micha's passing, we feel compelled to say that this rock opera, re-mounted by his assistant choreographer and wife Miki Matsuse and Stefania Di Cosmo, is the Russian-Belgian choreographer's spiritual testament, a work steeped in hope, represented by the flickering flame that Syd/Paganini lights in the darkness.

SHINE - Pink Floyd Moon urges us to turn on the bright side of our inner moon, the symbol of poetry, imagination, and the very life of every human being, to fight the rampant materialism of our days and always find ourselves, our "self," even in these dark times of bewilderment.