About us
Cora De Maria
Born into a famous family of painters in Turin, including Domenico Buratti, her grandfather, she has studied music at the "Giuseppe Verdi" Conservatoire in Turin and has worked with the Teatro Regio in Turin for many years. In parallel, she is active as an illustrator for children's books published by Gallucci and Salani. In love with the theatre of the East, she has studied shadow theatre "Wayang kulit" in Ubud (Bali, Indonesia) and is a founder of CONTROLUCE Teatro d'Ombre with Alberto Jona and Jenaro Meléndrez Chas. She has been from the beginning the designer and creator of the original silhouettes used in the company's shows.
Jenaro Meléndrez Chas
With my origins in A Coruña (Spain), I graduated in biology at the University of Santiago de Compostela and I lived for a few years in Tokyo, in the late 80s, before settling in Turin.
From abstract painting I turned to a sort of "instantaneous painting in motion" within the representations of Controluce, a shadow theater company created in 1994 and specialized in translating classical music, especially opera and contemporary music, into images.
With the shadows, I participated in productions of operas such as Gulliver (Bruno Moretti), and Donna di veleni (Marco Podda) at Teatro Coccia of Novara, Il Pirata and La Straniera (Vincenzo Bellini) at Landestheater Niederbayern, Dido and Aeneas (Henry Purcell), at Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Agrippina (Georg Friedrich Haendel) at Festival "Via Stellae" Santiago de Compostela, La liberazione di Ruggero dall'isola di Alcina (Francesca Caccini) at Geneva's Victoria Hall, and the Concerto per fagotto e strumenti ad arco gravi (Sofia Gubaidulina) at the Olympic Theatre of Vicenza..., and with shows without "live music" I have visited many countries all over the world with the company.
Together with Alberto Jona, I held the artistic direction of Incanti, the Puppet Theatre International Festival of Turin between 1994 and 2018.
I can be reached at the email address This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Alberto Jona
Musician and musicologist, he graduated from the University of Literature and Philosophy of Turin in Musical Aesthetics and has published studies about the eighteenth-century theater and the drama of Mozart.
He has founded with Cora Demaria and Jenaro Meléndrez Chas the company Controluce Shadow Theatre in 1994 and organizes and directs Incanti International Figure Theatre Festival. He teaches History of Musical Theatre at the Conservatory Giorgio Ghedini of Cuneo.