Accompanied by a band of extraordinarily talented musicians, he will lead the audience on a journey through a fantastical Middle Ages filled with extinct beasts, magical creatures, errant knights, fairies, and saints. Vinicio Capossela's theater tour, among many other cities, will arrive in Naples on October 21st. The Teatro Regio di San Carlo will be the perfect setting for "Ballads for Men and Beasts," the artist's new concert-show inspired by the album of the same name, released by La Cùpa/Warner Music in April 2019, for which "Povero Cristo" was awarded the prestigious 2019 Targa Tenco Award for "Best Record Ever."
"In times of plague, as in the Decameron, we take refuge in the story, but not before having made our own denunciation." – writes Capossela to better explain the significance of this project – "A plague is raging at this moment in history: a moral, ethical, linguistic plague. It runs through the network, a new pneuma that transmits ancient impulses.
In the plague, the downward trend, the corruption of language, violence, pornography in place of desire spread more quickly. We have entered a new phase of the technological revolution in which the consequences of Production are beginning to be measured. In the last hundred years, the planet has undergone an acceleration that erases previous history. A structural change that is approaching irreversibility. The sense of the sacred, of manifestation of the sacred in nature, has disappeared. Religion has become a prerequisite for conflict.
Scholars call this era the Anthropocene, to underline how much man has modified the very substance of the planet and its inhabitants.
In the raging of the plague, in the story, in the song, it becomes necessary to recompose the unity to seek a new relationship with the nature of things. With the sacred and with the beasts, living creatures with which we share life on earth. The relationship with the animal has passed from the hierophany of the Lascaux caves to the medieval bestiary, in which nature took the form of the book and reality was seen as a symbol, until arriving today at a relationship with the beasts that, although much more
debated and aware that in the past, it is often consumed mainly on the plate. Or it is culturally mediated by stuffed animals, fairy tales and cartoons.
But the beast r-esists, especially in the unconscious. We dream of animals more than we meet them. In a sleep that takes us back to the beginning of the world, to a common womb made of deep and dense darkness. That primordial darkness was followed by a separation, the crossing of a non-reversible limit. We are confined to the rigidity of the human form to which millions of years of evolution relegate us.
In this other and technologically advanced Middle Ages, made of new crusades, renewed religious wars, obscurantism, industrial work on fear, viral spread of plagues, behind us, sometimes alongside, or unconsciously participating, are the animals, the beasts as an unresolved point of access to the mystery of nature, even human nature.
This is the theme. In the development, a question of form: the ballad, as an opportunity for metrical practice and a break from synthesis. In the ballad, brevity is not mandatory. From the early troubadours, the ballad takes the chaos of free words, the liquid experience of becoming, reduces it to history and composes it in the flow of stanzas. Taking part in the dance, in the roles of infiltrators, are authors of great ballads, beloved voices such as those of Oscar Wilde, John Keats, and Francis of Assisi, along with the genius of a thirteenth-century scholar, Richart de Fornival, author of a marvelous Bestiary of Love, which, in addition to educating us and explaining the complexity and natural mechanisms of amorous seduction, reminds us that, all things considered, in the words of Robert McLiam Wilson, all stories are love stories. Even the absurd, destructive, and bloody history of humanity.
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