The third edition of the “Cilento festival – Pollica” kicks off tomorrow, September 16, and will be held in the spaces of the Teatro Sala Keys.
The event is dedicated to Angelo Vassallo, thirteen years after his murder.
Many quality events will enliven the program conceived by the founder and artistic director Girolamo Marzano.
We begin with "The Atomic Bomb Monologues," a performance by and starring Elena Arvigo, a journey from "Prayer for Chernobyl" by Svetlana Aleksievich (2015 Nobel Prize in Literature) to "Tales from the Atomic Bomb" by Kyoko Hayashi. Elena Arvigo, recently awarded the national "Masks of Italian Theater" prize for best actress and best performance, focuses on the female figure as a witness to tragic episodes linked to war and the criminality of human choices. The two places at the origin of the performance are Chernobyl and Hiroshima. On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, and on August 9, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki to hasten Japan's surrender: two dark chapters, two events that scarred consciences and are recalled here through testimonies and monologues, including that of Lyudmila Ignatenko, a firefighter's wife, soldiers, children, and Kyoko Hayashi, a writer but above all a hibakusha, as atomic bomb survivors are called in Japan. The reconstruction is not of events, but of feelings, through the eyes of these women witnesses and writers, in an ideal relay to cultivate the need for memory. “The Atomic Bomb Monologues” is part of a project on women and war with the significant title “The Unforgivables”: a series of studies begun by Elena Arvigo in 2013 on women, uncomfortable witnesses, mythical and real, linked by the common thread of war, unforgivable women because, precisely, they are uncomfortable witnesses of the reality that surrounds them.
On September 22nd and 23rd, Mariano Rigillo will perform "The Relative Truths by Umberto Eco." Rigillo, one of Italy's most critically acclaimed and popular actors, will present a powerful and unique performance, giving voice to the genius of the semiologist, philosopher, and writer whose words influenced a long and important period in the country's cultural history. In his will, Umberto Eco wrote that there should be no memorial services for him in the first ten years after his death. This has put such a genius in some way at risk of being forgotten. We have no intention of abandoning this directive. Instead, our goal is to discuss him through the various stages of his career. Eco was a man of great and subtle irony, which also emerges in those "Bustine di Minerva" (Minerva's Envelopes) he wrote on the back page of the weekly magazine L'Espresso for many years. And this is the approach we will follow in discussing him. Mariano Rigillo will be joined by Anna Teresa Rossini and Silvia Siravo. The dramaturgy is by Daniele Tortora, a teacher of Italian history and literature at the Leonardo Da Vinci High School in Vallo della Lucania.
On the 29th and 30th, Giuseppe Manfridi—one of the most frequently performed living Italian authors—will stage two plays, "La Castellana" and "La Particina." The first is inspired by the Hungarian countess Erzsébet Báthory (1560-1614). Convinced that the blood of virgins guaranteed her eternal beauty, she turned her castle into a terrifying place of serial extermination. The documents from the trial against her, which resulted in her being condemned to be walled up alive, speak of 650 victims. The second performance begins as the theater doors close: still in the foyer, Manfridi himself makes his way through the audience, introducing himself as a "guide," welcoming those present, identifying them as a group of tourists to be introduced to a strange scenic specimen that the supposed tourists would come to know as an exotic animal worthy of an organized tour. This is, in this case, a precious example of a theatrical "little part" taken from one of the most famous texts of all time: Romeo and Juliet. At the conclusion of this unique prologue, the guide enters the fictional space, defined as a "basement" where the characters' shadows are kept when they aren't called upon to tell the story they participate in. Here, the guide meets the little part to allow it to manifest and express itself, ultimately revealing the secret it holds. The dialogue begins with difficulty and thorny challenges. The little part in question, mortified at being called into the story of Romeo and Juliet only to say a few lines, harbors a clear resentment toward its author and his more renowned colleagues. It is touchy and often snarling. On the one hand, it defends its own category, on the other, it certainly doesn't want to be part of it.
On October 7th it's Lalla Esposito's turn with "Concerto blu". The show will be a journey through the poetics and innovative music of the great Domenico Modugno, the all-round artist who changed Italian music. Modugno, a sunny, stormy, impetuous character, demonstrated excellent artistic ability even in the theater, until the illness that penalized his physicality. Like all famous people so propulsive he had inside a melancholic note that was perhaps also the spring of his great artistic ability and his exuberance. The show will alternate music, theater, songs and pages from his diary. From his birth in the beautiful but provincial and narrow Polignano a Mare where he was born, his dream, his "Volare" took him, or rather projected him on stages of national and international importance all the way to the United States. His story had a sore point with his misadventures in Fininvest which slightly anticipated the eclipse of his health that suddenly took him away, without ever taking away from him until the end the ability to have a free and immense dream.
On October 13th, space will be given to “Iliad” by the famous Milanese actor Corrado D'Elia.
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On the program, on October 20th and 21st, “A proposito di Eva,” a text written by Girolamo Marzano, creator and artistic director of the festival. The entertainment world has always been a point of reference for contemporary English-language authors, turning it into a metaphor for the world as a whole. Sometimes with tragic tones, other times, as in this case, with tragicomic tones, they address existential themes, generational conflicts, bordering on class struggle. In this text, Eva and Margo are the two opposing yet united sides of the same figure,” explains the author. “The woman, the actress, the inexorable passing of the years, the inexorable hunger for visibility. The 50s setting does not allow for the intrusion of social media or influencers, but the dynamics are relentlessly the same. A bottom-up attack with determination and methodically trained skill on the part of Eva in place of Margo. Men act as a crown, often used by both Eva and Margo, the director, the playwright, the assistant director, the journalist… tools in their hands and also in those of Karen, Margo's friend, the playwright's wife, who now sides with one for the other, witnessing victories and defeats like a referee who will ultimately be spectacularly removed from office. Fortunately, all the conflicts are tempered by a brilliant comedic tone, very much anticipating the best television series but with an exquisitely theatrical language.
On October 27th, Caroline Pagani will take the stage with "Mobbing Dick." This performance won the 2009 Italian National Women's Union Award, the La Corte della Formica Award for Best Actress, the 2010 Audience Award, Naples, the 2022 Teatri Riflessi Award, best actress for "Idee nello Spazio" (Ideas in Space) 2021, best performance, and the 2022 Ginestre Award. Mobbing Dick uses gags and surreal situations to ironically and humorously describe the plight of female artists in the workforce. It's the story of a stage actress who finds a newspaper ad for an audition for a play about Eros. She goes to the audition and offers a repertoire of erotic Shakespearean female characters. But she encounters a different Maestro than she imagined... a porn director. The two don't understand each other; they have different languages and imaginations. Thus, the reality of one of the proposed Shakespearean texts, Measure for Measure, will shift, like a hall of mirrors, to the surreal context of the audition. The actress will suffer a series of humiliations from the director, like Shakespeare's heroine in Measure for Measure with her executioner, which will turn her into a being destroyed by the system, a monster. Will she give in?
The following day, October 28, the theater will host the “Concerto per voci single” On stage two men and a woman with a small orchestra behind them. A tenor, a singer and an actress singer. Together they build a dramaturgical/musical path that includes poems, opera arias, monologues. A sort of song theater linked by a common thread that is the theater and its most varied components: prose, music and songs. From Brecht to Eduardo, from Viviani to Karl Valentin, with songs taken from shows by these and other authors. “It is a format that we created last year in the second edition of the festival and that, changing the contents, we repeat on this occasion, counting on doing one every year – anticipates Marzano – This year the new edition will see the light in the recently restored Chapel of S. Marco that overlooks the port and was the first church that from the 600th century onwards welcomed fishermen returning from work”.
November 3rd will feature Rosalba Di Girolamo in "2984," inspired by Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. An old tape recorder takes center stage, a woman's voice: a rediscovered testimony. In an unspecified future, humanity has been decimated by atomic radiation, and the world has ultimately transformed into a single totalitarian state, a theocracy based on the control of man over man. Or rather, of woman over woman. Because at the heart of this system of power is control of the female body: women's sole task is to ensure the survival of the ruling elite. Women capable of reproduction are called Handmaids. Those charged with their surveillance are called Aunts; household servants are called Martes; those too old, frail, or infertile are called Unwomen. Alongside these is the hierarchy of males, guardians of order, headed by the Commanders, each of whom is assigned a Handmaid. Offred, or rather, Fred's woman, is a handmaid. Wearing a red dress and a red suitcase, Offred enters the stage and tells her story, in a play of intersecting memories and voices. A single figure gives voice to all the actors on the stage, because, despite their apparent conflict with one another, they seem to represent the various faces a human being can assume when they surrender their freedom. More than physical fertility, the play questions inner fertility.
The series concludes on November 10th and 11th with Roman actor Francesco Montanari's "Play House." A man and a woman. Love, boredom, family, sex, bickering, resentment. In 13 scenes, Katrina and Simon explore small moments of everyday life, digging into their relationship, building and destroying it. The world outside is just an echo, and when it enters their apartment, it excites and destabilizes. But who are Katrina and Simon really? What roles do they play? Have they ever really met? The viewer constantly feels like they're peering through a keyhole into the sterile room where a man's life unfolds—dramatically exhilarating, desperately lonely.
Many of the shows in the festival include a dedicated meeting with local schools.
The program will be enriched, in October (the date will be announced later), by the presentation of journalist Stella Cervasio's book, "Taccuino del serraglio. Nel labirinto dell'albergo dei poveri" (Langella editions). Designed in the mid-18th century by architect Ferdinando Fuga at the behest of King Charles of Bourbon, with the aim of housing and teaching a trade to all the poor of the Kingdom of Naples, the construction of the Real Albergo dei Poveri embodied the philanthropic spirit of the Enlightenment ideas then prevalent in the Kingdom's capital. In the centuries that followed, the building, never truly completed, was used for a wide variety of purposes and gradually fell into disrepair. Stella Cervasio's book, structured like a journalistic notebook, accompanied by eloquent photographs by Riccardo Siano and a comprehensive appendix, has the great merit of guiding the reader on a visit to this historic monument, illustrating its current state and the various hypotheses regarding its future. The presentation will be an opportunity to remember the recently deceased sociologist Domenico De Masi, who wrote the book's preface.
The 2023 edition is dedicated to Angelo Vassallo. "Vassalo was a friend of mine. Not in the kind of intimacy that exists between people who grew up together as children or for years. But rather in the fact that, however vaguely, we shared ideas that today we would call 'cultural politics'," Marzano recalls. "When we saw each other, he always asked me about my theater, which I opened in 1994 in San Marco di Castellabate. Above all, he asked me when I was going to open a space in Acciaroli. We also scouted locations together. Among them was the space behind the tower overlooking the harbor, as well as another enormous space where we could also organize high-profile events. I didn't listen to him, much to his disappointment. When I learned of his murder, I thought back to those missed opportunities and had the feeling they wouldn't return. Before leaving the artistic direction of Castellabate Luogo dell'Incanto in 2018, I had no hesitation in including in the program the show based on his brother Dario's book, "Il Sindaco Pescatore," starring Ettore. Bassi. Today, thanks also to his then deputy and current successor, Stefano Pisani, the Municipality of Pollica, in the hamlet of Pioppi, has been home to a theater for over two years. In addition to theater, we host film clubs, student meetings, workshops on the Mediterranean diet, and conferences. Thus, in some way, we honor his memory, with an event dedicated to him and fulfilling—mutatis mutandis—one of his greatest dreams.
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