Cilento Festival - Pollica, the new events of the festival dedicated to Angelo Vassallo

The events of the third edition of the “Cilento festival – Pollica” continue, held in the spaces of the Teatro Sala Keys. The event is dedicated to Angelo Vassallo, thirteen years after his murder. Many quality meetings will enliven the program conceived by the founder and artistic director Girolamo Marzano.

On September 29th, Giuseppe Manfridi – one of the most performed living Italian authors – will take the stage with Lorenzo Manfridi, to bring two texts to the stage, “La particina”. The show begins when the doors of the theater close: still in the foyer, Manfridi himself makes his way through the audience and, introducing himself as a “guide”, welcomes those present, identifying them as a group of tourists to introduce to the meeting with a strange scenic specimen that the supposed tourists would have come to know like an exotic animal worthy of an organized visit. In this case, it is a precious example of a theatrical 'particina' taken from one of the most famous texts of all time: Romeo and Juliet. At the end of this very singular prologue, the guide enters the fictional space, defined as 'a basement' where the characters' shadows are kept when they are not called to tell the story in which they participate, and here he meets the little part to make sure that it manifests itself and expresses itself, until revealing the secret of which it is the bearer. The dialogue begins difficult and edgy. The little part in question, mortified by the fact of being called into the story of Romeo and Juliet only to say two lines and nothing else, harbors an evident resentment towards 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 does not want to be part of it.

On September 30, it is Giulia Morgani's turn to interpret a text by Giuseppe Manfridi, “La Castellana”, inspired by the figure of the Hungarian countess Erzsébet Báthory (1560-1614). Convinced that the blood of virgin girls guaranteed her eternal beauty, she turned her castle into a terrifying place of serial extermination. The documents of the trial that was brought against her, and which condemned her to be walled up alive, speak of 650 victims.

On October 7th there will be Lalla Esposito 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, gave proof of excellent artistic ability also in the theater, until the illness that penalized him in 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 of his diary. From 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 up 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 8th, the festival's guest will be Mariano Rigillo, who 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 commemorations in his memory for the first ten years after his death. This has put such a genius at risk of being forgotten. We have no intention of failing to follow this directive.

The goal is instead 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 dramaturgical narrative is entrusted to Daniele Tortora, a teacher of Italian history and literature at the Leonardo Da Vinci High School in Vallo della Lucania.

On October 12th, space for “Nuovo concerto per voci single” with the reciting voice of Girolamo Marzano and the tenor Francesco Formicola. On stage two men and a woman with a small orchestra behind them. A tenor, a singer and a singing actress. 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's 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 – Marzano anticipates – This year the new edition will see the light in the recently restored Chapel of St. Mark which overlooks the port and was the first church that from the 600th century onwards welcomed fishermen returning from work”.

On Saturday 21 October the public will be able to attend “A proposito di Eva”, a text written by Girolamo Marzano. “The world of entertainment has always been a point of reference for contemporary English-language authors to use as a metaphor for the world as a whole.

Sometimes with tragic tones, other times as in this case with tragicomic tones, the films address existential themes, generational conflicts, and even class struggle.

The men acting 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 takes sides now for one, now for the other, witnessing victories and defeats like a referee of a race who will be blatantly removed in the end. Fortunately, all the conflicts are tempered by a tone of brilliant comedy, 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?

On Saturday, November 4th, the theater will host Rosalba Di Girolamo in "2984," inspired by Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. An old tape recorder in the foreground, 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 offspring for 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.

On November 10th, Roman actor Francesco Montanari arrives in "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.

And again, on a date to be announced, “Io Divina – Homage to Maria Callas” and “Iliad” by Corrado D'Elia.

Many of the shows in the festival include a dedicated meeting with local schools.

The program, featuring the artistic collaboration of Paolo De Santillana, 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 Edizioni). 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 various hypotheses about 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 because, even if only very vaguely, we were united by ideas that today we would call “cultural politics” - remembers Marzano - When we met he always asked me about my theater that I opened in 1994 in S. Marco di Castellabate. Above all he asked me when I would decide to go and open a space in Acciaroli. Together we also did some site inspections. Among these the space behind the tower on the port as well as another enormous space where we could also organize very popular events. I didn't listen to him, much to his regret. When I learned of his assassination I thought back to those lost opportunities and had the feeling that they would not return. Before leaving the artistic direction of Castellabate Luogo dell'Incanto in 2018, I had no doubts in including in the program the show based on the book by his brother Dario "Il Sindaco Pescatore" performed by Ettore Bassi. Today, also thanks to his then deputy and currently his successor, Stefano Pisani, the Municipality of Pollica in the hamlet of Pioppi has been home to a theater hall, for over two years. In addition to the theatrical activity, we organize film clubs, meetings with students, internships on the Mediterranean diet, conferences. So in some way, we honor his memory. With an event dedicated to him and realizing - mutatis mutandis - one of his great desires”.