The third edition of the “Cilento festival – Pollica” which will start in Pioppi starting from September 16th 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 start on September 16th with “The Atomic Monologues”, a show by and with Elena Arvigo, a journey from “Prayer for Chernobyl” by Svetlana Aleksievich (Nobel Prize for Literature 2015) to “Tales of the Atomic Bomb” by Kyoko Hayashi.
Elena Arvigo, recently awarded the national prize “Le maschere del teatro italiano” as best actress and best show, brings the female figure to the center as a witness of tragic episodes related to war and the criminality of human choices. The two places at the origin of the show are Chernobyl and Hiroshima.
On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, on August 9, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki to accelerate Japan's surrender: two dark chapters, two events that have marked consciences and that are recalled here through some testimonies/monologues including that of Ljudmila Ignatenko, wife of a firefighter, soldiers, children and Kyoko Hayashi, a writer but above all a hibakusha, as the survivors of the atomic bomb 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 Monologues” is part of a project on women and war with the significant title “The Unforgivables”: a series of studies started by Elena Arvigo in 2013 on women figures, uncomfortable witnesses, mythical and real, linked by the red thread of war, unforgivable women because, precisely, uncomfortable witnesses of the reality that surrounds them.
On September 22 and 23 it will be the turn of Mariano Rigillo who will interpret “Le verità relativi di Umberto Eco”. Rigillo, who is one of the most acclaimed Italian actors by critics and the public, will propose a very intense and particular show, capable of giving voice to the genius of the semiologist, philosopher and writer who with his words has been able to influence a long and important period of the cultural history of the country.
In his will Umberto Eco wrote that in the first ten years after his death there should be no celebrations in his memory. This meant that such a genius somehow risked ending up in oblivion. There is no intention of failing to comply with this indication. The aim is instead to talk about him through the various moments of his activity.
Eco was a man of great and subtle irony, which also comes out in those “Bustine di Minerva” that he wrote on the last page of the weekly L'Espresso for many years. And this is the line that will be followed to talk about him. With Mariano Rigillo there will be Anna Teresa Rossini and Silvia Siravo. The dramatic texture is entrusted to Daniele Tortora, teacher of Italian history and literature at the Leonardo Da Vinci high school in Vallo della Lucania.
On the 29th and 30th Giuseppe Manfridi – among the most performed living Italian authors – will bring two texts to the stage, “La Castellana” and “La particina”. The first is 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.
The second show begins as the doors of the theatre close: still in the foyer, Manfridi himself makes his way through the audience and, introducing himself as a “guide”, welcomes those present by identifying them as a group of tourists to be introduced to the encounter with a strange scenic specimen that the supposed tourists would have come to know as an exotic animal worthy of an organised visit.
In this case, it is a precious example of a theatrical 'little part' taken from one of the most famous texts of all time: Romeo and Juliet. At the end of this very singular prologue, the guide sets out into the fictional space, defined as 'a basement' where the characters' shadows are kept when they are not called upon to tell the story in which they participate, and here he meets the little part to ensure that it manifests and expresses itself, until it reveals the secret it carries. 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 that's it, harbors an evident resentment towards its author and his more renowned colleagues. She is touchy and often snarling. On the one hand she defends her own category, on the other she 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 also 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 to 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 13th, space for “Iliad” by the famous Milanese actor Corrado D'Elia. The Iliad is not only one of the pillars of literature, but it is also the archetype and paradigm of our feelings. It is the origin, the master, the coinage from which we still move today to tell and imagine our passions, our lives, our relationships and our history. Human feelings are timeless.
And the love and hate that Homer sang about almost 3000 years ago, the deeds of those great men, their passions, are the same as today, they have the same disruptive power, the same intense ability to move us and make us reflect. Each of us, even those who don't know it, even those who don't imagine it, is imbued to the core with the humanity of myth. We all come from there. We all belong to that origin. This is why even today we feel the urgency to tell this extraordinary story. Not only to join a rite as old as time, but to fully experience its extraordinary journey of humanity and contemporaneity.
On the program, October 20 and 21, “About Eva”, a text written by Girolamo Marzano, creator and artistic director of the festival. “The world of entertainment has always been a point of reference for contemporary English-language authors to make it a metaphor for the world as a whole. Sometimes with tragic tones, other times as in this case with tragicomic tones, existential themes are addressed, generational conflicts bordering on class struggle.
In this text Eva and Margo are the two opposing but at the same time united faces of the same figure – explains the author – The woman, the actress, the inexorable passing of the years, the inexorable hunger for visibility. The setting in the 50s does not allow the intrusion of social media or influencers, but the dynamics are implacably the same. An attack from below with determination and a methodically trained ability by Eva in place of Margo.
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”. The show won the 2009 Italian National Women's Union Award, the La corte della Formica Award for best actress, the 2010 audience award, Naples. Teatri Riflessi Award 2022, best actress “Idee nello Spazio” 2021, best show and Ginestre Award 2022. Mobbing Dick describes in an ironic and funny way, with gags and surreal situations, the condition of women artists in the world of work.
This is the case of a theater actress who finds an ad in a newspaper for an audition for a theater show about Eros. She goes to audition and proposes a repertoire of erotic Shakespearean female characters. But she comes across a different Master than she imagined… A porn director. The two do not understand each other, they have different languages and imaginations. Thus, we will slip from the reality of one of the proposed Shakespearean texts, Measure for Measure, which overlaps, as in a game of mirrors, with the surreal context of the audition. The actress will suffer a series of humiliations by the director, like the Shakespearean heroine of Measure for Measure with her executioner, which will make her 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 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 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”.
On November 3rd it will be the turn of Rosalba Di Girolamo in “2984” inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. 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 ended up transforming into a single totalitarian state, a theocracy based on the control of man over man.
Or rather, of the woman over the woman. Because at the center of this system of power is the control of the female body: women have the sole task of ensuring the lineage of the ruling elite. Women capable of reproducing are called Handmaids. Those in charge of their surveillance are the Aunts, the housemaids are the Martes, those too old, frail or infertile, the Nonwomen. Alongside these, the hierarchy of males, guardians of order, at the top of which are the Commanders, each of whom is assigned a handmaid.
Offred, or the woman who belongs to Fred, is a handmaid. Red dress, red suitcase, Offred enters the scene and tells, in a game of memories and voices that intersect. A single figure that gives voice to all the actors on the stage, because these, despite apparently fighting each other, seem to be the various faces that the Human Being can assume when he gives up his freedom as a human being. More than on physical fertility, the show questions internal fertility.
The show closes on November 10 and 11 with the Roman actor Francesco Montanari in “Play House”. A man and a woman. Love, boredom, family, sex, bickering, resentment. In 13 paintings Katrina and Simon explore small moments of everyday life, they plunge the blade into their relationship, they build and destroy the relationship. The world outside is just an echo and, when it penetrates 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 has the impression of spying through the keyhole into the aseptic room in which the life of a man is consumed, dramatically exhilarating, desperately alone.
Many of the shows in the festival include a dedicated meeting with local schools.
The program will be enriched, in the month of October (the date will be announced later), by the presentation of the book by the journalist Stella Cervasio, “Taccuino del serraglio. Nel labirinto dell'albergo dei povero” (Langella editions). Designed in the mid-eighteenth century by the architect Ferdinando Fuga at the behest of King Charles of Bourbon with the aim of gathering and teaching a trade to all the poor of the Kingdom of Naples, the creation of the Real Albergo dei Poveri made concrete the philanthropic spirit of the Enlightenment ideas then widespread in the capital of the Kingdom.
In the following centuries the building, never really completed, was used for the most disparate functions and experienced progressive degradation. Stella Cervasio's book, constructed like a journalistic notebook, accompanied by the eloquent photographs of Riccardo Siano and equipped with a rich appendix, has the great merit of guiding the reader on a visit to this historic monument, illustrating its current state and the various hypotheses on its future. The presentation will be an opportunity to remember the sociologist Domenico De Masi, who edited the book's preface, who recently passed away.
The 2023 edition is dedicated to Angelo Vassallo. “Vassalo was a friend of mine. Not in the intimate way that exists between people who grew up together as kids or for years. But rather because, even if very vaguely, we were united by ideas that today we would call “cultural politics” – Marzano recalls – When we saw each other 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 is the space behind the tower on the port as well as another huge space where you can also organize events of great appeal. 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, place of enchantment in 2018, I had no doubts in including in the program the show based on the book by his brother Dario "The Fisherman Mayor" 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 theater activities, we hold 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”.
EDITORIAL TEAM
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