Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari

Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari Alchemy at Work: Teatro delle Albe Writings and interviews 1997-2010 2 Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari Alchemy at Work: Teatro delle Albe Writings and interviews 1997-2010 Politttttttical Theatre Politttttttical Theatre by Ermanna Montanari 1. I’m renovating the old cottage where I was born in Campiano, a village of a few hun- dred inhabitants some twenty kilometres from Ravenna. My parents, brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces live there, plus a lot of old people. The cottage will be habitable in a few years. Twenty years ago I ran away from Campiano, got married to Marco Martinelli and set up the Teatro delle Albe with him. We started wandering around while maintai- ning our base in Ravenna, a county town with a population of 130,000. 2. In July 1987 we were invited to a convention in Narni, Theatre and Politics, organised by Giuseppe Bartolucci. Marco and I wrote our own definition of political, reflecting on the relationship between our theatre and the world over those first ten years. We had just debuted with a work on cannibalism, inspired by a Lu Xun story, the eternal law of human relationships. Marco had rewritten it and set it in fin-de-siècle Ravenna. Was our theatre political? No, we said, ours was politttttttical theatre, with seven ts, boundless. The following is a fragment of what we said in Narni. The Albe produces politttttttical theatre. Why politttttttical? Why with seven ts? Let’s look at seven possible answers. 1. The polyptych1 is a sacred object, architectonically subdivided into panels and intended as an altarpiece. The etymology is enlightening: of many folds. And that’s just the polypty- 4 1 In Italian polyptych is spelt polittico and political politico. ch, with a double t. Imagine it with seven! Even more exalted are the numberless folds of the real. Fervid people are not in need of ideologies but of powerful, complex politttttttical thought. 2. It’s the error of a crazed typographer. 3. It’s poetic licence. 4. It is the grinding of a cry on teeth and tongue, on the ts like blades, a kid getting stuck, an irreducible, a Third World guerrilla fighter. 5. It’s knowing that we can’t change the world (read Revolution) but something, in some corner, something of ourselves, of someone else, scattered on a small planet turning round a suburban sun, in one galaxy among many, we can stop a tear, heal a few wounds, survive, be hateful to somebody, be able to say no, plant the apple-tree even if the bombs are to fall tomorrow, get lost in a Schiele painting, take care of friends, write certain let- ters instead of others (read Revolution). 6. It’s thinking that “being poetic is a desperate battle”. 7. It’s black humour. While Marco was reading aloud I stood near him in an attitude of prayer: I was wearing a green jacket, just used in the last play. We’d stuck forks into it that seemed to pierce the skin. That’s how we went to the convention. Eaten. 3. Marco and I and the other Albe members have never liked political theatre. At least not that bleak political theatre of our youth in the seventies. It was arrogant, gave easy answers to the horrors of the polis and claimed the spectator’s consent. It took no heed of the abysses of the psyche, of its “infinite desires”. It knew everything beforehand, gave us lessons like a pedantic schoolteacher, reducing the stage to a political meeting. During the eighties, contrarily, when we were making our way in theatre, it seemed that you could no longer speak of politics. In Italy those were years of collective amnesia, of taking 5 refuge in stupidity and a bank balance. We didn’t like that either. The horrors, the knots of the polis were still there in front of our noses, inside our brains, unresolved. You couldn’t make them disappear by pretending to forget them. It was from this twofold refusal that the politttttttical slowly came into being, a thought which took conscious shape in Narni. To bear the horror, not to set it aside, even if you have no answers or cure, even if you risk madness. To look at the polis, which can no longer be just the village where we live because it’s the polis-planet that the video brings into our home every day, where everything is linked and the destruction of a forest a thousand miles away is our concern. To bear our own impotence in a boundless world where individual action seems to get lost and vanish like a drop of water in the desert. The politttttttical was not a theatre of responses. Those on stage had no solutions to offer, only wounds to show, infections that regarded the psyche and the polis at the same time. The politttttttical was this untreatable relationship, and its stubborn, asinine raison d’être lay precisely there. 4. Did we think about the Living Theatre? About Pasolini? Maybe. We went back in time to Dionysus and Aristophanes. Within those reflections on the politttttttical, the urgency of a confrontation with Tradition took up more and more space. Marco and I blazed our own trails, interwoven and distinct, as an alchemical couple. Marco started to work as a playwright-director, narrator of theatre stories. What had Aristophanes, Molière and Shakespeare done if not tell stories? They didn’t do it at a desk but onstage, working with the actors, on their bodies, mixing writing and stagecraft. They weren’t litterateurs, their writing was impure, inseparable from the living limbs of the actors. Their ambition was to bring the dramas of history and the storms of the soul to that Wooden O. We felt there was a lot of the politttttttical in that Tradition, a secret betrayed and for- gotten by many who staged Aristophanes, Molière and Shakespeare as monuments deserving homage. They weren’t to be brought to the stage but brought to life, by resu- scitating their original gesture. We needed stories written in flesh and ink, stories that 6 had to do with the polis. Weren’t Athens, Paris and London the bubbling melting pots into 7 which our predecessors plunged their hands to give form to their art? Fine, we had Ravenna, Romagna, Italy, the polis-planet. Hadn’t those authors employed the dialect- language of their community? Well, we too started to put forward a multilingual theatre where the playwright-director could use Romagnol dialect, together with Italian and other languages spoken in the polis-planet, like the various instruments in a single orche- stra. And as Marco proceeded along this path, I tackled a procession of ghosts who’d exhibited their body-wound on stage, from Hroswitha – a tenth century nun-actress- 1 author – to La Clairon (“How much study to cease being oneself!”) and that incandescent 2 Theatre-Figure Eleonora Duse . So I contributed to the politttttttical, not from the narrator’s viewpoint but from the body of the actor that inspires him. The puppets we created – Daura, a tough Romagnol mother, the androgynous taxi-driver Spinetta, the magical funambulist she-ass Fatima and yet others – grew out of the same magma. Within the politttttttical, the one onstage is the Muse of the one who is writing offstage. The playwright doesn’t work with abstract concepts but with the living matter supplied by we actors. The actor at once inspires and betrays him because the actor must not (under penalty of death!) reduce himself to being functional to the story told, as often happens with actors in so much institutional theatre. The actor is himself a story, a glance, a voice and nerves, the black hole that alludes to something else that precedes narration, the organism that precedes language. I work from a place which I know is inaccessible to Marco’s pen: a terrain often barren and untellable. Where the well of my stagecraft lies, the well I draw from in order to turn up bright and shining for my date with narration. Just as Marco has his mind-holes, reser- ves from which he fishes out the stories that will come to life on stage. Today this still 1 8 Madame de Clairon, French actress of the Commedia dell’arte, 18th century. 2 Eleonora Duse, the most important Italian theatrical actress lived between the late 18th century and early 19th. seems to us the only possible alchemy between the techniques of playwright and actor, committed to loving and betraying one another, jealous of their own specific quality and ready to offer it to the shared work. 5. We must avoid one of the traps set by the polis-planet: the illusion that everything is the same as everything else, a facile cosmopolitanism, the loss of differences, “Fashion, sister of Death”. One kind of dizziness that seizes us when we’re hitting the motorways and service stations is an awareness of the Emptiness-Fullness-Of-Merchandise, the Everywhere-the-Same that flattens all differences. When in 1991 the Ravenna Administration offered us the management and artistic direc- tion of both of the town’s theatres we accepted on impulse, taking on a great burden and responsibility because we felt it to be an ethical and artistic challenge, hence politttttttical. To increasingly penetrate that thing which makes our predecessors illuminating, the loving and critical dialogue with the town that gives us expression, the piece of earth beneath our feet which, in a boundless world, nonetheless remains the place where we can get something done.

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