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- author – to La Clairon1 (“How much study to cease being oneself!”) and that incandescent Theatre-Figure Eleonora Duse2. 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, reserves 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. Aristophanes insulted and entertained the Athenians, gave them outlandish and fantastical stories, Athens was in the stalls and on the stage, there was no separation. But the situation then, as in other golden ages, was due to the cen- trality of the theatre event. Nowadays, with the theatre banished to a corner, that fertile stage-polis dialogue can only be reinvented as a paradox. In this western world condem- ned to sterility, fertility is a paradox! As part of this dialogue with the town, I ran a five year project for women called The Language of the Goddess. I stole the title from the Lithuanian archaeologist Maria Gimbutas and also the idea of a pre-Indo-European gylanic society, a balanced and peace- loving social structure, neither patriarchal nor matriarchal, highly developed and devoted to the objet d’art. Over those years – through works and meetings and open workshops with theatre scholars, playwrights, administrators, philosophers, actresses and directors 9 – we drew up a possible alchemical avenue and a possible relationship in the polis. 6. If fertility is the artistic condition of the politttttttical it was perhaps inevitable that our path should intersect with that of people born in other civilisations. In 1987, just a few months after the convention in Narni, the Albe became Afro-Romagnol, enriched by the contribution of Senegalese actors, musicians and dancers. The encounter with the black Albe reinforced us in what we wanted to do. Were we seeking a theatre in touch with those tortured realities, terrible to describe, which today are the “roots” and the “people”? Were we seeking a dialect theatre, epic and ethnic, the being-in-life of Tradition? Something was there that resembled these things, vaguely, but it was there. Watching Mor Awa Niang’s archaic animalistic comicality you could imagine the original pre- Goldoni Harlequin. The sight and sound of El Hadj Niang’s furious drumming raised questions about the nature of shamans. My Campiano dialect contrasted with Mandiaye N’Diaye’s Wolof, with the ballad singers of the Apennines, with tales told in Senegalese villages, with the fulèr, the Romagna storytellers, and with the African griots. And so on, mixing languages and identities, and at the same time preserving them, at the same time creating a new way of being for the group, crossbred, doing a job of resistance to stan- dardisation. We didn’t meet the black Albe at the Conservatoire of Dakar but on the beach at Marina di Ravenna. They were plain immigrants, selling T-shirts and elephant sculptures. Their families were griots, the storyteller-artistes found throughout francophone Africa. Since griots hadn’t been earning a penny for decades, the new generations got a kick in the backside and were sent to Europe to sell elephant sculptures to tourists. This is what happens in the polis-planet: you find griots on the beach. Entire populations, compelled by the political and economical forces of History, are emigrating from the South, changing the face of old Europe, making our cities black, and this concerns us politttttttically. Mor, Mandiaye and El Hadj had been “eaten” like us, in a different way: the jacket with the forks fitted them like a glove. For them, doing theatre together these past ten years has meant experiencing something that was unthinkable in the beginning, at once a bold, 10 new choice and the revival of a tradition. Their Senegalese friends made fun of them at first because they got paid so little! 7. While I’m renovating the old cottage in Campiano, our Senegalese counterparts are in Guediawaye, a village on the outskirts of Dakar. They’re building a “theatre house” that will bear the name of the village: Guediawaye Théâtre, a place to invent a theatre immersed in the African scene, and open to the best European theatre because Mandiaye, who will be artistic director, is well aware of Odin Teatret and Peter Brook. The Teatro delle Albe is one of the founder members and supporters of Guediawaye Theatre. No separation then but a new phase of the crossbred adventure, six months a year in Senegal and six with the Albe in Europe, foiling the destiny that made immigrants out of Mandiaye and his countrymen. And we in turn will become immigrants, for artistic reasons, since we’ll often be joining them, working in their world as they did in ours. New stories will be brought to life. Senegal is a nation of kids – the average age is sixteen – and there’s so much Dionysus in the air, a thirst for life in the midst of poverty. As I scrape paint off the old cottage doors I think of the songs Mandiaye will be hearing at this moment, and I treasure them jealously in my ears.

11 The Open Page n°3, March 1998 I’ve never thought my voice had a sex I’ve never thought my voice had a sex by Ermanna Montanari

I’ve never thought my voice had a sex, my voice doesn’t have a sex, it’s the voice of a figure, every time. Each figure takes on its own materic specificity during construction, and the more it abandons the little bios the more this becomes crystalline and without scle- rotic form. The more the figure you’re building no longer corresponds to the little bios of the actor the more it lets loose corporeal emotion, musical wholeness, the theatre pup- pet. Mêdar Ubu is music organic to the mathematical vitality I Polacchi, just as Alcina is in the severe architecture of her Island. My voice isn’t Ermanna’s voice, isn’t important. Ermanna isn’t important onstage. I’ve always liked a saying of Mademoiselle Clairon’s: “How much study to cease being yourself”.

The word brings my body to its knees, it has the power to make me perceive the whole. So the music of Romagnol dialect, its miserable locality, lies outside of form, of the clean, of civil familiarity. It overbearingly illuminates every word, even the most modern, making it the supreme language of the dead, materic and utterable.

A question they often ask after seeing one of our shows has to do with the voice. They ask if they might work with me on the voice. It’s always embarrassing. There’s nothing I can teach anybody about the voice. The voice isn’t a part distinct from the rest, from life. The voice lies on a crux so fragile that it should be distanced rather than given. Of course you can work on your voice, as on your feet or shoulders. Maybe singing in octaves, trying to hit the right notes, to faint with the voice and suddenly break out in an asinine bray. 12 That’s it, do this for hours and then discover that something has happened, a certain vibration in unison, or everyone stopping at the same moment. Maybe from there you 13 can go on to work on the voice, in perceiving that instant which unites everybody and which everybody in their own person can decide to let through. But this has to do with life and with liberating yourself from it. The same goes for feet and knees. And then I prefer listening to people talking on the phone, hotel switchboards, disguises, nasal sounds, conversations on mobiles, on trains, in public toilets, the conversations of people who don’t know each other, can’t see each other, their attempts to make themselves under- stood in noisy places, in hospitals, churches, cemeteries, in the fields at the fruit harvest, people who read aloud and their bodies at the mercy of every vocal shred. The voice lies in the ear, in its narrow canals.

14 Sguardi dentro e fuori dall’arte edited by Gioia Costa, Editoria & Spettacolo, Rome, 2002 The technicians of Dionysus The technicians of Dionysus interview to Marco Martinelli

One of the fundamental concepts of your work is the idea of “bringing to life”. What is this “bringing to life”?

It means taking the Dionysian origin of theatre seriously. Dionysus is the god of indestruc- tible life: the Greeks didn’t distinguish between beautiful and ugly, they had a more effi- cacious and deeper way of telling good theatre from the useless kind: they said “Dionysus is here” or “Dionysus isn’t here”. Dionysus is the sphalèn god, literally “he who perturbs”. A theatre incapable of stirring the spectator’s soul, of eliciting physical thrills, is not theatre, it’s something else and doesn’t interest me. “Bringing to life” is the overturning of “bringing to the stage”, interpretable in its oldest and still valid sense. As far as we’re concerned it’s the only possibility.

Since the mid 80s the Albe’s poetics has neither repudiated Tradition nor accepted it pas- sively but is based rather on an “upside-down” vision of theatre Tradition.

These were Meyerchold’s teachings at the beginning of the twentieth century, but how quickly we forget the masters! The great tradition isn’t a museum piece. If we rummage in the dust and go questioning the masters we come up with the “new”, which is to say the contrary of what we are offered by pseudo-traditional plays. That’s not tradition. We shouldn’t be taken in by words. Often we’re given nothing more than a piece cobbled together in haste, with a couple of half-baked ideas and clumsy, approximated fake nine- teenth century art. Not many know how great the Italian actors of that century were, 15 from Gustavo Modena to Eleonora Duse. If we pay a visit to the worlds of Aristophanes, Molière and Shakespeare, if we try to imagine their relationship with the public, we rea- lise that their theatre was a furious mirror of their times, that those dead people were alive and contentious, off-putting, lined up against power even when they were depen- dent on it. Not the nauseating monotony that often gets served up as a “well made play” in straight theatre. When we think of Tradition we think of rebels. Time has turned them to statues, but they’re rebels all the same.

Something you share with the great writers you’ve mentioned is the idea of playwriting, the way your texts come into the world…

I’m a “company playwright”, a pretty rare species nowadays. I’ve always thought that the Tradition, here too, was more interesting than the present: Shakespeare, Molière, Eduardo De Filippo were company playwrights who wrote with the company in mind, almost “calculating” a play for the actors who would be putting it on. Those actors weren’t mere performers: on the contrary, they were the author’s muses, they were authors themselves… this is what I call “impure dramaturgy”. Which doesn’t mean “dimi- nishing” the playwright’s role but rather reinforcing it, highlighting it within a collective dynamic. I’ve defined my work in this way to distinguish it from the concept of drawing- board playwriting, which I have nothing to do with but which still appears to be the domi- nant approach. Impure dramaturgy grows out of the alchemy created between the playwright-director and the actors. Mirandolina wouldn’t have been what it is without Maddalena Marliani, Goldoni’s favourite actress. She herself “prompted” the author on many of her lines and mannerisms. And what about the relationship between Luigi Pirandello and Angelo Musco, between Pirandello and Ruggeri1? In the history of theatre

16 1 Italian theatrical and film actors lived between the late 18th century and early 19th. they talk only about the “fathers”, the playwrights, whereas there are also the “mothers”, the actors. The result is an absolutely original creation: Renda’s Dr Merletto is a flesh and blood marionette whose vital strings are held by both me and Renda. How do you think your plays will live after you?

Well, Aristophanes and Shakespeare didn’t give it any thought. And they lived better than many writers.

In everything and throughout, your writing is the word made flesh: it feeds on linguistic inlays, on the use of dialects…

It’s writing that accommodates several languages, like a mosaic. Firstly the Romagna dialect, made of earth and guttural sounds, an iron dialect as Ermanna calls it, a rough bond that includes gestures and meanings, it gets down to the rawness of things. At the end of the eighties, in shows like Ruh. Romagna più Africa uguale, Ermanna brought as dowry the dialect of her village, Campiano, marking a path that would turn out to be decisive for all of us: for me, writer without dialects, who started robbing the actors and their linguistic reserves, and for Luigi who found some directions there.

Ermanna sings the dialect like a queen. In Alcina for example…

And in this she’s a child of Alfred Jarry, even before knowing Jarry. Ermanna has been a pataphysician since birth. Campiano is like Jarry’s Laval in Brittany, an ultra-local and ubu- niversal place, a well of mysteries. When Ermanna uses that language she’s like a piece of earth with a voice, that earth of our plain which hides the marshland underneath. And at the same time it’s a high-sounding language, it sounds-on-high, a language of art. Dionysus has something to do with this – how could it be otherwise? 17 This was followed by Mandiaye’s Wolof and other dialects borrowed from the actors you worked with: from Bari, Naples, Tuscany, and then Bandini and Pergolari’s Foligno dialect for Salmagundi and Vi e Ve. Ceaseless theft. Never be ashamed of what you pinch. Stealing is like breathing.

The Albe have developed their poetics through falls and victories… do you feel we can talk about a “method” with regard to the performance of the Albe-actor?

Let’s look at the etymology: in Greek it meant “the journey I have made.” So maybe it’s better not to have a method at the start, because if you set out already with a method you’re setting out on a journey already made, but made by whom? By others. And that way you don’t lay yourself on the line, don’t make the journey. We found out what the Albe actor was by trial, show after show: the Albe-actor grew within that alchemical pro- cess we talked about, there wasn’t any preset method. Which doesn’t mean not having models to look at, quite the contrary. There were various models that excited us: Totò for example, a monster of wisdom, a ghost who still shakes us up on video; or living examples in the theatre, the rigour and madness of Carmelo Bene and Leo de Berardinis, the Odin Teatret actors, the glance elsewhere of Jerzy Grotowski with whom Ermanna did a work- shop in Pontedera that was fundamental to her. You need models and you need to get rid of them later.

The Greeks called actors “the technicians of Dionysus”. You feel it’s the perfect definition.

It contains something of an oxymoron: the actor seen as a technician, therefore a craft- sman, a carpenter, a plumber, someone who must be the perfect master of his trade otherwise he’ll flood your bathroom. But this “technician” belongs to a god, Dionysus, who manifests himself as the god of sexual rapture, of wine, of the ecstasy aroused by 18 drums and flutes. How can you reconcile the know-how typical of any technician with an ecstasy that sends you out of your head? How can you be at once “technician” and “bac- chante”? Inside and out? There is an answer, but it’s to be sought through work.

So you think the actor remains important in the theatre of the third millennium…

Central.

The theatre of the Albe feeds on the Tradition, “brings it to life” once more, filling it with topicality, with our own history. Contemporaneity through the story…

As early as the first half of the 80s we were taken by the desire for a theatre that was “also” history, a story. At the time hardly anybody wanted to hear about such things: there was considerable mistrust of text and word. We were thinking of a theatre where the energy of the tale wouldn’t be to the detriment of the energy of the actor, indeed they were to be mutually exalting. And this vital interchange shouldn’t be enclosed on stage but should overflow into the audience, exuberant and fertile, restoring meaning to the roots of an ancient language. The best subversion had to pass by way of construction: no through yes.

Does the definition of “politttttttical theatre” approach the idea of a theatre that recounts and derides topicality?

There’s also the idea of beauty in the politttttttical. Of the polyptych as sacred object, radiant. The work (theatre or otherwise) is in this time out of time, is the possibility of contemplation in spite of time. It makes me pause, it makes me live reality in a way that is different from the empty frenzy of the everyday. It arouses amazement, a marvel that strikes at the roots of being. At the roots of that ego I don’t know about, which I “feel” to 19 be something but if I try to describe it I stutter. Just like the equally mysterious bond of being in a “chorus” that links me up with others. The theatre takes account of this stam- mering chorus, together with the violence and separateness that make us non-communi- cating monads. It’s Dionysus who guides us towards this simultaneous presence of oppo- sites, “light-bringing star of the nocturnal mysteries”, as Aristophanes puts it: a Dionysus in relation to Christ, a Christ-Dionysus, the victim, the lamb, following in this approach the insight of the German romantics from Hölderlin to Novalis, an insight two centuries old which, when cleansed of the rust of the worst romanticism, is still alive and kicking. At least it’s been beating in my heart for thirty years… and I encounter it each time I arrange people in a circle and set them off on perturbing chants and rap-dance.

Your company has held its own for more than twenty years… you must have heard a lot about the theatre crisis, but you’ve forged ahead. Aren’t you concerned about the idea that the theatre might become increasingly narrowed down to a niche sector, an island for the few?

They’ve been talking about the death of theatre since the second half of the twentieth century. Because there’s always somebody who dies, but then somebody else is born. And as for the margins, there’s more than one way to get along. You can lock yourself away in the museum, you can clock in and dust down the monuments every once in a while, do a repaint job on past masterpieces. You neither suffer nor enjoy: you dust down. Or you can wander uneasily in a labyrinth, question yourself and the monuments, the present and the ancients. You don’t dust anything down but plunge into the dust in search of the secret, and in this anxiety for knowledge you suffer, enjoy, understand, don’t understand, question yourself: you create. And you always keep the doors and win- dows open so that reality might come in.

Monade e coro, Conversazioni con Marco Martinelli edited by Francesca Montanino, 20 Editoria & Spettacolo, Rome, 2006 21 Critical glances Critical glances

“Martinelli has been most influenced by the Brecht of ‘levity’, an important characteristic in Brecht notwithstanding his Goethean origins. Martinelli doesn’t write plays in verse and doesn’t believe in identifying the poetic with the true. He admits no truths that do not pass through relationships of disfigurement, since even the hope of his own genera- tion’s emancipation is disfigured. So in his writing the political has become politttttttico (with 7 ts) as if to say that there can be no resistance to abuse of power without creating stumbling blocks, by turning, so to speak, the very act of revolt on its head. In this odd and Romagnol sense Martinelli too has taken up the levity mode: such as his cultivation of the magical-playful element that allows you to break down the resistance of everyday habits, to choose your own world in the world.” Claudio Meldolesi, A Hyperrealist of the Theatre and a Collective of Irreducible Individualities, in An African Harlequin in Milan, Marco Martinelli Performs Goldoni, edited by Teresa Picarazzi and Wiley Feinstein, Bordighera, U.S.A., 1997

“Ermanna Montanari, in the part of the mad sorceress, screams whispers sings her exalted punishment, evolving the vocal acrobatics of her earlier Lus., and makes pure sounds of Nevio Spadoni’s Campiano dialect poetry. Indeed the words are an essence of contrasting feelings in the fiery and passionate struggle triggered off with the notes of Luigi Ceccarelli’s Romagnol horn; and these, electronically aggravated, dance with Vincent Longuemare’s lights which inflame the tableau vivant on Byzantine gold or Ferrarese Dossi backgrounds. […] It is a unique emotion for the spectator, a shock to be experienced.” Franco Quadri, La Repubblica, October 19, 2000

“Fifteen or twenty experiences were fundamental for me, plays I’ve seen and seen again and which led me to get to know the companies and their work methods. The last time I 22 felt this ‘fatal attraction’ was for Teatro delle Albe. […] They’re one of my favourite companies and there’s no way I would miss the chance to see a play of a quality that’s become rare in my country.” Susan Sontag, from an interview by Antonio Monda, La Repubblica, June 24, 2002

“The name Nevio Spadoni is by now inseparably linked with the undertakings of the Teatro delle Albe, and in particular with the staging of his splendid monologue Lus., performed by actress and director Ermanna Montanari. If I’m not too mistaken due to little knowledge of the language, I should say that Spadoni’s poetic machine triggers ‘sub- stratum reactions’. The monologue or canto of the clairvoyant played by Ermanna Montanari brings back to life a certain way of perceiving, and corporeal vibrations that we haven’t seen for some time. I’m thinking about when Ermanna does the voice of an old woman, of a wicked witch, as if she were in a cavern, but also as if the vibrations of her throat brought down the walls that protect civilised man. And another thing that comes out through Spadoni’s poetic machine is the clairvoyant’s invective, an invective without compromises. Sometimes the protagonists of Lus. and Pèrsa bring to mind biblical prophets who speak of the overthrow of Jerusalem.” Gianni Celati, in Teatro in dialetto romagnolo by Nevio Spadoni, Edizioni Il Girasole, Ravenna, 2003

“So I prefer the Teatro delle Albe with I Refrattari, a tragicomedy (seemingly from the school of Jarry) about a mother and son who want to go into exile on the moon because ma’s tagliatelle aren’t so good any more. Not even the mafia is what it used to be and, lastly, the Senegalese refugee they’re taking with them as a servant can always be outvo- ted two to one. But he brings all his brothers and sisters with him in the rocket (thus alte- ring the balance of democratic power), the mafia also has a branch up there and mother finds herself suspended above the roof like a saint. The piece is witty, with great linguistic power, and is brilliantly staged and acted. Marco Martinelli, playwright, director and 23 theatre manager, has made the Ravenna company famous throughout Europe, especially with I Polacchi which has been going from festival to festival for years. I hope the deserving I Refrattari will follow suit.” Renate Klett, Neue Züricher Zeitung, July 23, 2003

“I saw an amazing actress, a woman of 1.000 voices – growls, squeals, minedeep exhor- tations of woe, birdlike chirps of maliciuos glee. The American stage debut of Ermanna Montanari wasn’t the only reason to see I Polacchi, an hour-long Teatro delle Albe adap- tation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu the King at the Museum of Contemporary Art. But Montanari, longtime artistic and marital partner of writer/director Marco Martinelli, played the power-mad Mother Ubu […] and without unbalancing a very interesting evening, she made it difficult to watch anyone else.” Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune, June 11, 2005

“After such memorable shows as I Polacchi and L’isola di Alcina, here come the Albe with A Midsummer Night’s Dream which stands up very well to comparison with other ‘Dreams’, notably Peter Brook’s. It’s in the invention of the day that Martinelli unleashes his freedom as director and violates Shakespeare with much love in a spine-chilling and highly vivacious portrait of all the Days of Society and Politics that speak about ourselves. There are many references to our own day, for example in the ‘prophesies’ or invectives in Romagnol dialect from Ermanna Montanari’s unrestrained Titania, but this wealth of inventions and preoccupations brought into play is effortlessly interwoven in a sort of cheerfulness in spite of everything, which needs intelligence and lucidity, with the sad realisations and fears resulting therefrom, but which does not renounce a kind of sub- dued and persistent youthful vitality imbued with slightly Mozartian pain. The play is one of the best of recent years for imagination, intelligence and topicality.” Goffredo Fofi, Quando sognano le Albe, in Monade e coro, Conversazioni con Marco Martinelli edited by Francesca Montanino, Editoria & Spettacolo, Roma, 2006 24 “Marco Martinelli is a sui generis playwright and director, a man of the pen but not of the drawing board, of the book but also of that Gaddaesque ‘baroque’ book that is the world, a visionary whose eye penetrates his actors, a fisher of actors in the everyday sea, a founder of city-theatre, inventor of parables with asinine settings, of poetic gestures in apo- calyptic scenarios.” Cristina Ventrucci, Martinelli, le Albe e l’attore selvatico, in Teatro Impuro, Danilo Montanari Editore, Ravenna, 2006

“Marco Martinelli is a very fine director of genius who manages to remain faithful to a text and to betray it, as only the best theatre succeeds in doing. He brings together the surreal dimension, making it a concrete and not only metaphoric instrument for under- standing his times. All this with the language and faces of kids who, through Jarry, want to talk about their own days. When they line up with the cowardly king Ubu to challenge the army of the Tsar, their imaginary war becomes real, very real. Close, very close. To the extent that it appears to be the war of Scampia.” Roberto Saviano, La Repubblica, April 2, 2007

“These plays are indicative of the powerful, evident and unique journey of an actress. The path taken by Ermanna in fact neither runs through a multiplicity of characters nor stands on a foundation of pre-existing skills. It unfolds, invents and finds its ‘own’ technique, at once forceful and personal, with movements that develop not so much in breadth as in height and depth, decanting dramatic substance and stagecraft from lived experience.” Gerardo Guccini, Antologia personale in Atti&Sipari n°3, Edizioni PLUS-Pisa University Press, October 2008

“For the staging of Mighty Mighty Ubu in Chicago – once the Albe arrived after three years of organizing efforts among universities, public schools, foundations, museums and 25 consulates – I quickly found myself transformed from college teacher into factotum, chauffeur, janitor, host, secretary and cheerfully annoyed jailer of the young participants in the project. The miracles Marco and Ermanna realized with the kids during rehearsal were at the heart of everything, but due to the reigning culture of distraction here in the U.S., the most exhausting challenge was always the task of getting everyone together in the same place to concentrate on that one single thing for three or four hours every evening. It’s more than simple logistics.” Tom Simpson, Teatro e impero americano, in Suburbia, Ubulibri, Milano, 2008

“So the Albe’s work continues to ask us questions, continues to be ‘as necessary as gas and electricity’, precisely due to their disturbing construction of language, this putting the forms of their theatre to the test with different latitudes of our present. […] The Albe have been doing this for thirty years now: they question themselves about the word ‘truth’, about its value which changes from year to year; they listen to what the world says on the subject, they move around and travel to put their own and others’ convictions to the test, and they never renounce spreading heresy in seeking utopia: in a word, we would say community.” Lorenzo Donati, Ravenna&Dintorni, March 16, 2010

“I remember how I felt when Harpagon enunciated his first words: ‘out, out of here’. But going back to my experience as spectator at rehearsals I cannot but point out the difficul- ties of my eye which for a long time observed one show at a time: either Harpagon or the world swarming around him. I believe that it was because I myself had taken on Harpagon’s point of view as a result of his magnetism. The show around him had to bloom and grow in order to return to less schizophrenic modes of montage. Something remains to be said about the work methods. About that never taken for gran- ted alchemy which is created and recreated among roles which nonetheless remain well defined. First of all and substantially between Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari – 26 an extraordinary ‘art couple’ as Claudio Meldolesi often said – but we would have to go into detail to talk about Martinelli (director-writer-pedagogue-theatre manager) and about Montanari who directs her own acting at Marco’s side and devises the whole show together with him, as well as being instrumental in creating posters, lighting systems and costumes.” Laura Mariani, In viaggio con L’Avaro delle Albe, in www.teatrodellealbe.com, May 5, 2010

“On stage the black satirical tone is coloured, thanks to the music of land and the faraway in the Mancuso Brothers’ funereal dirge and to Renda’s taut intensity, by a note of pain, of pietas, that move and wound. The show leaves us astonished, indignant and not only: it digs beneath indifference, carving out faces, stories and sufferings that continue to live within us for days and days.” Massimo Marino, “Siate un po’ più umani, squali!”. Un disgusto, in Rumore di acque by Marco Martinelli, Editoria & Spettacolo, Roma, 2010

“It’s no surprise that a multilingualism composed of local Italian dialects (such as Romagnolo), hegemonic global languages (English), and peripheral languages (such as Wolof) has been a strong feature of Martinelli’s playwriting. His use of language evokes the plain non-acting that so marked Rossellini’s neo-realist cinema and the raw, untrai- ned performers in Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life (his Decameron, Canterbury Tales, and Arabian Nights). In standard theater the professional actor wears a mask of phony naturalness. Against this, the Albe’s pirate theater parodies and desecrates every form of supposed naturalness, opposes every canonical acting style. The spectator can never settle cozily into his or her red velvet chair, sure of what is going to happen next. Instead the spectator feels riveted to his/her seat, immersed in a precarious event pulsating with novelty, uncer- tain about the outcome up to the last moment. Only when theatrical action is vital action, a lived and shared ritual and not a passive, consumerist display as it is in bourgeois theater, only then is theater’s true purpose accomplished: to be a vision of a vital experience.” 27 Franco Nasi, Specchi comunicanti, traduzioni, parodie, riscritture, Medusa, Milano, 2010 c o n t e n t s

Politttttttical Theatre by Ermanna Montanari 4

I’ve never thought my voice had a sex by Ermanna Montanari 12

The technicians of Dionysus interview to Marco Martinelli 15

Critical glances 22

Photocredits Lidia Bagnara, Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari 7 Marco Caselli, Ouverture Alcina 13 Alessia Contu, La mano 21

28 29 Traslations Franco Nasi, Tom Simpson, David Smith Cover photo Ermanna Montanari Grafic design, layout Cosetta Gardini Editors Barbara Fusconi, Francesca Venturi 30 Printed in December 2010