CREATIONS
PROMETHEUS by Aeschylus
The man of today wonders about fundamental questions – Will there be a future for human life or is there only a catastrophic prospect before us? What role will science and technology play in this catastrophe, seen today exclusively as the light of the future? What tribute will be paid to progress? The loss of memory and identity? The degradation of values and the inexorable transformation into consumers/consumed? How does today the theme of the relationship between the human and the divine reappear, in such difficult times of intolerance, racism and fundamentalism? Prometheus is the hero of the border, of the mediation between these two worlds, both of them so different. What a terrible thing is the human being. Even more terrible is the world of the gods. A great master said that the ancient texts are like signals coming from luminous stars that have now disappeared. Update these texts and try at all costs to find a direct relationship is like closing our eyes to our contemporaneity. In this moment of loss of values and ideals, of absolute degradation and superficiality, of lack of gods and Titans, of unbridgeable human arrogance, it is absolutely necessary to confront ourselves with the ancient word, to try to decipher the luminous reverberation coming from those stars that have now disappeared, to stop at the edge of the abyss, to wait, to look at the light and to reflect on our future destinies. For a moment. Just for a moment.
THE DICTATOR'S LAST NIGHT By Yasmina Khadra
Yasmina Khadra takes us to the heart of the last day lived by Muhammar Gaddafi, “Brother Guide”. These are difficult, desperate hours. It is the last journey of a lonely man, of a corrupt soul, lost in the labyrinth of power. This is a modern tragedy, the tragedy of a man who, page after page, shows us his childhood traumas, his sensitivity, his humanity, his fragility, his fears and his anxieties and then suddenly surprising us with his perversions, his thirst for power, his irremediable desire for self-celebration. Precisely in the unshakable faith in himself and in the conviction of being the chosen one, the first, protected by God, Gaddafi, until the last moments, felt untouchable and awaited a miracle. He believed he was the revolutionary, he thought that no one would ever betray him. Not even his people.
MACBETH By William Shakespeare
The whole drama seems to take place on a dark and eternal night in which supernatural powers play with Macbeth by deceiving him. The supernatural intervention of the three sisters, with their deceptive prophecies, will poison the mind of Macbeth, whose weak spirit will be solicited and manipulated by his ruthless wife. Macbeth by Daniele Salvo is a black work, between horror and esotericism, in which men and spirits coexist with the same strength, dominated by the seductive power of darkness. A visionary and at times macabre representation in which hell opens its doors to the world by connecting living and dead, damned souls and men and women destined for damnation. Macbeth's palace itself seems to rise over the Hellmouth as a vivid and terrifying projection of his worst nightmares becoming matter. Everything seems to be the result of a splendid and terrifying hallucination, a nightmare with open eyes in which brave warriors, vile men and fantastic and demonic creatures move in a power struggle that upsets the minds. On stage a group of extraordinary actors.
"BLACK SEA" By Gianni Paris
"Black Sea" is not an ordinary show. In this work there are no "characters", there are no "theatrical inventions", nothing "represents" anything.Every day we hear news of shipwrecks in front of the coasts of Libya or in front of our coasts, near Lampedusa, amazed, incredulous, but now irreparably addicted, anesthetized in front of the TV screens of our living rooms. Men, women, children, left to themselves, saved or left to die in the waters of the Mediterranean. These tragic events are daily transformed into political matches, exhibited and exploited by this or that bailer on duty. In this shocking, visionary and non-rhetorical text, Gianni Paris tries to touch the inner life of these men left to themselves. Their candor, their naivety, their expectations emerge in an almost surreal reality. The journey to the Italian coasts becomes a mental, dreamlike journey, a modern tragedy, a close confrontation with the ghosts of each of us.
"JULIUS CAESAR" By William Shakespeare
To the question: "Is fascism coming back?" Today we can perhaps answer with another question: "What if in reality you had never left?". In our country, the signs of a return of fascism are numerous and they are not only of today, indeed they are traceable over the course of at least the last thirty years. The prevailing of the right on the national and international political scene, the revaluation of nationalisms, borders, protectionism, the emergence on the political and social scene of the "new fascists of the third millennium", the advent of the rampant racism towards the foreigner and the unfortunately, the diffusion of a feeling of resentment manifested in the unbridled hunting of the scapegoat, unfortunately make us think of this. The Furies have never subsided, they have only pretended repentance, they have not been neutralized by civil society, in reality they have never been transformed into Eumenides by Athena. Instead, they remain buried at the roots of our society, pollute the deepest strata of civil society, taint the most pure feelings and values. The Furies, today, disguised as protective deities, occupy the Palaces of Power, dispose of the lives of every citizen, stage fictions of false politics, orient consents and disagreements with their winking and reassuring television faces. Shakespeare speaks to us of all this: of a blind, absolute power, of the cult of personality, of the manipulation of the masses through the use of language and the public image, of a people without a face in the obstinate search for a Leader, a people without dignity , from the unbridled desire for pillory, a people in the midst of narcissistic delirium, which changes its mind based on the promises of the most skilled barker.
"The last moons" By Furio Bordon
The elegance and sensibility of Andrea Giordana are able to illuminate new facets of this touching figure, which moves and makes one reflect, entertains and touches uncovered nerves, in his confrontation with his son (Luchino Giordana, son also in art) and with the memory of his wife (Galatea Renzi) who died many years before, but with whom he never ceases to hold a tender, imaginary conversation. In the first part of the text, the Father awaits - in the room that so far has inhabited the Son's house - the arrival of these, who will accompany him to a retirement home. It is a choice of the old professor, whom no one has too opposed ... It is therefore the moment of memories and small recriminations, of reluctance that open to those ineffable waves of tenderness that find substance only in the most visceral family ties. The second part is set instead in the desolation of the pensioner for the elderly: a place where the guest's personality is sacrificed to aseptic efficiency, their desire to listen to Bach, to see a basil seedling sprout. And in the end all that remains is the prospect of leaving, perhaps at Christmas, wrapped in snow, as candid as the final scene conceived by the director Daniele Salvo. He underlines how in an age in which everyone seems to be engaged in the cult of the ego, of egoism, of eternal youth, old age is instead a privilege "A precious stone. The moment of a man's life in which all the lines converge towards a point suspended on the edge of the horizon. (...) Coincides with the poet's condition. Being a poet today gives scandal. The poet serves no purpose. It annoys, it's too naive, too fragile, too true. Above all, the Poet, as the Old knows how to tell the truth ".
"COROS - VOICES FROM TRAGEDIES" By M.°Marco Podda
"Choròs - The voices of tragedy", a concert for choir only, orchestra and reciting voices, a unique experimentation of its kind, conceived and directed by Marco Podda, reproposes in a setting specially created for the Festival, with a new orchestration of 42 elements on stage, the original music written by the Maestro for the tragedies of Daniele Salvo represented in Syracuse from 2005 to 2016. Approaching with harmony and pathos Melania Giglio, generous actress, of great depth and unusual vocal and singing qualities, Daniele Salvo, Giulia Diomede, fine actress, soprano soloist, have unfolded the voices and made fully, even in the short excerpts, the power and tension of highlights of the four tragedies directed by Daniele Salvo from 2005 to 2016: Ajax, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, The Bacchae.
"AFTER THE REHEARSAL" By Ingmar Bergman
In a suspended time, in the shadow of an old stage, Henrik Vogler, a great director and theater director, sits motionlessly in an armchair. Appears almost embalmed. He's 109 or maybe just sixty-two. The scene is cluttered with scenic equipment, scenes, and equipment, left after an afternoon test of Strindberg's dream. But now the director is left alone. The building is completely deserted. The curtain is raised to half. Suddenly Anna Egerman appears on the scene, a young actress who plays the daughter of Indra in the play directed by Vogler. From this moment, a close confrontation began between the two who, suspended in a border area, finally allowed themselves to speak the truth. Rakel's sudden entrance introduces other Bergmanian themes of extraordinary significance: the perception of time, the fear of old age, the extraordinary fragility of the feminine soul.
MEDEA By Euripides (Resumption of the direction of the show of Luca Ronconi - 1996)
In this reworking of Medea, absolutely philological, I wanted to re-propose in detail the direction of Luca Ronconi, without any interference and no addition or subtraction, rediscovering the itinerary already covered by Luca.
Franco Branciaroli in this work reaches heights of interpretation that are absolutely incredible. His is a protean Medea woman / man / monster, indecipherable, ambiguous, mysterious, violent, very sweet, sensational. Medea, "the foreigner", "the different", arrived by sea, left the country, passed "the double rocks of the sea strait", finds herself in a foreign land, lost her man, her bed and now she is hunted with shame by the country that welcomed her. Needless to make easy parallels with the events we see every day in our times.
THE TEMPEST By William Shakespeare
"The Tempest" is born in a very difficult moment: a moment in which everything gets confused and degrades in a frightening superficiality, in an absolute human desert. The ship sinks. Shakespeare begins with this image his "Tempesta", with the image of a society that plummets, a place where a King and his court, from their luxurious rooms inside the ship, try in vain to lay down the law to the elements natural, willing to do anything to save their lives, offending sailors exposed to the storm, flaunting their supposed omnipotence of little politicians at the mercy of the waves. But the storm, at least in this case, is an illusion, an artifice, a theatrical spell organized by Prospero, the protagonist of the pièce, who, like an orchestra conductor or a modern director, creates reality and manipulates it to his liking, intervening on the natural elements. We are at the Globe, in the theater of William Shakespeare, a small universe, metaphor of the "terrestrial globe and all that it contains".
"Mimì - in arte mia Martini" by Melania Giglio
The show ambitiously proposes to complete a very special task: to recall the tormented spirit of Mia Martini. It is a soul that has never had peace in its brief passage on earth. Mimì is a woman who has suffered too much, who has paid too much for the enormous talent she has been given. But now, with the help of two luminous and friendly figures, two guardians, perhaps two angels who will evoke her before our eyes, Mimì will finally be able to retrace his whole life and to pacify himself with everything and everyone, through charm endless of his magnificent songs. .
"EDITH PIAF -Le Petite rossignol ne chante plus" by Melania Giglio
We are in 1960, in Édith's apartment. A series of events followed one another in the life of this little woman: deaths, accidents, loves, quarrels, loneliness, alcohol, joys, successes and songs. Everything fell on the nightingale like a hurricane. The nightingale no longer sings. Arthritis made her hump, alcohol and medicines made her swollen and without hair, the mourning hurt her will to live. But suddenly someone knocks on his door and gets to profane this "darkness". It is Bruno Coquatrix, the impresario of the Olympia. The show traces the days that preceded the historic exhibition of Édith Piaf on the stage of the Olympia, from the end of 1960 until the spring of 1961. This story, enriched by songs performed strictly live (among others L'accordéoniste, La vie en rose, Milord), wants to be a tribute to one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking voices of modern song.
"IF THIS IS A MAN" By Primo Levi
Between 1940 and 1945 some men suddenly disappeared into the maelstrom of history. They were ordinary men, of races, languages, different backgrounds. Men who from one day to another, without any warning, were violently thrown into the hallucinatory reality of Auschwitz, Birkenau, Mauthausen, Buchenwald and many other Nazi camps, in the heart of what is now modern Europe. Nothing remained of them, nothing was known of many. What does it mean today, 70 years later, to once again face the Nazi extermination and question the reasons and historical reasons that led humanity to the darkest period of its history? In the period of revisionism, short-term memory, pop songs, TV dramas, entertainment theater, performance pornography, reality shows and one-day heroes, meeting the voice of Primo Levi leads to profound reflections on the meaning of our lives.
JEKYLL By Fabrizio Sinisi - from Stevenson
Henry Jekyll is a rich philanthropist, a former theologian who became a finance magnate thanks to his exceptional talents as a financial speculator, guide to an important charitable foundation for the support and care of mentally ill people. An ascetic intellectual, severe and controlled, endowed with an ironic reasoning and mirrored morality, Jekyll cultivates, from the beginning of his project, a dream: the construction of a citadel of humanism where he can provide education, care and free assistance for the poor. However, a series of brutal murders, carried out by a mysterious psychopath named Mr. Hyde, systematically hinders the success of the operation. Inspired by the famous novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, the young playwright Fabrizio Sinisi reinvents one of the most important myths of modernity, making it a philosophical and financial drama, a metaphor for an alienated and two-faced present, unable to see one's true face. In the directorial reading of Daniele Salvo the text of Sinisi becomes a show with visionary hues, a dramatic, disturbing and compelling session on the illusion of identity, a contemporary parable suspended between hallucination, dream and reality.
In today's fast-paced life we entrust the last remnants of irrationality and of physical presence to Eros, illness and sleep moments. The Bacchae, however, act in a state of mental automatism, a perpetual sleep, they are somehow "taken in action" by the God. Dionysus works through them, through their bodies and their voices, transforms them and makes them a toll of sensuality, stupor, death, infinite sweetness and demonic ambiguity.
Le Funambule (The Tightrope Walker) is one of the most beautiful texts by Jean Genet, one of his most sparkling, where the writer exposes its aesthetics but also its erotic. It is a great hymn to Death, companion but also mother of the tightrope walker: "Death - the Death I talk about - it is not the one that will follow your fall, but the one that precedes your appearance on the thread. It is before to climb that you die. The one who will dance will be dead - in agreement to all the beauty, capable of all of them". The tightrope walker plays on the thread of the horizon, plays his and our life to compete with himself and with the limits of all of us.
There are lost values, forgotten glances, words that will never come again: spirit, dedication, focus, kindness, slowness, patience, respect, loyalty, fidelity. Pier Paolo Pasolini with "Pylades" speaks strongly to our consciences, shakes our bourgeois thoughts from the bottom, our fatuous securities, with its desperate vitality tries to make us understand the meaning of the word "friendship", he attempts to unravel before our eyes the perverse mechanisms that regulate the power and does so with a wonderful and absolute clarity, nowadays unthinkable.
On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the brutal murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Teatro Vascello, in collaboration with Fahrenheit 451 Teatro, stages the wonderful interview that the poet released to Furio Colombo on the evening before his death. An extreme and prophetic document, a confession rather than an interview. A lucid cry of alarm and despair on the inevitable decline of our civilization, which in the light of today's events it sounds remarkably prophetic.
"The Libation Bearers/Eumenides", two tragedies of the "Oresteia" trilogy by Aeschylus, staged by Daniele Salvo, widely regarded as one of the best Italian theater directors, in the amphitheater Makarios III of Nicosia. The show - presented in Cyprus after the successes collected in May at the Greek Theater in Syracuse and in June in Pompeii as part of the centenary of the I.N.D.A.
"In order not to distract the viewer from the interior work of these extraordinary characters, I thought to steal as much as possible decorative elements, effects and inventions to reach an essentiality and the interpretive clarity more necessary than ever, in my opinion, to the staging of this text." Daniele Salvo.
The inexorable omnipotence of Fate, the devastating power of the truth, the precariousness of the human condition. In short, the Greek Tragedy. Or that "Summa" written by Sophocles, "Oedipus Rex", that yesterday made vibrate again the auditorium of the ancient theater of Syracuse.
At the Ancient Theater of Syracuse the tragedy was staged under the direction of Daniele Salvo. Great protagonist Giorgio Albertazzi. The titanic scene of Doriana and Massimiliano Fuksas (an overturned truncated cone of reflective foil) is completed, in the center of the cavea, by a mountain of salt that serves as the hill of the Eumenides. On the side, around an olive tree, a few terracotta furnishings. A stony block awaits Oedipus, to act as his seat. And the elders of Colonus, scattered in the land, strenuous in protecting the stranger from Creon's snares, wander around the story, comment on it brandishing their sticks and tremble, under the thunder and lightning of Zeus, as if shaken by Dionysian electricity. Then, invoked by the foreigner, here is Teseo on horseback: an entrance from a lyrical staging that the public praises. And the Eumenides, which rise at times from the salt hill wrapped in flesh-colored latex sheaths, appear naked, the mask on the face, the long raven hair accentuating every movement. Again: flashes of fire and sunset, the dark sound of strings of Marco Podda's music, soldiers armed with flames, thunderstorms, fear of panic, lamentations, whispers, evocations.
"It is a reflection on human nature. It is not up to us to give a partisan political point of view, but the viewer can reflect on a theme that is part of the collective consciousness and the history of a nation. There are references to Luisa Ferida and Osvaldo Valenti, the two actors that passed from the glory of Cinecittà to a firing squad, but the text goes further, it is much more complex in its implications" Daniele Salvo
"The Tempest" was born in a very difficult time: a time when everything is confused and degrades into a frightening superficiality, in an absolute human desert. The man of today is confused, disoriented by the hidden persuaders, he is anaffective, bought from a society that has devoured him, digested, transformed in a blind consumer and into a product of the market. With bowed head we browse the grass portion assigned to us and from our eyes, the eyes of an ancient people, Poetry, the Culture, the Power of thought, the Art fever do not overflow anymore. The ship sinks.