On occasion of the centenary of INDA 1913/1914
a project of Fernando Balestra
Il mare nel vento mesceva il suo sale che il
vento mesceva e levava nell’odor lussurioso dei vichi,
e la bianca notte mediterranea scherzava…
(Dino Campana, Canti Orfici)
On occasion of the centenary of the Institute (1913-2013), the INDA Foundation will propose a specific programme to record the years that preceded the establishment of the Institute and the one of its core activities – the Cycle of Classical Plays, the two initiatives to which we owe the preservation of an inestimable world heritage, those two that had stood in defence of the fundamental principles of the Western civilisation.
Under the title borrowed from the poet Dino Campana – Bianca Notte Mediterranea, a series of events will be organised to include different cultural institutions such are schools, museums, libraries, art galleries, small theatres, etc. inviting them to reconsider the phenomenon of beauty through readings of great European writers (Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Arthur Schnitzler, Bertolt Brecht, Erich Fromm) performed by young artists and students. The main objective of such an initiative is to distinguish what was at the beginning of the last century defined as the aesthetic credo based on the canons of the Greco-Roman thought, in contrast to the horrors of the World War I during which the decline of the Western society had started. A mediation on the intellectual movements that had been breathing life into the old Europe in front of the coming disasters that, later on, gave birth to the totalitarian ideologies of Communism and Nazism. Apart form the mentioned one, the project’s goal is also to define the place INDA had within the European dynamics of the time and to emphasise the important role it played in the years that had witnessed an extraordinary theatrical revolution in performance (acting, singing, dancing) and scenography.
In the quest for an ark where to preserve the very meaning of existence, Campana and the founding fathers of the Institute were the minstrels and the re-inventors of the Orphic poems. There is a curious statistic coincidence that connect these great man who all wrote in a literary homage to the immortal Hellenic verse: the year 1914 when Campana had published his work was the same year when the first classical play was staged at the Greek Theatre of Syracuse. This is the reason why Campana’s Canti Orfici are the first subject to treat in the research of the project Bianca notte mediterranea. The rhapsodic character of Campana’s poetry is also a stimulus to start a research on the theatrical language particular to the Polish underground theatre of the 1940ies which as its most representative figures has Kantor and Kotlarczyk, the theoretician of Rhapsodic Theatre of Krakow (frequented also by the young Karol Wojtyla).
The Campana’s all-encompassing poetical lesson becomes a sort of catalyst for discovery of the primary value the “live human word” has in the dramatic art, where the movement that takes rhythm from it is just its natural consequence. The dramatic language, through aphairesis (abstraction), with Plato gets to express the essence of what is ontologically more important. The abstract language is realised through a radical contraction of time and space, the so-called “temporal gap”, the one of the most fascinating characteristics of Campana’s poetry. As Mario Luzi remarks, it is the poetry made of escapes: “ …back and forth in time; the not-linear time that, apart from the Orphic and Nietzschean mysticism of eternal return, stands as the trace of archetypes of our existence, that emerge and disappear along the way.” The “Orphic memory” that allows us to get into a reality where the past and the present are aligned within special dilated time, is nothing else but the “inner space”, the space par excellence tragic. The renaissance of word, of the “live word”, has been and has to remain the way by which the Theatre pursue its goal, that of acknowledgement of the central position man as a person has against the ever-present extermination of culture and fundamental values of the Western civilization. It is in these complex and attractive directions that the acting experiment of the Laura Piazza, the interpreter of Canti Orfici, has set off under guidance of INDA’s art director.
CANTI ORFICI
by Dino Campana
Faust era giovane e bello, aveva i capelli ricciuti. Le bolognesi somigliavano allora
a medaglie siracusane
e il taglio dei loro occhi era tanto perfetto che amavano sembrare immobili
a contrastare armoniosamente coi lunghi riccioli bruni.
Qual ponte, muti chiedemmo, qual ponte abbiamo noi gettato sull’infinito,
che tutto ci appare ombra di eternità?
A quale sogno levammo la nostalgia della nostra bellezza?
(Dino Campana, Canti Orfici)
Performance
Laura Piazza
with Giorgio Albertazzi
(voice record)
Sound-track
Maria Callas, Marlene Dietrich
W.A. Mozart, M. Theodorakis
Scenography
Tony Fanciullo
Costume designer assistant
Marcella Salvo
Video
Antonio Alfano
Maria Laura Aureli
The first showing: Syracuse, Basilica “S. Nicolò ai Cordari”, July the 3rd 2009, in memoriam of the late Pina Bausch who had departed a couple of days before. This performance, proposed by INDA Foundation within the project Bianca Notte Mediterranea, closed the cycle Tragoedia, organised by the Cultural Centre L’Arco e La Fonte.
Note on mise en espace
The title Canti Orfici of Dino Campana’s work was born during his mysterious journey to Switzerland from 1913 till 1914, in the same year when another “orphic poem” shinned out, another guardian of beauty which, just like the plot of the poet from Marradi, arose from the Florentine fragments – the Cycle of Classical Plays at the Greek Theatre of Syracuse. Launched and encouraged by count Gargallo, the idea of bringing back to life the ancient theatre most probably was conceived in the secrete chambers of Geneva. Set up on the model of the “total theatre” founded on the equality of word, dance, music and image, the theatrical season flowered in the spring of 1914, 2500 years after the season of the Greek polis. The coincidence of the two poetics, so close and yet so far from the moment they were born at, shows how the European sensibility had turned to traditions of the Greek verse, that pilaster of the “Religion of Man”. Starting with discovery of Troy, this return to classics was prefigured during the preceding century in the numerous studies and researches, most of all German, while the Western civilisation was about to succumb to the destructions of the First World War.
In view of this, connecting the episodes that appear far away from each other, serves to clear up (or further mystify) mysteries and to bring back to the future generations the values of those lessons that are either forgotten or quoted out of context and only episodically.
For almost eighty years now, the life of Dino Campana is subject to thorough investigations. To begin with those treating the long burial in the mental hospital in the outskirts of Florence he acquiesced to, all the way back to those touching on the tormented childhood torn between mother’s hysterias and the defects he inherited from his father – all of them were nothing but a pitiless stripping off of the human traits of a country boy. Strong and arrogant, with an easy step and uneasy nature, this vine addict of a rather sleepy kindness and unrestrained rage, knew how to be violent when the honour, respect and loyalty were in danger, a true old-school hero ready to fight for his principles until the last drop of blood. Ferocious knowing to be the most fragile of all the animals, he exposed himself without a shelter, he strayed until, finally, “wasted away” for love. Ferocious and mendicant he was in his love, the only love he ever had, for another writer, the woman older and more famous than him.
Adventurous and chaotic life bound to enigma that forces him and the others to go on and yet again, doesn’t help us to enter the Campana’s poetic mystery. «Gentile di ansia e di stanchezza», «la mano non mai quieta», «bianco delicato mistero», «ricordo una vecchia città, rossa di mura e turrita», «oh! Ricordo!», «amava…»: Orpheus’ soul lives in the body of the chemistry student unfit for military service. He who teased young misses, stands as magma of lava that flows down the mountain slopes and ploughs leaving wounds red of fire that will later become black of death and absence. During his life of a poet he didn’t consider the everyday’s existence. However, when he ended his poetic career, which coincided with the end of his relationship with Sibilla Aleramo, Campana surrendered to the gravediggers of the mental house “Castel Puci” where, like some posthumous declarations distant in time, he left his words, often senseless, to one of the doctors. The recorded “last tape”, only without the mad lucidness of Krapp, has risen from ashes. These words have lost their internal rhythm, the unease that had served Campana to paralyse the pain of living, to veil it. It is that disquiet that, as per Nietzsche, pertains to the Greek élan.
The mise en espace follows the mysterious line that invisibly links the superb and solitary work of Campana and another “orphic poem”, the Cycle of Classical Plays at the Greek Theatre of Syracuse. Both episodes intended to reconstruct the sounds and rhythms of the redeeming rite inspired by the traditions of ancient thought while Europe is about to fall into the night of the World War I. The Canti Orfici is a Dionysian hymn (with a shrouded Apollonian touch), an orgiastic, bacchantic dance that dims eyes and consumes desires, an embodiment of pure vitality not stained by the conventional schemes and rules. The staging of his last truths are entrusted to a young actress and researcher (University of Catania), a great admirer of Campana, who makes her body a dramaturgic terrain so as to expose the mystery in an unseizable stirring tension.
This production dedicated to Campana that celebrates the Theatre of Being and Not-Being and thus, perfectly corresponds to Tragoedia, the famous script of Albertazzi based on the verses of Aeschylus and Euripides (in translation of Renato Randazzo) staged for the first time in June 1988 at Syracuse. And so as to confirm the link, there is the unmistakable voice of the great actor who, for this occasion, had recorded several passages from La Note (the initial part of Canti Orfici), instinctively embracing thus the ever more urgent necessity to invent a new sentiment of word, that architrave of the New Humanism capable of adopting the lessons of Erich Fromm with regard to the “Individual Who Is” and not the “Individual Who Has and Consumes”. The voice of Albertazzi is an evocative voice, a reflective chant, that is clearly mythological compared to the expressive torture, the pain of communicating emotions the young artist has.
From a room that recalls the mental house “Castel Pulci” where the poet from Marradi has spent his last fifteen years isolated, surrounded by barbed wire looking like either a concentration camp or a military trench, raises the chant of life and power of man, the man who didn’t accept mutilation and abuses, the ardent defender of the Greek-Roman and Judaeo-Christian roots.
Fernando Balestra
Art director