Fernando
Balestra

INTRODUCTION

How did we get here?
Since its first edition in 2016, the Proagòn project has involved tens of thousands of students in Syracuse in theatrical processes of in-depth study and school drama creation. From myth to reality, from theatre to school and vice versa.
The stories and literary models on which Western culture is based have been used in schools as “fans” with which to blow over the psychological and emotional structures, the semantic and interpretative categories of the society we live in, until we discover its changing cultural and human roots. A way to learn about the world inside and around us through their problematisation: war, metamorphosis, theatre, the ideal city, the very idea of “classic”.
A fantastic journey shared extensively with the city’s school communities, which, in the 2023 edition, produced multiple theatrical results presented at the Urban Centre and a special meeting at the Greek Theatre in Syracuse, attended by about four thousand people. That final event represents the starting point for the new project proposal shared by the INDA Foundation – through the “F. Balestra” section of the Academy of Ancient Drama – and the Municipality of Syracuse for the 2023/2024 school year.

PROPOSAL

Proagòn 2024, a “choir” of the City.
Where society struggles to find easily viable answers to the challenges of the contemporary world, theatre, with its power to generate sociality and its real and imaginary space where anything can happen, proposes – experiments with – and relaunches an alternative model of coexistence and civil collaboration, attempting to overcome the usual fragmentation of interventions through an inter-school programme whose ultimate goal is the creation of a large “choir” (understood in its function in ancient theatre) composed of all participants.
Becoming a choir may perhaps be a playful and alternative way of becoming a City; of rediscovering the pleasure, the thrill, the emotion, the strength of feeling like an active part of a community that needs us, our voices, our bodies, our critical reflection aimed at the constant improvement of the world we live in. Forming a choir is also an exercise in listening to oneself and others, a game in which one can experience the magical power of the relationship between different generations and school communities, between words and bodies, between personal stories and the myths of all.
Without myth, every civilisation loses its healthy and creative natural force:

Only a horizon defined by myths can unite an entire civilisation.
Only myths can save the forces of imagination and Apollonian dreams from their aimless wandering. The images of myth must be the demonic guardians […] under whose watchful eye the young soul grows, and from whose signs man interprets his own life and struggles: even the state knows no unwritten laws that are more powerful than the mythical foundation, which guarantees its connection with religion, its growth from mythical representations.
From “The Birth of Tragedy” by F. Nietzsche.

THEME

Pygmalion, I am not what you want me to be!
Having seen them lead dissolute lives, Pygmalion,
disgusted by the unlimited vices that nature had given to women […]
one day, with enviable skill, carved a statue out of white ivory,
imbuing it with such beauty that no living woman
could boast of possessing; and he fell in love with his work.
From Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Ovid tells us of a sculptor (Pygmalion) who, trapped by his prejudices about women, sculpts a statue in his own image, which the gods bring to life and with which he falls in love.
In modern times, librettist H. Poly and musician F. von Suppé added to the story the character of the patron Midas who, with his unlimited financial resources, believes he can buy beauty – whether statues or people – with his money.
The statue becomes the “young and beautiful” Galatea who, from birth, seems to have no other destiny than to be a lover, loved and adored by the two operetta characters who represent power: the famous Pygmalion and the wealthy Midas.

Together with the teachers of the INDA Academy, schools in Syracuse will enjoy questioning the three mythological figures to explore their meanings and experiment with their multiple interpretations: the power dynamics in social, family and emotional relationships that “petrify” individuals (or make them feel that way) within gender and generational stereotypes that may prove obsolete.
The workshop meetings will allow for the exploration of numerous sub-themes: the relationship between social expectations and personal ambitions, the perception of one’s own body and the judgement of others, stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between purchasing power and the value of universal beauty.