The latest theatrical text written by the Reggio writer and playwright Tiziana Bianca Calabrò is entitled «On this dirty land», and it won a beautiful and important award for Italy at the tenth edition of the Festival Internacional de La Escritura de Las Diferencias, which has always aimed to give visibility to «the voice of women in the theatre» and which this year had the theme «Transmigration». The motivation states, among other things, that it is a work of «intense civil resonance» that «reworks the theme of transmigration in a theatrical and post-apocalyptic key, evoking a “Godot” in which the end is awaited and memory becomes a fragile instrument of reappropriation of the human». Two characters on stage, hidden in an abandoned and claustrophobic space, in the background a land perhaps in agony, perhaps already dead. And a crowd of memories, memories, symbols that the two – who were actors, before the “catastrophe” – evoke and exchange. There is always, in and around the shows written by the Reggio author, a powerful tragedy, and at the same time a very tender vein of humanity and profound grace, supported by a crystalline and resonant writing: we remember, directed by Basilio Musolino and interpreted by Renata Falcone, «A(r)MO» and «Obitus» (of which she is the author with Eleonora Scrivo – poet and writer from Reggio, also with her in the platoon of the 5pm Calabrian and Sicilian authors of the anthology of short stories «Stay Strette» – which will be staged again tonight, at 8.30pm, at the Teatro Metropolitano in Reggio, with original music by Antonio Aprile).
When will we see «On this dirty earth» and what is there, on this dirty earth, that deserves to be saved?
«The show is currently in rehearsals. We will debut on May 17th, in Reggio Calabria, within the “Esistenze” Author Theater Review of the Proskenion Theater and Antigone Osservatorio sulla ‘Ndrangheta. The team is that of the Ucrìu Company, founded by me, Renata Falcone and Basilio Musolino who will take care of the direction. On stage Renata and Vincenzo Mercurio. We are very excited also because we are veterans of the Dante Cappelletti Prize experience in Rome, where in the semi-final we presented a 15 minute show. I believe that, “on this dirty earth”, the tenderness, the minute relationships, the wonder, the gesture that anchors us to the human deserve to be saved. We are in a time of the unthinkable. When I started studying for this drama, about two years ago, the bubble had not yet burst, but the signs of it could be felt. I started rereading all of Samuel Beckett’s texts, because I thought that only the absurd could be the stylistic and dramaturgical signature so to speak. The title was taken from a phrase in “Waiting for Godot”. I studied Arendt, watched films about war. Talking about horror is always a dangerous operation, because there is a risk of falling into rhetoric. There is also an episode that actually happened that has to do with my cat Tàlia, who somehow hovers throughout the show and has become a symbolic figure. But I won’t reveal it.”
The award is particularly interesting: for the “nomadic route” and for “women’s theatre”. How much do you recognize yourself in this?
«One of the reasons why I participated in this award was its purpose: to create networks between female playwrights. Mine is a female gaze, mine is a female voice, where by female I mean cultural construction also determined by gender, by feminist struggles, by demands, by the desire to contribute with one’s own sound to a narrative that is also collective. Then there is the “nomadic route”, which apparently clashes with my being geographically sedentary, yet the word, literature, theater create points of movement and connection, possibilities of communication even from apparently distant places, to discover commonality of observation. I am very curious and eager to get to know the female playwrights of Spain and Latin American countries, each winner for their country, and to discuss with them, also regarding the difficulties of asserting one’s voice.”
Your characters are universal and yet closely linked to this slice of the world, to your southern, Calabrian, Reggio identity. Perhaps it is the signature of your writing, intimate yet shared…
«The identity of language is an aspect of writing that I care a lot about. Ours is a writing of the margin. Geography, gaze, historical and toponymic experience impact the construction of language. Reading other contemporary authors of different nationalities, I think of Duncan Macmillan, or Tiago Rodrigues, I cannot help but see the differences in linguistic approach. Just as Southern writing benefits from its own identity. Ours is the writing of the extreme margin, that of the Strait, in which we live within the paradox of a land that rests behind us and of a sea that is so narrow between two lands, but which gives you the benefit of breathing space and an imagined horizon. Our language as writers is mixed with the currents of the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas which meet here. Our belief is the language of contradictions. And contradictions in the theater work.”
You are now an established playwright, but your relationship with writing is much older: what is playwriting for you, and what collective value does it have?
«As Artaud says, the theater is the place where the spectator will go as if to the dentist or the surgeon, with the same state of mind, knowing that he will come out alive, but aware that it is a serious thing from which he will not emerge intact. Writing also involves a similar internal operation. Theater gives me the opportunity to plumb the abyss, to dare the boundaries of the unimaginable, to move knowing that I cannot control life, that there is trauma, dysfunction, horror, but despite this the challenge is to maintain tenderness for the human, while looking the precipice in the eye. And then the macro is added to the micro, History, the events that overwhelm us, the contemporary. Works such as A(r)MO, which deals with migration today and yesterday, and Obitus, which addresses the topic of feminicide, go in this direction. I hope that this work, which the Ucrìu Company and I care about, can cross the Calabrian and Sicilian borders. The collective is then in the ritual itself. Theater is a sacred yet secular rite: a real function in which we talk about ourselves, where the spoken word moves with rules that are also different from those of everyday life, but which manages to communicate with the other world, that of reality, of the audience sitting there. Magic happens when what happens on stage appears more real than the world beyond the fourth wall.”
New projects in the pipeline?
«A new text, a return to family relationships: a mother, a daughter, a granddaughter, linked by the unspoken that can create a cage. But also the theme of old age, of mothers who age and lose pieces of themselves and their identity.”