An astonishing journey, culminating in the awarding of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Biennale Teatro: Emma Dante adds to her artistic journey, already so rich in recognition in Italy and abroad, an award that is also an indisputable consecration, in which she is defined as “the most celebrated Italian director of theater and opera”, without forgetting her forays into cinema and literature (“Via Castellana Bandiera”, for example, is a film and a novel).
At the Venice Biennale in June, Dante will present “The Ghosts of Basile”, a return to the imaginative universe of the Neapolitan writer. Conversing with the director and author from Palermo is an experience: never banal and always capable of emotion, her answers are rich in nuances and bearers of a unique artistic poetics.
The latest work, «The angel of the hearth» (Italian-French co-production, with Leonarda Saffi, David Leone, Giuditta Perriera, Ivano Picciallo) will be in Calabria in the next few days: on 13 February (9pm) at the Politeama in Catanzaro and on the 15th (6pm) at the Unical Auditorium in Rende.
I would like to start with a trivial question. Theatre, opera, cinema, literature: how do you find time for everything you do?
«They are all crossings, connections, there is not one thing in particular that takes time or space from another, everything is linked. I’ve only made three films, so you can’t say that I make films and I don’t know if I’ll make the fourth. Theater is my greatest vocation, opera is always theater but musical, so one thing does not engulf the other, they are stories that are part of my journey as an artist and that have the same seeds. From them the fruits that allow me to continue my research are born.”
She was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2026 Biennale Teatro. The motivation underlines that she «has been able to bring Sicily to the fore». What do you think was his originality in his journey from Palermo (to which he dedicated a trilogy) to the world?
«I am happy with this recognition, it thrilled me and gives me the strength to continue. It fills me with joy above all because it is a shared prize: with the public, with the actors and actresses, the collaborators who made this dream possible. The motivation says many beautiful things about me, one is this idea that I brought Sicily to the world. I am proud to have done it and it was natural, as I am a Sicilian daughter of Palermo which is a city of art, so I can consider myself a daughter of art and, as in all children of art, the shadow of this great mother is always present. I took Palermo everywhere with me. Even today, that I live in Rome, I have not left Palermo because it is inside me, it has written my theater in all these years, it has allowed me to grasp the stories of marginalization, where I was able to find the universe I wanted to tell, to then tell the world. In my theater Palermo, or rather Sicily, becomes universal.”
Before leaving the topic of Sicily, do you confirm that you want to “face” Pirandello, even if there were already Pirandello paraphrases in your «Stage Beasts»?
«Yes, I believe that an artist must deal with his masters. Pirandello is a writer who innovated theatrical and narrative language. It opened important windows on the world, which are still relevant today. I want to explore two texts, one linked to the theatre, “Six characters in search of an author”, and the other, closer to the magical world of apparitions, of the appearances that Pirandello always talks about, “The giants of the mountain”.
«The angel of the hearth», her show on tour, presents feminicide as a ritual, touching on themes dear to her: women, the family, the reactions of society. Does the theater have a mission in this sense?
«It is the story of a dead woman, who cannot fully die because she is forced to get up every morning to continue being the cog in a house where ordinary domestic violence is practiced. The man kills his wife and then asks her to get up because he doesn’t believe he really killed her. The normalization of everyday domestic violence, in my opinion, is more chilling than the extraordinary event of a femicide. I wanted to investigate the mechanisms that drive the oppression, the violence, the ferocity that exists inside homes, in families where women are killed every minute. I believe that theater helps us discover and remind us of the horror that surrounds us, because, closed in our lives, we often forget about it. In this sense, yes, theater can have a mission. It must be necessary, otherwise it is of no use to anyone or anything, and to remind us of things, to take care of others and to take responsibility for the terrible events that shake the community.”
You have also made the female condition a fundamental theme in the direction of operas, from «Carmen» to «Dialogues of the Carmelites» and «Cavalleria rusticana». Has it demonstrated that this type of theater also has social values?
«The theater has great social value. The condition of the woman is that of someone who has suffered repression and commands from men for many years. There is no fairness with the rules of patriarchy. It is right that the theatre, even the lyrical one, reveals this difference in level. The hope is to find a balance, an understanding, a harmony that makes both men and women free.”
She started out as an actress, why did she leave?
«I graduated from the Silvio D’Amico Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome as an actress because back then women weren’t directors. But I wasn’t interested in acting: I was never a memorable performer nor did I ever enjoy being on stage and performing. When I found my path, that of using my gaze to serve the theatre, it was a spring awakening for me.”
In an interview you said that yours “is not a logical path but linked to madness”. Why? Choice or necessity?
«An artist must always have a pinch of madness, because if he stays too down to earth he cannot talk about life, always poised on madness. Art does not have to do with concreteness, but with chaos, with unruliness, with inadequacy. In this sense, yes, I think I’m a little crazy. In daily life I am almost autistic, tidy, I need to put things right. In the theatre, however, I can be incoherent, at least at the beginning of the creative journey. Then I put everything in place there too, but the theater allows me to be free in imagining, in having visions. Visionaryness has to do with madness.”
What does it mean to experiment in the theater today?
«It means accepting that a test tube explodes in your face, in your laboratory. Because only by making mistakes, trying to do experiments and accepting the idea of failure can you do research. If instead you sit there making nice things, done well, it’s entertainment.”
You never talk about directing the actors but about creating together. And with opera singers?
«The path I take with my actors and actresses is obviously different from that with opera singers. Because the needs and tensions are different. In opera there is the need to express oneself first of all with singing. Actors and actresses have other elements at their disposal such as the body and gesticulation. In both cases I try to bring out their truth, their natural gesture; not to make them stay on stage lolling left and right: they have to find where they feel comfortable despite the discomfort of being there. Because in the end the actors, the singers, all those who perform are superheroes: they are always doing tests, waiting for the public’s consent or denial. I have a lot of respect for them.”