Welcome to the Babilonia Teatri amusement park, where the word, spoken like a stream of consciousness and not recited, and the music, made up of catchphrase songs, tell the daily madness of our present. A profoundly irreverent staging, full of surprises thanks to a whirlwind of words and notes, here is «Calcinculo», a show that served as a preview of the 15th edition of the Cortile Teatro Festival, born from an intuition of Roberto Zorn Bonaventura – artistic director –, Giuseppe Giamboi and Stefano Barbagallo, which confirms itself as an eagerly awaited event of the Messina summer despite the places that welcomed it having changed over the years.
For the first time, the event which, with obstinate attention, care and presence, brought some of the most well-known names of contemporary theater to the shores of the Strait, was hosted in the Coral Garden, where the Veronese company founded and directed by Enrico Castellani and Valeria Raimondi proposed to the attentive and participating public a fast-paced show, in which music and theater intermingle and dialogue in an incessant and dizzying way.
In a sparse scene, to leave room for the word, in an alternation of intense monologues and musical pieces (to the music of Lorenzo Scuda of Oblivion), «Calcinculo», which recalls the carousel with flying seats of the town amusement parks, makes the game the guideline of a narrative designed to paint the phobias, the racism, the obsessions, the contradictions of a lost and frightened humanity painted by a tight dramaturgy, which it contaminates languages and intentions.
«We live in an obsessive time that words and images are no longer able to tell by themselves – explain Raimondi and Castellani who with «Calcinculo», which premiered at the Primavera dei Teatri festival in Castrovillari, confirm and continue in the wake of a recognizable poetic path committed to looking at, and questioning, the present and its derivations -; music comes to the rescue like a medicine or like an explosive fuse.” The intention is clear from the first monologues that Castellani conducts with firmness and tension, to undermine certainties and start from the clichés of contemporary time, showing cracks and delusions. A direct, sharp and ironic song without pretenses, where we reveal the fears that guide our actions, seasoned with broken desires, paranoia and disillusionments to which the songs performed by Valeria Raimondi act as a counterpoint, in an ever-lively exchange between word and music.
A pop guise to photograph today, its perversions and its escapes from itself, seasoned with a hilarious and unlikely dog show to decree the “objective beauty” conducted by Castellani, a convinced barker, who however ends up becoming yet another contradiction of a system in eternal short circuit, and culminated with the performance of a – fake – choir of Alpini to reinforce values and intentions.
«They are works – recalls Roberto Zorn Bonaventura – that choose to stay where the present breaks down, in our opinion necessary, because they feel the need to become words, songs, the subtitle of this fifteenth edition». The Festival is organized by the Castello di Sancho Panza with the contribution of the Messina Foundation for Culture and with the support of Latitudini, a Sicilian drama network. Graphics by Riccardo Bonaventura.
