Like every year, the Orestiadi, on July 19th in Gibellina, remember Paolo Borsellino and the men of his escort, through the theatre. This year, on the anniversary of the Via D’Amelio massacre, “La Grande Menzogna” will be performed at the Orestiadi, a play written and directed by Claudio Fava with David Coco (Friday 19 July at 9 pm), which will be preceded, at 7:30 pm, by “Parole di Legalità”, a meeting in which Lirio Abbate will dialogue with Rino Giacalone, an event organized in collaboration with the Terzo Tempo SCA Association. On Saturday 20 July, at 9 pm, “Radio Argo” will return to Gibellina, a contemporary rewriting of Igor Esposito’s Oresteia, directed and performed by Peppino Mazzotta (a show that was suspended last year at the Cretto due to sudden bad weather).
“The Big Lie” is the theft of truth that the country has suffered on the death of Paolo Borsellinonow reduced to a tangle of lies, fake witnesses, amnesia, sly smiles, flawed trials, endless silences and blatant, blatant lies. The text does not stage the detailed narration of the diversion, because it does not want to be an operation of pedagogical theater of memory: it is first and foremost an invective. And the protagonist is him, Borsellino: no longer told – as has been done a hundred times – in agony and death, but in the resolved condition of someone who is no longer there. And it wants to summarize the things that happened, with the amused detachment of someone who is now beyond and elsewhere.
In this new dramatic text, which also sees Claudio Fava sign his first theatrical directioninvestigates the sensational theft of truth suffered by Italy after the death of Paolo Borsellino. The protagonist is him, the Palermo judge killed in the attack on via D’Amelio in ’92, told no longer – as has always happened – in the moment of solitude and death but in the resolved condition of someone who is no longer there. And he can say, indicate, demand.
“Radio Argo suite” (production Teatro Rossosimona), directed and performed by Peppino Mazzotta, is a performance for voice and music (original music Massimo Cordovani, performed live with Mario Di Bonito), centered on the play Radio Argo, a rewriting of the Oresteia, by the poet and playwright Igor Esposito. “This courageous dramaturgical undertaking is a dense score with a strong libertarian and rebellious vocation that is nevertheless miraculously faithful to the classical reference materials. With a decisive and uncompromising prose, the author wants to make us forget the sweetened, diluted and politically correct language of contemporary news, returning to a frank and passionate speech, without censorship or compromises dictated by calculation or interest. In doing so, he makes us feel again the danger of the reality that we pass through every day unaware, in a continuous and inexorable process of unmasking. The text unfolds its version of the facts through six direct testimonies that, in chronological order and far from any whim of actualization, retrace the events preceding and following the most well-known and celebrated war in the history of humanity: the war waged by the Achaeans against the city of Troy. The first is that of Iphigenia, the last that of Orestes. In between, those of Aegisthus, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon and Cassandra chase each other. Six ghosts that come back to life, that return in voice, to explain to us the arcane past from which we come and the tragic present in which we navigate. All wars resemble the one that saw Hector oppose Achilles. The structural themes of every war conflict, cleaned from the chaotic noise of the confusing news, are found in the story of this ancient legendary war and in the fate of the heroes who won it, marking that of those who lost it. Now, as then, innocence is sacrificed on the altar of lies, in the name of shameful and predatory interests, disguised as great ideals such as freedom, honor and democracy. Then the battle was persevered in, as it is persevered in now, until the years of war were numerous enough to completely forget why it was waged. The figures of the Greek and Trojan heroes echo sinisterly those of our recent history. Tyrants in suits and ties and colonels perpetually in uniform, blinded by bizarre obsessions. Oppressed by tragic manias that shout proclamations, recite delirious speeches, vomit infernal sentences through the loudspeakers of a radio, or the screens of televisions. Responsible for tragic decisions and real massacres, for reasons as questionable or futile as the beauty of a woman. Helen, whose abduction by the Trojan Paris causes the siege of Troy, thus becomes the symbol of everything that the tyrant of yesterday and today uses as a pretext and justification to give free rein to his darkest deviations”. Peppino Mazzotta
“Radio Argo is a compact rewriting of the only surviving trilogy of Greek tragedy: the Oresteia. The voices of the characters stage the irreconcilable clash between the sick blasphemy of power and the desperate song of those who flee from power, seeking, in silence and exile, a redemption or perhaps just a point of pure desire. Song embodied by the anarchic gesture of Orestes who, after the terrible matricide, refuses every “civil” consolation, making true, with his choice, a verse of the irreducible Russian poet, Marina Cvetaeva: “To your senseless world only one answer – refusal”. Igor Esposito