Being together, feeling together, whether it is suffering or joy, extreme happiness or excruciating pain. There are plans that meet, facts that emerge from corners of memory or anecdotes that seem true but are the result of an ad hoc creation and emotions that touch each other until they become confused and lost in the dense story, of gestures and words, of Michael Sinis. With “The Sympathy of All Things” of which he is the author and interpreter, the actor, playwright and director from Andria, Puglia, has returned to Messinaas part of the XIII Cortile Teatro Festival, strengthening a relationship with the festival and with the city that is increasingly close, fruitful and positive.
This time, on a warm summer evening, it was the courtyard of the Spanish Fort in the Horcynus Orca Park, in Torre Faro, thanks to the friendly availability of the Foundation of the same name – another intimate and cozy place, where the theater becomes an opportunity for shared encounters and collective rituals – to welcome his work for another applauded event of the festival. Born from an idea by Roberto Zorn Bonaventura (who is the artistic director), Giuseppe Giamboi and Stefano Barbagallo, organized by Il Castello di Sancio Panza together with the Municipality of Messina, the Courtyard has become a fixed point of the theatrical summer on the shores of the Strait, always capable of reinventing itself by finding new spaces, new formulas and synergies.
Produced by the Castel dei Mondi Festival of Andria, the show features the dramaturgical collaboration of Davide Attilio Tattolo, “the wonder” (as it is defined on the poster) is by Francesco M. Asselta, the sound designer is Claudio Kougla. “Everything is in its place, even when it seems the opposite” is the subtitle of the work, where the word, with its intense and direct dialect nuances, becomes a crowbar to investigate and tell, a word that welcomes in itself, already from the etymology, the sense of being together, of suffering together. Here is the sympathy: everything begins (a fun narrative device that brings us back to Sinisi at school, a student not very fond of numbers but accustomed to being together) from the memory of a science lesson in which the teacher addresses in class the quality of liquids of being together. But the science lesson alternates with anecdotes of real life, funny, ironic, painful, imagined forms in the scenic space and little by little the sympathy is lightened of every doctrinal pretension, leaving room for a single certainty, that life flows and experiences happen, then making theater becomes the ability to grasp the flow, share it with the spectators through body and word, to give rise to a sincere encounter, without frills or superstructures.
The Cortile Teatro Festival, which takes place with the support of Latitudini, a Sicilian drama network, continues on August 5, at 9 pm, in the courtyard of the Metropolitan City of Messina, with “Makallè”, by Aurora Miriam Scala, with Carmela Buffa Calleo, produced by Bottega del Pane, and then moves on August 9 to the Promontory of Capo Rasocolmo where “Periplo” by and with Gaspare Balsamo will be performed, with live music by Giovanni Arena, produced by the Associazione Musicale Etnea.