A puppet skillfully manipulated by an artist who, giving it life, leads children and adults into a fantastic world. A green space that becomes a stage for new stories, connecting landscape, narratives, visions, transforming and vivifying places. A journey in four stages, «The landscape of the theatre», a project promoted in Messina by the Reggio-Messina company Carullo Minasi, in collaboration with Messina Social City, as part of the Christmas events. A puppet theater and circus festival (4 shows always starting at 11.30 am and 2 workshops from 10 am, starting last December 30th, will end on the day of the Epiphany, with appointments tomorrow, January 5th and 6th) carried out – in continuity with the poetic vision of Compagnia – in the form of theater spread throughout the villas of the city of the Strait, from Villa Sabin to Villa Mazzini passing through the Gravitelli Pine Forest.
«A path – as Giuseppe Carullo and Cristiana Minasi explain – which continues in the poetic history of the Company and grows thanks to the collaboration with Messina Social City, promoting a process of vision and knowledge through the instrument of theatre. A process that began with the Trilogy on the Limit which took place in various places in the city, then continued with the Delivery theater which, in times of pandemic, wanted to represent a response to the function and position of art and artists who regain the places of daily life to create a new contact with citizens through active participation. Other moments of theatre/training and meeting followed until we reached the Theater Landscape, which aims to be a reconquest and re/visitation of everyday places, a way to rediscover the city, its wonders (not so hidden after all) and a ‘collective identity’.
«At the center of the journey – continues Minasi – there is the need to regain a new interlocutor for the theatre. An opportunity to rediscover, therefore, not only the identity of the places but also create a circular relationship with the community that passes through them and rarely lives there. We believed that the right thing was to deal with what man must learn to manoeuvre, i.e. imagination, and for this reason we chose programming that looked at puppet theatre, in which the actor puts himself at the service of a miraculous and surprising object, the marionette and the puppet, with respect to which man becomes the operator, demiurge of an extraordinary world”.
Therefore, a program of shows for children was proposed to reconstruct the magic of theater and of a profound relationship, connected to the essence of the human race. To open the fantastic journey, in a landscape that itself becomes a dramaturgical place – the first appointment took place in a Villa Sabin full of children and families -, «The adventures of Pinocchio» with Stefania Ventura committed to giving life to the puppet «from very long nose” by leafing through words, dance and music the magical pages of the Pinocchio fairy tale starting from “Pinocchio’s nursery rhyme” by Gianni Rodari. The show, directed by Livio Viano, with music by Sandro Balmas, is the company’s flagship and in 10 years it has been performed more than 700 times in Italy and abroad.
Tomorrow at Villa Mazzini it will be the turn of an acro-dance workshop and then the acrobatic circus show «Lumie di Sicilia» curated by Francesco Mirabile; on Friday, however, in the Gravitelli pine forest, the enchanted magic of “Rapunzel” will be on stage, a show for puppets and narrators curated by Salvino Calatabiano and Vito Bartucca, the Teatro degli Spiriti and Teatro Patafisico company of Palermo, also protagonists of the grand finale of the event, the day of the Befana, at Villa Sabin, with a marionette and puppet workshop and the show for puppets and narrators «The legend of Orion».