Teatro di Roma Opens 'Piazza d'Italia', 2/8

Teatro di Roma Presents 'Piazza d'Italia' from the novel by Antonio Tabucchi, directed by Marco Baliani. Performances are from February 8 to 28, 2010.

"This novel is the story of a village in the north of Tuscany and of its inhabitants in the time between the unification of Italy and the early 60's. The events are narrated and filtered namely through the life of a family of Garibaldi's supporters, following, as in a family tree, the succession of generations, the intertwining of the life of the village and of its inhabitants but also with the greater Italian History.

The performance aspires to preserve the epic choral nature of the writing, in an alternation of collective scenes and single narratives, according to a search of narrative dramaturgy that has been characterizing my journey for years. With sudden "dramatic downfalls" to concise dialogues that, immediately after, turn into a chorus or a single omniscient narrator. Actors and actresses will not only be defined characters but also functions of a larger social and choral nature, floating in and out of scenes like fragments of a continuous photograph gallery. From the black and white of daguerreotype to the first family photos of the sixties, pastel colours, scenes and costumes, together with the lighting, will also give colour to those years, not in their temporal reality, but in our memory. Music will mark every change in generation, every passage of time, finding here also a revisited musical memory. The special force of Tabucchi's writing translates into a strong corporeal presence, in a symbolic invention and. at the same time material, made of gestures, dance, singing and objects, specifically created to recall, in a different way, the images of the work.

And it is exactly the excellence of the actors on stage, of their dramaturgic language, that will allow this story from our past to emerge again from the trap of a revisited neo-realism and suddenly become the mirror of our contemporaneity." 
Marco Baliani

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