Peak Performances to Present Emma Dante's THE SISTERS MACALUSO

Peak Performances will introduce American audiences to The Sisters Macaluso (La sorelle Macaluso), from Sicilian theatrical innovator Emma Dante.

The institution has dedicated this season to works by women creators, and The Sisters Macaluso is not only a wild work of physical theatre by a vital and prolific female visionary, but also one that focuses almost entirely on the emotional, physical, and metaphysical lives of female characters - seven sisters confronting the threshold between life and death following a family tragedy.

The Sisters Macaluso is set in a fantastical world, where a simple line of adhesive tape on the stage marks the border between earth and heavens, presence and absence, is and was. Seven sisters participate in funeral rituals - mourning members of their family, potentially mourning themselves - remembering, dreaming, laughing, fighting, weeping, and working through the burdens of poverty, illness, and volcanic levels of familial dysfunction. With sword and shield in hand, the sisters fight over the line between life and death in the manner of Sicilian puppets; meanwhile, viewers themselves are never quite sure who is alive and who is dead, or if, in this dreamlike depiction of life on the brink, there's any difference.

The Sisters Macaluso, which has now toured in Chile, Mexico, Brazil, and Italy, comes from Emma Dante's Compagnia Sud Costa Occidentale, founded in the '90s in a Palermo cellar the company named La Vicaria, after a prison where women accused of witchcraft were sent. The space is just as much a laboratory as it is a theater, where process and training are prioritized. Dante's laboratories come before proper rehearsals, and are periods of reflection devoted to creating conditions for actors to be free enough in their bodies to gradually develop and layer on the physical comportments of their characters. Eventual choreography is derived from the movements that arose organically in the laboratory process. Peak Performances audiences will therefore experience a work that was collaboratively devised over the course of two years by Dante and her Compagnia Sud Costa Occidentale members.

Compagnia Sud Costa Occidentale is deeply devoted to reflecting, in their deliriously staged fashion, the social, political, and emotional undercurrents of Sicilian culture. As Teresa Fiore, the Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies at Peak Performances' home, Montclair State University, writes, Sicily "is a place between geographies and civilizations, a light-filled space replete with shadows, a baroque corner plagued by paucity." Dante's vision in The Sisters Macaluso takes an expressionistic look at the interior lives of members of the island's working class society. "When I write stories, I always focus on characters who are, in a way, marginal, who nevertheless find a function and role in society. That almost always leads me to explore the interiors of homes, and domestic relationships within the family," says Dante in an interview with the Théâtre des Îlets, where The Sisters Macaluso was previously performed.

The Sisters Macaluso is spoken in Sicilian and Apulian dialects, with accompanying surtitles. "Dialects tell pieces of the history of Italy - Italy is a divided country," Dante further explains. "All of the dialects are intrinsic languages that speak to the identity of a culture. And so these 'impure, poor, savage' languages interest me because they come from the street, from marginal people, who aren't part of the bourgeois, educated population. My characters are totally anarchic and they therefore need an anarchic language...a language that moves, that evolves."

Fiore emphasizes that the surtitles are therefore both "necessary and unnecessary" because in its collage of "thick accents, ancestral words, local expressions, ritualistic repetitions [and] quotations from the folk tradition...Dante's language [often] transcends concrete meaning and becomes pure sound." The fluidity of Dante's work - here seen in the flow of meaning between language and movement, in the interchangeability between life and afterlife, and in the evasion of any traditional plot or scene structure that exists beyond insinuation - has been described by the director herself as forming a "theater of poetry." Through linguistic, emotional and bodily freedom, performers in Dante's productions create what Fiore refers to as explosions "into excess" - a lighthearted and joyous approach to themes of despair.

While The Sisters Macaluso may lithely approach time, space, and plot, there's one trademark of Dante's directorial style that's geometrically rigid: in many of her works, there's a line at the edge of the stage, against which characters will often stand, delivering their lines next to one another. According to Fiore, this compositional motif gives "flesh to the separation between stage and audience, and [allows] Dante to give shape and color to her vision with a blend of the sacred and the ordinary." Behind the threshold of the stage lies the infinite potential of emotional and physical expression, beyond logical limitation.

The cast of The Sisters Macaluso includes Serena Barone, Elena Borgogni, Sandro Maria Campagna, Italia Carroccio, Davide Celona, Marcella Colaianni, Alessandra Fazzino, Daniela Macaluso, Leonarda Saf, and Stéphanie Taillandier.

The production features text and direction by Emma Dante, lighting by Cristian Zucaro, and costumes by Gaetano Lo Monaco Celano. Montclair State University student Marta Russoniello is creating theEnglish supertitles, supervised by Dr. Marisa Trubiano and Dr. Teresa Fiore of the Italian Program in MSU's Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.

Performances of The Sisters Macaluso will take place at the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University (1 Normal Ave, Montclair, NJ), November 16 and 17 at 7:30pm, November 18 at 8pm, and November 19 at 3pm. Tickets, affordably priced at $20 (and free for Montclair undergraduates), be purchased at www.peakperfs.org or 973.655.5112. Running time is approximately 70 minutes with no intermission.

Companion Programming: Two free talks with Emma Dante will be held in conjunction with the performances. Sicily as a Theater of the World - with Dante in conversation with Teresa Fiore, Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies at Montclair State University -will take place on Wednesday, November 15 at 6:30pm, at the Feliciano School of Business, Lecture Hall 101. A community conversation will also be held immediately following the performance on Saturday, November 18, at the Alexander Kasser Theater. There, Emma Dante and The Sisters Macaluso company members will share their reflections on the performance.

Emma Dante was born in Palermo in 1967. She graduated in 1990 from the Accademia Silvio D'Amico in Rome and founded her company Sud Costa Occidentale in 1999. Her performances, staged in Italy and abroad, have won numerous prestigious prizes and vast critical praise, including Ubu awards-Italy's top theater honors-for her works mPalermu (for Italian Innovation,in 2002), Carnezzeria (for Best Italian Original Play,in 2003) and Le sorelle Macaluso (The Sisters Macaluso) (for Best Director and Best Show, in 2014). Other plays she has directed include Vita mia, Mishelle di Sant'Oliva, Medea, Il festino, Cani di bancata and Le pulle. Her Trilogia degli occhiali has toured Italy and the world since 2011. Dante has also helmed several acclaimed opera productions, including Bizet's Carmen, with Daniel Barenboim conducting, at La Scala in 2009; Strauss' Feuersnot, conducted by Gabriele Ferro, at Palermo's Teatro Massimo in 2014; and Rossini's La Cenerentola, conducted by Alejo Perez, at Rome's Teatro dell'Opera in 2016. Dante's first novel, Via Castellana Bandiera, won the Premio Vittorini and the Super Vittorini in 2009; it become a movie, A Street in Palermo, directed by Dante, that won actress Elena Cotta the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, won Cotta and Alba Rohrwacher the Pasinetti Award for best actress, and won Dante a Vittorio Veneto Film Festival Award Special Mention and the and the Soundtrack Stars Award for best film score at the 70th Venice Film Festival.

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