| TERRA PROMESSA!
Brigands and migrants a performance by Marco Baliani and Felice Cappa
with Marco Baliani
featuring in video Salvo Arena, Naike Anna Silipo, Aldo Ottobrino, Michele Sinisi
dramaturgy Maria Maglietta
music Mirto Baliani
set design Valentina Tescari
assistant Virginia Forlani
video design Matteo Massocco, Andrea Nobile, Valeria Palermo
director assistant Anna Banfi
production delegate Lidia Gavana
a project by Change Performing Arts
produced by CRT Artificio 1861-2011: Italy celebrates 150 years since the national unity.
The unification was surely the achievement of a political dream shared by politicians, artists and intellectuals, but it was also a difficult and painful process that caused many victims, men and women who strongly opposed a political project, which they couldn′t share. Actually, the unification process entailed for the farming community living in Northern and Southern Italy to give up a respectable future.
In the face of a unification that was being achieved by the weapons, it was inevitable that some people arranged an armed resistance, a resistance designed to go down in history as "brigandage".
The brigands - pitiless, rebellious, ferocious - were placed to be instruments of shifty and ambiguous powers, used and deserted by unchanged rulers, barons and landowners always readies to change allegiance. The desperate rebellion of the brigands was choked off with blood, scorned by betrayals, repressed by army and special laws. The new-born kingdom of Italy ranged almost half of its army against the rebels: the number of the victims of this civil war was higher than the total one of the Wars of Independence. | The authors of the performance read into the life of the brigand Carmine Crocco the emblematic history of a misunderstanding, a civil defeat, an absence of a political long-sightedness that puts a deep strain on Italy yet.
So, the lives of the brigands become the lenses which allow to reread and investigate the history of a country that, as it arises, fed on the civil enthusiasm excited by the promises of Garibaldi but then it was not able to assure minimum rights for a respectable life.
On stage Marco Baliani retraces the events, reconstructs the circumstances and lights the places consigned to history by the protagonists of those events. To accompany the words of the storyteller on stage, others characters appear on two big movie screens: they are two common people, a baron and a Piedmontes soldier who contribute to complete the patchwork of the account. The storyteller gives voice to all the characters, evoking them to the act of memory and creating a fragmented account composed by different voices and points of view. "Alternating and matching words and images it is possible to dig into Italy′s history, a country that finds hid truths and leaves remains of a not composed country, a not reconciled land where it only remains for the losers the last humiliation: to become strangers to themselves and to change themselves into emigrants" (Felice Cappa and Marco Baliani): this is the destiny of eight million people, men and women who, while the Italian State is arising, are forced to leave their country in order not to be killed, not to die of starvation, famine, desperation.
The forced or voluntary migration and the conflicts fought by whom demand basic rights are topics that go through all the times: that′s why the performance is anchored to the present time, characterized by the conflicts that can not be forgot, and gives back the echoes of many migrants who yesterday, today and every time are forced to leave their country, getting through the efforts of a journey that often ends tragically.
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