SPINE di Massimo Barilla

One of the most interesting shows produced by Calabrian theater.

SPINE
by Massimo Barilla

with Stefania De Cola, Mariano Nieddu, and Lorenzo Praticò

Directed by Massimo Barilla and Salvatore Arena
Original music by Massimo Polimeni
Set design by Aldo Zucco

Production by Mana Chuma Theater

Synopsis:
Three solitudes, three solitudes mixed with sorrow. A round dance of losers. Triangle of solitudes, in a rectangle of history. Characters that seem like ghosts: they move like leaves of trees at night. A story told in multiple voices, woven with whispered screams.
Three characters - shadows in an inn without customers, obsessively repeat a story that - they say - has crossed them and made them witnesses forever. The story of intoxication, of a wound, of a degraded Cassio and a less noble Othello. "And Desdemona? What happened to Desdemona?" But this is only a pretext, like in a run-down metatheater, to play at being something, someone, in a reflection of mirrors and identities: Lucio, the Captain/Othello; the rough and seductive hostess Magdalena/Desdemona; the obscure and multilingual Gravedigger/partially Cassio and partially Iago.
Just a pretext, a search in the dark, an inexperienced attempt - and for this, unconcerned about occasionally trespassing into the excess of farce or melodrama - to reclaim a time, a breath, a body, a flesh to heal, to free the soul from their unresolved history, from their escape from themselves, from their eternal attempt to unveil the hidden drama within them.

Spine arises from an expressive necessity. From the need to confront a high story starting from the margins, from the untold gaps, from the desire to investigate paths normally ignored, both in terms of dramaturgy and linguistic research.

Language is a mobile instrument, dominated by use and function, in which the "signifier" transforms, assumes new, disconcerting colors and sounds, but always for the purpose of strengthening "meaning," never for themselves, never for pure ostentation or linguistic acrobatics. Dialects, languages indeed, blend. Sardinian, Sicilian, Calabrian (not coincidentally the mother tongues of the actors), poised for a lofty use, taste of life, never of the everyday. In the area remains this strange mixture of accents and languages, which reaches its peak in the speech of the gravedigger, an invented mishmash, not the language of ports, but of the dead, full of last words stolen from them, dislodged from their teeth (Frenchisms, Englishisms, Spanishisms, Germanisms reused more for the fascination of sound than for sense).

THEATER SEASON 2024/25 TEATRO GRANDINETTI IN LAMEZIA TERME
Web: www.amaeventi.org/stlt2425/