by Tonino Guerra
The idea of working on Tonino Guerra’s Odiséa grew out of the need for a daily digging into poetry and my desire to fine-tune the use of dialect as “stage language”. Dialect as language incarnate, a well from which to draw visions and collective imagination, a contact with the ghosts of our ancestors. The Teatro delle Albe, the company I’ve been with for ten years now, has always worked on all of this, has made it an indispensable cornerstone of its poetics, and with excellent results. After years of apprenticeship, after years in Alcina’s cage as dog-cavalier, attentive to the thousand variations Ermanna Montanari brought to that language, my intention was to begin a personal practise, in the etymological sense of an itinerary which through assiduous repetition will find its way to maturity and in-depth knowledge. The idea was concretised a year ago with a poetry reading by Raffaello Baldini, the only success in Seneghe, Sardinia, during the “Poets’ September” festival. Marco Martinelli suggested working together in that direction to do an evening as part of “Nobodaddy”. First off we thought about an anthology of Romagnol dialect poets, but as we worked our attention got focused on a single text, Guerra’s rewrite of the Odyssey, founding myth of western culture.