by Patrizia Cavalli
In 2007 Ermanna Montanari devised, in Ravenna, a permanent workshop, a singular space of creation which still exists today. The place is the Rasi Theatre but there are no defined time schedules: we get together, Albe actresses and adolescents, working mostly at night when the theatre becomes a space freed from its multiform daytime activities, enveloped in silence. There have never been production worries: guided by Ermanna in investigating the possibilities of the spoken word, plumbing the depths of one’s own voice, we have tackled poetry and pieces of music, the swerves and jerks of the body onstage, with Lorenzo Donati as a critical “spy”, the invaluable observer of an experience that plays on the absence of pressure, on the need for intimacy. It was within this context that Ermanna asked me to create a vocal “miniature”: we inquired into various hypotheses together and arrived at Patrizia Cavalli’s ARIA PUBBLICA (PUBLIC AIR). At this point it seemed necessary to bring in Marco Martinelli to work with us, for a subtle thread that links the “girls in a suitcase” of LEBEN to all the creatures who “haven’t drawn air”, who claim the right “to public air”, the air that belongs to everyone. The result was this theatre “short”, an exercise in which Cavalli’s verses are the living testimony of what is violated every day, cancelled out, removed in the name of an alleged modernity that is (almost always) transformed into squalid abandon. The poetic figure is the mirror of a flesh which yearns for breath, for that playful cheerfulness which the Albe had already encountered in the verses of Cavalli’s teacher: Elsa Morante, author of The Happy Few and the Unhappy Many.
