The first story of a crossing that I heard in Mazara, in autumn 2009, was from a tiny courageous Tunisian woman: shy, with her broken Italian, she had trouble raising her eyes. I changed her name to Ja- smine, transfiguring her story and maintaining the essential aspects. It’s the only story of those told by the General that concerns not a drowned or lost person but a life that was saved. Was it really sa- ved? In the clutches of the old Italian who, he says, “has always been liked”? In the end when I asked her if she would make the same jour- ney again she replied with a decisive no. She would stay in Tunisia.
I wrote and directed Rumore di acque after several years spent in Sicily, presenting it for the first time at Ravenna Festival 2010. Since then that text has had a long life in Italy and abroad: multiple translations, publications and performances. I’ve read or seen or only heard the General take on different bodies and languages, and the envisaged metamorphoses are even more: in France, Germany, Romania, in the United States, from Chicago to New York and Oregon, and then in Brazil, in Chile, and in a unique “choral” version in Mons, Belgium, European capital of culture 2015.
That monologuing general is actually a “medium”, he is crossed by a population of voices and faces that lay siege to him, the people of the drowned, which not even his bureaucratic nature manages to reduce to mere statistics. The dead who make themselves heard through him: in spite of himself. The general is alone on his lost island in the Mediterranean, but he is surrounded by the dead who do not leave him in peace, who torment him, who cry out to be “remembered” not merely as numbers.
What is culture, what is theatre, from Sophocles to Brecht, if not an ideal circle in which humanity reflects on the violence and dramatic contradictions that lacerate it? This in my view means taking the words “culture” and “theatre” seriously, tackling the “capital” knots of one’s time. And among these the tragedy of migrants and refugees: in relation to these “human sacrifices”, to this endless hecatomb, what can our Old Continent do? Europe is faced with a challenge that brings its very existence into play: should it show itself as capable of facing this historic moment, decisive with view to delineating its own identity: a Europe of goods and bureaucrats, a frightened Europe prey to arrogant populisms, or a Europe of true values and solidarity as the indispensable foundation of civilisation?
Are we innocent? Am I innocent? Can I consider myself not responsible for all these tragedies that happen elsewhere, far from my little house? What have I got to do with my brother’s death? That sour and neurotic general, that functionary who has had it up to here with counting numbers and deaths and setting them in order, a lousy job, every day the same, also poorly paid by those of the capitals, that bookkeeper, demoniacal and sarcastic, that impotent spectator watching the TV news, that one, precisely that one, that’s us. The “rambling talk” came in a spurt, an unstoppable flow of numbers and images. I wrote it in Mons in January 2010, while it was snowing, during breaks from the rehearsals of detto Molière: I stayed at home and plunged into the Strait of Sicily, the grey sky of northern Europe was transformed into the light of the Mediterranean. I reread all the notes in my Mazara travel journal. Stories and tales, but not only. The cry of the muezzin on Italian soil. The intricate alleys of the Kasbah. The bright green of the cathedral domes. I was also nourished by the strongest impressions of my companions in adventure: Ermanna Montanari, who had immediately felt the presence of the volcano, an underwater volcano, a red water, on fire, and about which she had at once imagined a military figure; and Alessandro Renda, who filmed everything he could, learning a smattering of Tunisian working with the adolescents of the non-school and seeing his Mazara roots in a new light, stringing together genealogies and tapestries of family history. This oratorio for the sacrificed was enriched by the Mancuso Brothers with their exceptional music, with their powerful ancient voices that seem to howl the pain of humanity from the depths of an abyss.
But in this 2015 the “question” of the refugees exploded, it became obscenely “visible”: as I write, the daily papers show the dead body of a little Syrian boy in the arms of a Turkish policeman, the photo “that shakes Europe” the papers say. Aren’t thousands and thousands of deaths enough to shake Europe? Isn’t it enough to know about the hundreds and hundreds of drowned children, do we need a front page photo to shake Europe, the world? In this 2015 our Rumore di acque is being invited to the most unimaginable places: schools, social centres, small theatres. To respond to these requests, while still touring theatres with the Mancuso Brothers and the play that debuted in 2010 we have invented a more agile version: Ermanna has redesigned the set with a performative spiral of coal on the floor, while Alessandro is accompanied by the recorded music of accordionist Guy Klucevsek with whom we did a special edition of Rumore di acque in Milwaukee, following the nice suggestion of our friends of Theatre Gigante. And with this new version we can go almost anywhere, wherever the show is needed, even on the beach: as if it were wartime. And perhaps it really is.
Marco Martinelli, 3rd September 2015
