The “storyteller” and “street artist” Ascanio Celestini arrives in Milan with a new “anthropological” monologue: “Museo Pasolini”. An operation in which analyzing the life of the writer in the centenary of his birth finds important analogies with the history of Italy from the Twenties to the Second World War.
In his work, the author of the “Black Sheep” questions himself about a hypothetical “Pasolini Museum”, a meta-place in which to narrate the crossroads between the author of “Petrolio” and the history of his country. The goal is always the same: to get the citizen out of a self-referential loneliness and solipsism and make him, if possible, feel part of (what remains) of a community. The show debuts tonight at the Carcano Theater and is on stage until Sunday; We asked the author-director-showman to tell about its genesis a The print.
With the “Museo Pasolini” the initiative of the Carcano “Oltre il teatro” also kicks off, leading to the real places of some selected shows: in this case, to the Pasolini places in Rome, from 7 to 10 April 2022.
Celestini, the show arrives on the occasion of the centenary of Pasolini’s birth, but this is not the only reason to bring it to light. Is that so?
“Indeed, far from it. The centenary was the trigger but I have been following Pasolini for a long time. The occasion to transform my Pasolini wanderings into something structured was the enlightening consideration of Vincenzo Cerami: he said that if we take all of Pasolini’s works and put them in chronological order, we tell the history of our country. And then there is also another thing to say ».
Which?
«That Pasolini, despite being a well-known and overwhelmed author, is one of the least read and studied, apart from the usual things. Another reason to fathom his work, in which it was already seen that he no longer referred to the people with this label but called them the “mass”, a sign of the conceptual pulping that today we live to the nth degree, as well as being a concept abused for political purposes “.
How does the monologue develop?
«I am on stage alone in the guise of a narrator who composes a“ narrative museum ”dedicated to this relationship between Pasolini and Italy. For example, the story of the “Casarsa della Delizia” cemetery in Friuli, where Pier Paolo himself is buried alongside his mother and many other relatives, but not his partisan brother, who is in the cemetery but in another place after being killed by Yugoslav Communist partisans during the Second World War. This presence-absence of the brother in the family cemetery is something that has to do with the feud between Julians and former Yugoslav ethnic groups, another tragic page in Italy and Europe “.
You are Roman: is this love for Pasolini’s places a coincidence?
“Of course not. I know well all the places that recur in the works, the famous suburbs such as those of the Roman aqueduct of Appio Claudio, where Pasolini filmed “Mamma Roma” and which until 1973 housed a shanty town. Here, in the show there are fragments of interviews with the children of the time, which I went to look for and in part I found. Pasolini was interested in the excluded and put his pen and his art at the service of the attempt to place them at the center of social and political life. And this must also be done by theater for me ».
So yours is a political show, Brechtian speaking?
“” Anthropological “, in the sense that it does not tell private and” bourgeois “facts but essential facts for the life of a community: art must take an interest in the community and, for example, undermine the prevailing idea that the freedom of the individual is only that to be able to do everything without any rules, rigorously alone and perhaps consuming without limits. On the other hand, I am interested in bringing the “we” back to the center of the scene, instead of the “I” ».
What would Pasolini have said about the “spectacle” offered by politicians during the recent re-election of Mattarella at the Quirinale?
“I don’t know, but he was perhaps the first to use the term” palace “referring to the distance with which politicians dealt with public life, with a grotesque-surreal effect, which for me also concerns citizens”.
In what sense?
“I see surreal comparisons with a state of dictatorship regarding the Green Pass issue and the mandatory vaccine for Covid, when a large part of the world does not have access to medical care and vaccines: a completely meaningless thing”.
Covid has also hit hard on the theater: how do you see the issue?
«I think that politics has done little and badly for the theater, limiting itself to randomly giving some money to anyone who boasted a title to belong to the category. The problem is that the actors had to be helped to stay in the theater and to solidify their presence in the buildings over time, but it did not happen. But there is a positive note ».
Which?
“Seeing people queuing in the cold to collect their theater tickets, when they could comfortably stay at home watching TV series on the usual American platform, I am moved and I think that the theater remains a” garrison of civilization “: a place in which people still prefer the direct relationship with culture despite everything ».
“Museo Pasolini”, Carcano Theater, Corso di Porta Romana 63, until 6 February, 22/28 euros