Theater was not my love – my loves are my children -, it wasn’t even my passion – the passions were my lovers, especially the “blue” one, that is the sea, the THEATER was simply my life. This silence imposed by the closed curtains is deafening, but we learned from the greats – like Frida Kahlo, to whom I dedicated my last show – resilience: being able to transform an unhappy experience into an occasion. Like a frozen lake, and therefore inaccessible from the outside but alive under the crust of the ice, the Biondo Theater, with the curtain closed, opted for active resistance.
Tall our productions have been put to the test, we have created – in collaboration with the Sicilian Region – research paths and theatrical works for the web, which we intend to stage in the summer, and we have become “Teatro d’Ascolto”. Citizenship, young people in particular, paid a very high price with isolation. The words remained to bounce between the walls of silent rooms.
We wanted to give voice to those words. So we asked people and high school students – through their teachers – to write to us: we collected anthologies, suggestions, outbursts, hopes, and we worked on them, even with our students. The writings are becoming texts, readings that we broadcast on social networks, will be a recital this summer, a film and two performances with Irina Brook in September, and finally a show next season. The Theater must be a point of reference for its own territory, a catharsis, a reflection on the problems of the Polis.
This Season … “Heroic”, it will be a … “liquid” season: it will begin – as soon as we are allowed to – with the shows that require a closed room, and will continue outdoors until early October.
Yes, we are a bit exhausted: we disassemble and reassemble the programming like Lego villages, but still we work, even more than normal, so I don’t want to complain. Also I am in a wonderful city, near the sea (where I train almost every day before going to the office), I meet our students, who are full of enthusiasm, I stop to follow the tests, there is a good relationship with the employees, and I want to give everyone the strength to move forward, not to give in to discouragement, to encourage creative work in all possible ways.
Of course, we had to invent ways, methods and structures, we are pioneers in various activities (our School is the first Italian degree course in “Acting and the professions of the scene”); but they are bets won thanks also to the experience and dedication of our president Giovanni Puglisi.
And of course we try to plan the next seasons: we read texts, meet artists and ideas arrive, and they are many. We can boast of the fact that we are making many actors and directors who had had to emigrate to prove their skills and have opportunities to go “home”: 85% of our cast members are Sicilian. And one of our most ambitious projects, “Squarci dell’arte”, concerns the great Sicilian literary and theatrical production of the 20th century: Danilo Dolci, Franco Scaldati, Gesualdo Bufalino, Leonardo Sciascia, Luigi Pirandello, Andrea Camilleri and others. But we will also have many contemporary dramaturgy texts, which speak to us about our current situation and our territory, written, among others, by Giuliano Scarpinato, Rosario Palazzolo, Giulia Randazzo, Dada Morelli, Chicca Cosentino. I want the Theater to have its roots in our cultural identity through our human resources, to expand ever higher with very ambitious international proposals. In short: we are preparing to face the future. I would like to leave this land – which deserves it – a reborn theater, I would retire with joy in my heart. We hope to be thawed soon. FORCE VACCINE!