Thus, these ancient puppets became Aeneas, his father Anchises, his son Ascanius, Queen Dido, King Latinus, and Turnus, king of the Rutulians. Although this is the first time that the Aeneid has been staged in the Opera dei Pupi, to Mimmo Cuticchio it seemed like its natural universe: in those characters the Maestro rediscovered the narrative world of the Teatro dei Pupi and of the Cunto, as if their theatrical destiny had remained silently waiting to be fulfilled. A narrative universe that Cuticchio also found in the scenographic elements, allowing some historic backdrops to come back to life, reinterpreted, alongside new visual solutions conceived for this production. A new dramaturgy of the image was born, in which traces of the past coexist with the languages of the present, creating a stratified scenic space in which memory and contemporaneity live in a continuous dialectic. All this also finds profound coherence in the space of the Tonnara, conceived as the site-specific setting of the performance. The Tonnara Florio, one of the most fascinating realities in Palermo’s industrial and maritime history, is today undergoing a profound transformation: no longer a workplace and vital centre of tuna fishing and processing, but a space that over time has taken on a new identity, becoming an elegant neo-Gothic residence capable of welcoming distinguished guests, sovereigns and leading figures of its time. Like the ancient puppets and backdrops recovered and reinterpreted, the Tonnara too preserves in its architecture the traces of the lives and functions that have passed through it over the years. The place, therefore, does not merely serve as a setting for the performance, but intimately reflects its meaning: a continuous passage between past and present, between memory and reinvention, between what seemed destined to disappear and what today finds a new voice. In this coexistence lies the profound meaning of the entire project: to make theatre a place where time is crossed, where characters, stories, materials, figures, spaces and symbols inherited from tradition can continue to speak to the present with a renewed voice.

Associazione Figli d’Arte Cuticchio

THE DRAMATURGY OF PLACES

by Mimmo Cuticchio

Starting in the late 1960s, my father, having by then lost his traditional audience – which, with the arrival of television, preferred to stay at home watching exotic Brazilian telenovelas – decided to open his last small theatre in Vicolo Ragusi. Its location, just a few steps from the Quattro Canti, would encourage the arrival of tourists, who greatly enjoyed the Opera dei Pupi. We ended up performing the same show every evening, and I often complained about this to my father. One day he said to me: «Build your own puppets and open your own theatre, so you can stage the shows you want». And so I did. In 1971 I began touring schools and founded the company Figli d’Arte Cuticchio. In 1973, in Via Bara all’Olivella, I finally opened my own theatre, which I wanted to call “Santa Rosalia”. One had to trust in the help of Palermo’s patron saint, because politicians had very different ideals. I began staging the cycle of the Story of the Paladins of France; at first, only a few enthusiasts came to follow me. But to my great surprise, I soon saw the little theatre fill up with children and young people who, in the absence of playgrounds and other services for children, crowded into the hall every afternoon. And they were not only from the Olivella district: thanks to word of mouth, they began arriving from the Vucciria and the Capo as well. That young audience took part with enthusiasm, and I was happy to tell stories to such a lively public. I then began taking my collapsible little theatre to the towns of the Sicilian hinterland, until the first invitations from outside Sicily arrived. So I went to Milan, Turin, Florence and Rome, and to other Italian cities.
In 1977, an invitation from abroad profoundly disrupted my way of making theatre. At the Piccolo Teatro Angelo Musco in Catania, I was staging The Arrival of Angelica in Paris and had included, as musical accompaniment, the Indian sitar and the music of Pink Floyd.

The journalist John Francis Lane of “The Economist”, who was present at the event, after interviewing me, proposed me for the Festival of the “Angry Young Men” in Cardiff. And so, together with my company, we left for a tour in Wales. The organizers invited us to a working breakfast to discuss the programme of performances, and when I asked to see the theatre where we were supposed to perform, the artistic director replied: «In this building we do not have an Italian-style theatre. You have to perform the show here», and he pointed to the place where we were: a small courtyard with balconies and, below, tables and waiters constantly going up and down, since the kitchen was on the ground floor. I turned to my brothers and said: «Either we renew ourselves here, or we die here». Unable to stage the performance inside our collapsible little theatre, for the first time we staged The Great Duel between Orlando and Rinaldo for the Love of Angelica among the tables of a venue: the puppets came to life on the balconies, the entire building became, in turn, the court of Charlemagne, the pagan camp, the cave of hell… and when Malagigi pronounced the magic formula that summoned Nacalone, the demon emerged from below, wrapped in the flames I produced with Greek pitch. It was on that occasion that I truly understood the power of Teatro dei Pupi “on an open stage”; the backdrops were no longer the painted ones we used in the small proscenium, but the places themselves, which became palace, forest, camp. That experience was fundamental for the transition from the small to the large stage, which would later characterize my performances outside the little theatre in Palermo, on the great stages of Europe and overseas. Since then, I have continued to think that theatre does not live only inside the building traditionally built to host it. Sometimes it is the place itself that suggests the dramaturgy, that imposes the rhythm, the entrances, the apparitions, the distances, even the way in which the audience must look, listen and take part. This year, the 43rd edition of “The Dream Machine” will have the sea as its theme. We will tell of shipwrecked people, of emigrants, of peoples fleeing wars and sieges; but we will also speak of the hope of landing in lands of peace, where it is still possible to imagine a future. Here too, in the atrium of the former Tonnara Florio, there is no theatre in the strict sense. And yet the place itself is already theatre. For centuries, in these waters, the harsh and necessary rite of tuna fishing took place: migrant creatures, guilty only of crossing the Sicilian Channel along ancient routes, older than any boundary drawn by human beings. The same happened with swordfish fishing, practiced precisely during the period of reproduction, when life exposed itself in its most fragile and most sacred moment. My performance will be itinerant: it will unfold among stages, puppets, stage machines and live music. There will be no chairs, because the audience will not remain still in front of a scene, but will follow the movements of the performance. In the end, theatre has always been this: a shared experience, a common rite between those who show and those who watch, between those who act and those who bear witness. Normally, audiences attend performances in the evening, when darkness isolates the stage from the rest of the world. I, instead, want the performance to begin in the late afternoon and end at sunset, not for mere suggestion, but to restore to theatre something of its origin: the direct relationship with natural light, with the air, with the sky, with the community gathered in an open space crossed by the breath of the sea. The setting of the sun will become part of the dramaturgy: it will accompany the journey of the shipwrecked, of the exiles, of peoples in flight, until it transforms the sunset not into an ending, but into the threshold of a possible landing.

And we must not forget that in Don Quixote of La Mancha the priest, the niece and the barber decide to burn all the chivalric books belonging to the hidalgo’s library, believing them to be responsible for his madness. However, only two books are spared: Amadis of Gaul, considered the most important chivalric romance of the Spanish tradition, and Orlando Furioso, which Cervantes states should be read in Italian and aloud. A very significant detail also concerns the description of the fight between Don Quixote and the “puppets” of Maese Pedro’s little theatre. The way in which the knight strikes, beheads and knocks down the marionettes on stage surprisingly recalls the way in which, even today, in the Sicilian tradition of the Opra, the puppets fight, heads fly, bodies split in two and warriors die on stage. This detail demonstrates the extraordinary continuity between European chivalric culture and Sicilian popular theatre. The idea that Miguel de Cervantes may have seen a performance of the Opera dei Pupi in Sicily is my own personal hypothesis. Cervantes did in fact take part in the Battle of Lepanto, was wounded in one hand by a shot from a harquebus, and was taken to Messina to be treated. I have always wondered whether, during that stay, he might have attended a puppet performance telling the stories of Charlemagne and the wars against the Saracens. There is no historical evidence to confirm this; nevertheless, this idea arises from the extraordinary precision with which Cervantes describes, in Don Quixote, the fight against the “puppets” of Maese Pedro’s little theatre. On the threshold of the 18th century, the European world was changing profoundly, at least in the great cities of the North. Factories, foundries, industries and railways were being born; new routes of communication and new forms of production linked to industrial modernity were developing. In the South and in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, however, society remained predominantly agricultural and tied to traditional activities. Wheat, sugar cane, artichokes, medlars and prickly pears were cultivated, while many communities continued to live from fishing and farming. Modern infrastructures were not widespread: there was a lack of major roads, adequate ports and railway networks. Travel took place mainly along mule tracks and local routes. Travelling was a privilege reserved above all for large landowners and aristocratic families. Yet there were also the zavorrieri, men who, with their boats, collected sand from the seabed for the construction of houses. There were the sulphur mines, which gave work even to the carusi, children forced to labour in extremely harsh conditions. There were also places where coal was worked, as Otello Profazio recounts in one of his famous songs in which, after listing many needs and hardships of the people, he concludes ironically with the expression: “Here we live on air”. Said with irony, because Sicily was, and still is, a land of great sacrifices and deep contradictions. We must not forget, however, that precisely in those years the cult of the stories of the Paladins of France, at least in Palermo and in several towns of the Sicilian hinterland, continued to be alive and narrated. Giuseppe Pitrè tells us about this, the author of the famous volumes dedicated to Sicilian customs, traditions and popular culture. Thanks to his studies, we know that the people clearly distinguished between the different arts of narration. The cantastorie, in fact, were travelling storytellers who moved through squares and markets, telling and singing about real events, episodes of current affairs and contemporary happenings, accompanying themselves on the guitar and showing painted panels with scenes from the stories they told. Those who instead narrated the Carolingian cycle and chivalric stories were called cuntisti, precisely because they were professionals of the chivalric cunto. Like African griots, they were true living libraries: through the spoken word, they preserved and transmitted stories that, in many cases, had not yet been fixed in writing. Their knowledge lived in memory, in the voice and in the rhythm of the tale. It lived in the ability to pass down orally, from ancestors to descendants, entire epic and popular worlds. To make the classification of these narrative arts easier, Giuseppe Pitrè concluded that the narrators of chronicles and real events were called cantastorie, while those who told the stories of the paladins and of the chivalric cycle were called cuntisti. Now I ask myself: am I really a cuntista? I cannot fully claim to be one, because I do not tell only epic-chivalric stories. At the same time, however, I do not feel I am a cantastorie in the most traditional sense of the term either. I recognize myself more in the word contastorie, because within this term I feel a broader freedom: the possibility of crossing different tales, popular memories, chronicles, epics and visions. And perhaps, thinking of my students – whom I have always defined as “actor-narrators” – I too can call myself that: an actor-narrator. A narrator who uses the body, the voice, rhythm and the spoken word to bring stories to life. A narrator who crosses theatre, cunto and popular memory without rigid boundaries, allowing each story to find its own form and its own breath.