It is the duty of the Republic to remove obstacles of a
and social order, which, by effectively limiting the freedom and
equality of citizens, prevent the full development of the
human person and the effective participation of all workers
in the political, economic and social organization of the country.
Italian Constitution, Article 3

PREMISE

This Workshop was created as a response to the Ministry of Culture’s recent call dedicated to the redevelopment of suburbs. Through music, dance, and theater, it aims to bridge the long-standing gap between central neighborhoods and metropolitan areas that to provide equal opportunities for growth and development for all citizens, young and old.
There are thousands of Palermo men and women who live in neighborhoods disconnected from urban centers. In many cases, these are vulnerable families in vain: from the availability of economic resources to study and job opportunities for young people. The profound territorial inequalities affect the development and well-being of the youngest especially, generating a “generational injustice” from an early age, with the paradox that precisely in the areas where poverty and juvenile distress are concentrated, the network of socio-educational services – which should be more robust – is extremely weak.
The process of marginalization of Palermo’s suburbs dates back to the progressive depopulation of the historic center that began when – as early as the 1970s – in the name of wild reconstruction and modernization, entire masses of the population, belonging to the lower-middle class, were moved to the public housing of the ZEN, CEP, Falsomiele, Brancaccio, Borgo Nuovo, and Borgo Ulivia neighborhoods in anonymous barracks built in the midst of cultural nothingness.
Portions of the city that in this scripted uprooting have lost their dialect, their history, their culture, their habits, their sense of community in the name of a supposed civilizing progress.
Progressively, the city lost its relationship with the sea, undergoing irreversible transformations under the pressure of uncontrolled urban sprawl, which has gone down in history as the “sack of Palermo.”
This cultural upheaval also overwhelmed the Pupi theater. Until the 1950s, in the historic center and immediately outside the walls, many opranti and a host of related craftsmen worked: tinsmiths, metal embossers, painters, sculptors, carvers, tailors, who devoted their lives to this particular activity born in Sicily between the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.
Until the 1960s, Tano Meli worked in Sferracavallo, Paolo Galuzzo in Pallavicino, Giovannino Lo Nardo in Acquasanta, and Giacomo Cuticchio, who before opening his theater in Vicolo Ragusi had worked in Falsomiele, Cruillas, Brancaccio, and Borgo Nuovo. In the neighborhoods of the historic center, Francesco Scafani, Giuseppe Argento, Antonino Mancuso, Peppino Amante and Giacomo Cuticchio himself resisted, respectively at Capo, Marina, Borgo Vecchio, Albergheria, Quattro Canti di Città. But by then conditions had changed, spectators were dwindling, and the Pupi Opera, without any support and without its traditional audience, faced one of the hardest crises in its history. The children of the Pupi world ended up going on to other jobs, the Pupi Opera fell into oblivion.
We have told Mimmo Cuticchio’s story many times: his survival and endurance are due, on the one hand, to the knowledge that the Pupi Opera could not end, and on the other to the conviction that his theater could be reborn, refounding a new audience that Cuticchio found mainly in schools and, at the same time, in the tours he had the courage to take around the world.