Sud
Translated from the Italian. Titles, names, venues and press headlines are kept as originally published.
SERGIO RUBINI
in
SUD
Andata e ritorno
with le musiche originali by MICHELE FAZIO
eseguite from vivo da
MICHELE FAZIOpiano
MARCO LODDO contrabbasso
EMANUELE SMIMMO batteria
directed by
SERGIO RUBINI
The show premiered at the Teatro Yves Montand in Monsummano Terme (PT) on 12 March 2016. To get an idea of it, imagine for a moment that you are not sitting in the stalls of a theatre but in a train compartment. A somewhat reckless train, because it is driven by an actor who is also a director: a thin man with a sharp profile, Sergio Rubini. He has told you stories of trains, tracks and little stations in remote places before, but only on the big screen. The conductor tells us that the reason for the journey is the SOUTH, but even he doesn't know where we will end up.
To the South? Probably, but it could turn out differently.
In short, the destination is uncertain.
And uncertain is the train's progress.
Right away you will feel you have travelled huge distances in just a few minutes. From a passage of Aeschylus' The Persians, which opens the show, Rubini moves on to the story of Matteo Salvatore, a ballad singer who lived through the dark post-war years and made the strength of his poetry out of black-bread poverty. Yet within this abandoned, unlit South, great literature flourishes, reaching its highest expression in Naples in the work of Eduardo, who turned characters crushed by fatalism and resignation into true giants – certainly unable to change their condition, but thinkers with the courage to look inside themselves. And speaking of the South's small 'heroes', Rubini then tells of another stationmaster, his own father, who in the 1960s, in a farming village in the deep South, cultivated like others in the village a passion for theatre, acting and poetry – like the dialect verses of Giacomo D'Angelo, who wrote poems in his toy shop. Accompanying the readings and linking the spoken and acted moments is original music played live by maestro Michele Fazio on piano, Marco Loddo on double bass and Emanuele Smimmo on drums, bringing every line to life.
Continuing the path of rediscovering the past in order to better manage the future, begun with his earlier work, in this new show Rubini goes beyond the recital “La guerra dei cafoni”, produced in summer 2013, creating a richer piece with poems and stories about the South of Italy.
“We are at a moment in history,” Sergio Rubini explained, “when we need to look again at the 1970s, before we met the ruinous 1980s. Those were years of passion, years when young people mattered a great deal and change was expected from youth. These ideas went sour in the 1980s, giving rise to the disillusionment in which today's crisis is rooted. So let's start again from the 1970s – and this show is a way of remembering them.”
Divided into three parts, the recital tells the story of Matteo, a boy who today would be the age of 'everyone's grandfather'; it tells the story of Eduardo, immersed in a South that manages to pick itself up and build its own dignity and culture even on poverty, a culture that has spread around the world; and finally it takes up passages from De Amicis' book.
“We forgot our origins far too quickly – where we come from. But in my view, if we don't remember clearly where we come from, we don't know where we need to go either.”
Tournée season 2015-2016
Teatro Yves Montand Monsummano Terme (PT) 12/03/2016
Tournée season 2016-2017
Teatro Comunale Vittoria Colonna Vittoria (RG) 02/03/2017
Teatro Vittorio Emanuele II Messina 03–05/03/2017
Teatro La Perla Montegranaro 07/03/2017
Teatro Lea Padovani Montalto di Castro (VT) 30/04/2017
Teatro dei Marsi Avezzano 08/05/2017
