La Canzone degli F.P. e degli I.M.
The Song of F.P. and I.M. - Public reading by Elsa Morante
Biblioteca Civica d'arte Luigi Poletti, Modena
28/10/2005, 
17:00, 19:00 29/10/2005, 15:30, 17:00
concept and direction Marco Martinelli
with Alessandro Argnani, Luca Fagioli, Roberto Magnani, Alessandro Renda
production Teatro delle Albe, Ravenna Teatro
duration 40'
premiere
Elsa Morante’s La Canzone degli F.P. e degli I.M. preaches a heretical message: happiness is possible. Even in a world of the cynic, the manipulator and the consciously manipulated, a world of “superturbofullyaccessorised- optionalextraslatestmodel, perfectly washed, pressed and disinfected shirts”.
Even in the dictatorship of happiness in which we live, where the really happy people are dangerous subversives regarded with suspicion.
On stage, Morante’s text becomes a public accusation read by a jester pursued by men in white coats and nurses with syringes; the interpreters of this “public reading” are the four young actors of the Teatro delle Albe who graduated from the non-school of Ravenna and from the extravaganza that made the company’s reputation I Polacchi.
“Elsa Morante has always been an important part of our work. Now, twenty years after her death, little is said about her. What touched us deeply in her, apart from her prediction about the Great Standardisation and the reign of the “Unhappy Masses”, was that she possessed a kind of “revolutionary concern”. There’s a letter Goffredo Fofi has in which her sensibility is very evident: the world is falling apart, it’s getting more and more ghastly, and she is eager that her books should be distributed free. ‘It’s my way of waging a cultural revolution (I’m saying this to stress the point, that is, I wish my revolution were so easy and simple! Mine is a permanent revolution, maybe a hopeless one.)’ “
The Teatro delle Albe are also mindful of Martin Luther King when he says: “Even if I knew that tomorrow the atomic bomb would be launched, I would still plant an apple tree in my garden today.” It is on this principle that we have founded our “po-ethics” in a constellation where the heroism of Luther King shines beside the revolutionary concern of Elsa Morante.
Marco Martinelli
Teatro delle Albe web site
