In his speech for acceptance of the Nobel Prize (1997), Darío Fo told several stories worth remembering. The first, the story of the Caldé rock, on a town perched on a rock that was sliding towards a lake without its inhabitants lending ears to those who warned them of danger; The second, a real anecdote, that of an actor who asked Franca Rame and he shared their knowledge with young people, which they decided to do immediately; The third will be seen.
Naturally, the inhabitants of Caldé continued to deny reality even after the waters engulf them and, when a fish walked “in front of their noses”, they took him through a weird fish that he had “learned to swim in the air.” As for the issue of young people, Fo and Rame faced it with workshops in universities and discovered that they knew almost nothing about what happened in the world, that their teachers did not know and that they did not even have a record of fundamental events of five or ten years before, which forced the following: “Start by what happened thirty years ago and then move forward.” They were “speaking in a vacuum” or, perhaps, as if they spoke from the apparent absurdity of the onomatopoeic technique of the Grammelotthat Fo himself had led to works such as Bufo mystery (A tribute to Maiakovski) Returning to the thread of the “true father of Commedia Dell’arte”: Angelo Beolco, Ruzzante (1502-1542), one of the two authors to whom he dedicated his words of that day.
Darío Fo thought that “an artistic expression that does not speak of his own time has no relevance” and that, if you want to contribute to others being able to “tell their own history”, it is not enough to teach a method or style; You should start “for what is happening around us” because, as one of the best playwrights of the twentieth century, its teacher and friend Eduardo de Filippo, “the theater must be the mirror of human life” (The art of comedy).
On that occasion, and as an example of how far the dismantling of the perception of the political had arrived, Fo mentioned that the students died of laughter with the farce they represented for them, but without suspecting at any time that “the stories we told them were true.” The reality seemed fiction, even if they were immediate realities, taken from science, the courts of justice, and so on; And “only in Italy” did not happen, but “everywhere, throughout Europe”; Starting with Spain, where “I have encountered the same difficulty.” From Filippo, who composed verses when stagnating in a work to “get closer to the essential,” the process had explained in a poem written in his language, the Neapolitan (‘O Culore d’E pparole): “If who chooses / does not choose well, / the colors of the words are mixed.
It happens that, in front of the minstrelsco Grammelot of fo, consistent roughly in imitating a language with invented sounds and words that, however, “transmits a complete speech” of intelligible intention (Minimum actor manual), Power produces a courtly gays from the real language whose true objective is that the true work that is being represented is not understood. Darío Fo, who on Monday would have turned 99, fought his whole life against that perversion in the company of Franca Rame, and did not fall short in his role: playwright, actor, director, set designer, composer and activist against wind and tide (his Marxism was not a living room) on the street and in his more than fifty works, although the majority only know the aforementioned the aforementioned Bufo mystery, Accidental death of an anarchist, Pum, pum! Who is it? The police! and No one pays here. It was, following the steps of Eduardo de Filippo, a jugglar who had gone into the world to tell Zanni hunger And, if Franca and he had no scenic spaces to tell or wanted to denounce the official model, they went to the enormous popular support they enjoyed, organized mobilizations and, if necessary, socialized buildings such as La Palazzina Liberty de Milan, which encouraged independent creators to extend the occupations for “almost all Italy” (Per one manage gepli spazi e swotacoli).
It is obvious that none of that would have been possible in current societies. The degree of mobilization and intellectual restlessness that existed then allowed situations as unimaginable today as 30,000 people met in 1974 to attend not a systemic show, but one of the always pursued and alternative fo. Many years later, Franca Rame revealed part of the reason in an interview with a Colombian media (Time2002): “I remember that, in Sicily, two large and robust employees saw us after the Nobel and broke down. They got excited and said: we have also received this award.” As he added, it seemed a general recognition to those who have less, to those who support “the negative conditions of life” or, in other words, to the central characters of the theater and the continuous and frequently dangerous personal commitment of the comedian couple, which can be summarized in two scenes of a fairly difficult year (1973): on the slightest side, the arrest of Darío Fo during a representation of THE PEOPLE WAR IN CHILE (Against Pinochet’s coup) and, for the most brutal, the kidnapping of Rame at the hands of a group of salary neo -fascists from the police who beat, tortured and raped for hours. Who wants to know more about it, can start with the distressing and brave monologue in which he tells what happened: Stupro (The violation).
He said at the beginning of this text that the Nobel Prize for Literature of 1997 told three stories during his speech; Well, the third – from suspense so far – was the vital and culturally opposite face to the Rock of Caldé and the catastrophe of the educational system: a tribute to Franca Rame from the absolute recognition to the author and the professional relationship they maintained (“believe me, this award is for both of them,” he said in the end) and, at the same time, from love and his complicities, humor included. “What do you feel when you are the wife of a Nobel Prize? What do you feel when you have a monument at home?” He had asked Rame a journalist. “I am not worried, I do not consider it a disadvantage at all. I’ve been rehearsing for a long time,” she said. It was the woman who had caused days before the passengers and the driver of a tram jumped to the street and start screaming, after congratulating the award -winning: “Where is it frank?” Nothing similar to a pedestal, of course. Like him, he lived without fear of being, and anyone who has read will know that they continue to laugh in the stands of the word like Eduardo de Filippo in the text that Darío Fo dedicated to him in 1986 (What gray is power): “With the approval of the Eternal Father. The Eternal Father of the Theater, is understood. One Dionysus, seems to me.”
#gray #power
