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Since the world began, at every transition between civilizations or even just between generations, the
“elders” have always had the impression that something essential was being lost. Or at least, that in the act of passing the baton to younger people who are inattentive or even disrespectful, something
venerable and sacred was slipping away. Gestures, words, ways of life, “values” which had been part of many people’s existence, no longer form the horizon of their lives, lose their weight of morality,
of conviction, of attractiveness, of emotion; their colour fades, and they tend to disappear.
This short-circuit between the generations has been brooding for some time in the Teatro Povero, has
insinuated itself more or less obviously into more recent plays, circling around scenes, scripts, titles, even affecting the task of mounting a show every summer. Gomiccioli
(‘Tangles’) takes this state of affairs on board. With sorrow, it records this discomfort, this sense of unease.
The loss of symbolic objects and gestures takes place with the complicity and the
intrusion of media-based modernity, which is organized towards a quite different logic of presentation: which contaminates, exploits, “buys up”, alters, devalues. But when even the poorest, purest,
most “touching” of objects risks being swamped, then a sharp mind, a swift hand, a naïve but also prophetic conjuror abducts the sacred object, obscures it, removes it from contamination, hiding it in a
mysterious physical space or in a remote area of memory where, sooner or later, someone with a delicate and emotive touch will find the will, the means, the passion to bring it back to life. |
