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Graciela Ferrari red carnations
When I was ten years the "politics" was a way to stay up after Carosello , TV advertising program in Italy sent the children to sleep. I tried to guess the names of ministers and political leaders appeared on the news immediately.
At thirteen I started high school. Usually going to school by bicycle, sometimes less, when my mother took me in his Fiat Cinquecento red second hand. It was 1968. One day, coming to school with her, I found banners hung from windows and doors blocked, while someone, speaking through a megaphone, explaining that the school had been taken. For the first time he heard the words "Mao" and "philo-Chinese." My mom tried to explain, but not really understood what it was. Just knew I had the day off because he could not go to school.
Some months later the school was again taken. This time the flags and banners were all red like red and black. There were many more students who spoke through megaphones. Most had long hair and beard. I heard words like freedom, anarchy, power to the imagination, not alienation, sexual liberation ... A classmate was inside the school. He said they needed someone to take food. I thought he was referring to candy and gum, and prepared to go buy it. As I looked around, trying to understand what was happening and trying to recognize students who were inside and those outside, the father of another classmate began shouting, waving fists, "Putas ... that's what it is you ... a group of whores ... go outside and you will see ... bitches! " I made my decision. He knew how much room. I climbed the gate, I went to school and joined the occupants. Students discussed
divided into small and large groups, sitting on the floor of the classroom, wrote and painted on large sheets of paper. My friend asked me if I would even at night. I called home, as he always did I wanted to stay to sleep at a friend's house. I was surprised when I heard my father told me definitively: "No! You can not spend the night at school! Back home, immediately!". Beginning to understand that "politics" had to do with power and disobedience and danger involved. I also noticed the fact that being a foreigner living in Italy should take particular care. But in any case at that time everything seemed possible. I liked the idea that people were equal, not just poor, sad, frustrated and alienated, but also rich, creative and alive. At home I tried to do the dishes my father and my brothers.
At sixteen years after leaving school for a year looking for new challenges, I started doing theater. I left the volleyball and ski competitions to go to trial. Three times a week I was in a borrowed garage on the outskirts of Milan to work with a group of people who said do theater underground. With a mask over his face and a cross as a nurse in the arm, blue jeans and remerita Dead Soldier walking the poetry of Bertolt Brecht. The group was inspired by the Bread and Puppet Theatre. We used puppets and masks to present a history of war.
Back in school I became politically active again, this time more seriously. There were young people who used drugs, others speaking of armed guerrillas, others who liked to buy shoes in tip and motorcycles. I was attracted by the idea of \u200b\u200bgrassroots associations, structures that appeared to be anti-bureaucratic and anti-hierarchical. I was falling in love with Marco, a blond with blue eyes, proletarian family, musical, he founded the theater group with which I worked and was a member of the same organization in which extra-parliamentary left was active in school.
The theater group was divided after an internal discussion. We were just a theater underground, but political. We believe that theater should contribute to the class struggle and operate as counter-information. I had no intention of becoming an actress, "a person who imagined a liar and impostor, but I like doing theater. Our theater did not belong to government buildings with red velvet chairs, or buildings with wooden chairs alternative: our theater belonged to the streets, markets, schools taken, factories and community centers.
The show about the war developed to include a protest against conscription. The show follows the coup denounced Pinochet in Chile. I was Death with a rubber mask covered with green wax and a fat American Marine chewing-gum chewing . Participated in demonstrations under a large paper tiger to criticize imperialism or in front of a big red elephant to uphold the rights of workers. My bridesmaid dress was used to dress a puppet Fanfani's Christian Democrats, while a garbage bag became the fascist gown Admiral when we did walk the streets as a married couple in favor of the referendum in divorce. My
political responsibilities grew as I took up more and more of the theater. The two activities became into one. At age nineteen was a member of the "cell culture" within an organization of the revolutionary left, along with some of today's young politicians are other kids who try to guess the name. I have been involved in endless meetings in discussing the meaning of art and culture, among colleagues who felt the music and theater primarily as a means to raise funds for the much more important political activity with the workers.
founded a music school and occupied a home theater in downtown Milan. Hundreds of young people participated. I organized courses and lectures, professional contacts, teaching, writing documents, prepared festivals, made masks, spectacles wherever we had called, was driving the old blue furgoncito, contacted the press, discussed, drafted the agenda and chairing meetings, participated in training sessions, recycled clay, painted the walls of the house occupied the morning ... working to make money, going to college in the afternoon and did all the rest at night. Enthusiasm, passion, political beliefs, deeply held convictions, no rest, no silver, meeting after meeting, meetings, demonstrations, festivals ... they were our daily bread.
One day the Danish group came Odin Teatret Milan. We invite you to see our space and give a lecture. Arrange an exchange with them. At twenty years ago, shortly before going to live with Mark and other friends, I went to Denmark for three months. Odin thought he would return to share with my fellow everything he had learned. Unexpectedly
I was not there, not speaking the language - and in any case did not talk much over there, did not participate in any show or public activity, did not know any of the rules of the profession was not for anything useful, and as an actress or artist was catastrophic. It took only three months to completely destroy my identity and feel that the floor was moving under my feet. I knew only one thing: he could not return to Milan and remain responsible for hundreds of young people like me simply basing the enthusiasm and words. He had chosen the theater as a way of saying no, to be rebellious by actions, not bear to be sitting on a bench in a school or office. In the Odin Teatret was found not know what was real action. All I could do was stay in Denmark. My mom was happy. Italy was walking around the decade of terrorism, to the years of lead. Many activists were later arrested or killed. He could be one of them. The policy could have been my only horizon.
A Rose
Working with the Odin Teatret since more than twenty years. It has taken time to pick up the pieces and recognize the continuity in that it seemed a break between my life in Italy and Denmark. For years I did not speak of content or responsibility, while the meaning of politics and the theater had for me was changing slowly. Take political positions no longer had to do with the direction of a party or the ideological background, but with a reality that always appear differently or with different names. The Odin Teatret was not a political theater, but in each of our choices had a policy and an awareness of the community, the polis .
spent the seventies and in Italy the labor movement and the students began to disperse, the young and were not in demonstrations or assemblies. Even my friends seemed confined to their work and at home, as I began to travel the world as an actress.
In l986 he was in Argentina. The army attempted a revolt to stop the processes that condemned the crimes committed during the military dictatorship. This caused a huge outcry in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. I first saw from atop a sea of \u200b\u200bprotesters, while also participating in the demonstration. He was on stilts, in the character of Mr. Peanut, "Death", and carried a black banner with one word: "Forgot?". He was back on the street and could see better. While on tour again in Argentina a few months ago, I asked to see the work of a theater group of Rosario, a provincial town. Two girls, about twelve years, dressed in innocent white dresses, presented a scene during which he had the last hours of Allende died not wanting to surrender to the military forces that attacked. The two girls had chosen the text alone, a need to know the truth about what what they had heard his parents: homicides, missing persons, mass graves ... They need information, or rather counter-information, and were doing theater to get it.
In 1976 and 1983 was in Italy. In 1978 and 1988 was in Peru. In 1980 and 1986 was in Wales ... Theatre groups met to exchange professional experiences, to share visions, dreams and problems. They were creating networks, collaborations, festivals ... One evening walked together in a very long line in the desert to show their work to someone who was not there, someone had opened a path. The sun had set and darkness came. The drama continued. The shadows of the partisans of World War II and the rice workers hunched over reappeared to remind solidarity, generosity, stubbornness and resistance also hope in dark times. There is no need to represent the resistance when the way we live and work in the theater is already a form of resistance.
In 1988 I was in Chile. I visited the tomb of Allende, who was not wearing his name, and then again as Mr. Peanut, I went to La Moneda, the building, where Pinochet lived while now. I had a piece of bread in the shape of heart that beat them to feed the birds. Had started doing theater in Milan to let the world know of the death of Allende and now I was there in Santiago to remember.
In 1993 were organizing a week of celebration in Holstebro. I listened to representatives of various religions sing under the same roof. I saw Arabs and Jews sing and dance together as he remembered what had meant their flags for me. I had not seen people behind the flags. At that time, I could not imagine talking to someone who does not think like me.
In 1995 he was in Cuba. Stealing eggs for breakfast, bread and cheese from the hotel to take you to the theater technicians who did the shows. Because of power outages (power interruption) viewers waited hours to see the shows. One day a technician took us to change handles and talked about how proud he was of his country. Despite the difficulties that had to endure, still believed in the Cuban Revolution. In her bright eyes I saw how imperialism was really a paper tiger like the one below which I had expressed many years earlier.
In 1996 he was back in Milan. Organize an exchange in prison. I played behind bars and in an enclosed courtyard in the falling snow. In return, the prisoners showed some of his shows. The women danced to music played by men for the first time were allowed to visit them. The theater can be an island of freedom.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and with it, so many illusions of being able to change the world, I felt again the need to stage something strongly political. I chose to dress as a man and take a flower in her hand. The flower should be red, I could not wear the pink because the meaning would have been too direct. I chose a rose. Then, at last, following a logic determined by the texts and materials on which it was working, I returned to a female figure with flowing hair, which she sang to his dead brother kneeling in front of the red rose crushed. The coldness of political discourse softened to show that the real strength lies in vulnerability.
The red rose flower seems adequate to represent what it means to me today the policy: no longer ideal and ideological determination of my youth, but take a stand full of questions, concerns and contradictions. Something that lives and moves, as the theater that I continue to remember what they believed when I was young and to keep fighting for the same values. What once was counter-information, agit-prop political theater, theater in the service of society, has become a theater that is communication, respect and an island of freedom, the theater becomes the impossible possible. Following the true nature of theater, changed by the rebellion revolution, politics and the subversive, the man for woman and red carnations and a rose.
Julia Varley (UK-Denmark) is an actress and teacher in the Odin Teatret. He has published articles in Mime Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Lapis and mask. Is part of the Magdalena Project since its inception.
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