IN SCENA! Italian Theatre Festival

*June 16 – 5- 6PM – DiCapo Opera
(184 East 76th Street, NY)

6 PM: Jennu Brigannu (Once Upon a Time there were Brigands)
by Vincenza Costantino, artistic collaboration Nino Racco, directed by Ernesto Orrico.
With Dante de Rose, Manolo Muoio, Ernesto Orrico.
Produced by Teatro della Ginestra.

*June 18 – 6PM – Calandra Italian American Institute
(25 West 43rd Street, 17th Floor, New York, NY)
Panel/Performance: Travelling theater: the use of language in theater. Performances by Teatro della Ginestra and Francesco Foti.
Moderated by Lucia Grillo.

Teatro della Ginestra
“Jennu brigannu. Once Upon a Time there were brigands”
by Vincenza Costantino
with Dante de Rose, Manolo Muoio, Ernesto Orrico
directed by Ernesto Orrico

Three chairs, Three men. May be a door in the background, the door of an ordinary wine store (somewhere in a village road). The Three men stand in front of this imaginary door, talking about a topic in freefall: brigandage in south Italy. They talk about it deploying their knowledge and the ways they are capable of, mixing the Great History of the Unification of Italy with the stories reported by unknown or invented testimonies, weaving hagiographic chronicles, and slanders, legends and documentary or photographic materials, not without a little bit of carefree “hearsay”.
The text is a polyphony that takes into account both the voices pro and cons of banditry, with the aim of revealing the limitations hidden inside a Manichean interpretation of the phenomenon. The robbers were not only scoundrels and not only legend heroes, before all they were men who had chosen or been forced to choose staying out of the law and the so-called civilized community, paying the highest price for this. Next to well known stories that became part of popular culture, there are stories of many nameless people, who have turned into bandits to follow a dream, an ideal, for a revenge, a cause of honor, or just to escape hunger.
So the tale unfolds into a fragmented and contradictory story, which runs beside the official one and the vicissitudes of contemporary Calabria. The dialogue between past and present is continuous, the clear chronology of events gives way to poetry, historical documents trespass in the delirium and dreams of whom really lived brigandage by proxy, without acting, without choosing, but going on telling about it, somehow, celebrating it.
In this pièce, the way of acting is simple, without any artifice, everything is based upon “the word”, upon the capacity of actors to give body and voice to small narrative fragments in a continuous piling up of styles and dialects, with a deep desire of an inward looking tale, to take one’s breath away by remembering names, characters, stories …

Vincenza Costantino has curated publications such as “Teatro in Calabria 1870-1970” and “Tra dramma e vita, il teatro di Antonio Spadafora.” She has also written plays such as “Sulle acque sui rovi, storia di San Francesco di Paola” (published by Le Nuvole in 2007) and “L’emigrazione è puttana.” She has taught several courses in Media and Communication at the University of Calabria.

TEATRO DELLA GINESTRA – Founded in Cosenza, Calabria, in 1995 by actor/director Dante de Rose and dancer/choreographer Antonella Ciappetta, Teatro della Ginestra is one of the most innovative and important theater producers in the South of Italy. They also organize “Indipendentemente Teatro”, a festival dedicated to the young production companies in the South of Italy, and “Esplorazioni,” a series of professional workshops for actors and dancers.

http://www.inscenany.com/festival-2/events/jennu-brigannu-once-upon-a-time-there-were-brigands