Last year it seemed like a fire, terrible in its destructive force. He burned books, those that clouded the mind of Don Quixote, according to the right-thinking, the “chorus of the reasonable”. In the second “door” of the “Don Quixote to burn” the brilliant reinterpretation of Cervantes’ masterpiece by the Teatro delle Albein scena a Palazzo Malagola until 7 July for the Ravenna Festival, we start again from there from that fire, which however takes on a completely different meaning. In the first part of the traveling show, led by two wizards with “blunt wands” Marcus, Mark Martinelli ed Little Sister, Ermanna Montanariwe retrace the steps of the first “anta”, in an alienating dialogue between reality and dream, to discover the dreams of the people of Ravenna in the rooms of Palazzo Malagola.
The fire, says Hermanita, is dangerous (“It begins with a burning of books – he says -, it ends with a burning of women, men, children”): “Escape, Escape while you can.” The “wandering” spectators, then, follow the advice. We find ourselves in the lunar setting of the nearby Palace of Theodoricwhere the tones change. Everything is darker. Don Quixote no longer seems himself. Il fire that animated it seems extinguished. He addresses his beloved Dulcinea offensively. He reproduces the stereotypes of the world. Reality, with its crudeness, imposes itself. But there is a brazier still burning at the side of the scene.
In the center it is Marcus who asks the question, and addresses it to the wanderers: “There always comes, sooner or later, the moment in which that question passes through us, pierces us, like a sharp blade, suspends us for a moment from the ruinous and mechanical going with our heads down, like brutes – says Marcus -: what am I doing here? What am I doing in this latrine of a world, born by chance in this place or that, in a stately building or in a tin shack, with this face and this body, playing this or that part, filthy rich or miserable , saint or murderer, Don Quixote or Don Giovanni”. That question lasts for a moment, “an electrocution, the hypocritical mask falls to the ground, and we no longer believe that all this is just Chance deciding it, no, it’s not enough for us, that everything is useless and in vain, that life is just a package sent from the midwife to the undertaker, no, that’s not enough for us, we want to knowwe want to know, we want to know, and we raise our eyes to the sky, and we invoke an answer: is there anything else, is there anything else? Knock knock, Universe, answer, is there anything else?”
The questions follow one another, because Marcus has no answers. (“I’m not an oracle. I can only ask questions”): “You, now, here, in this instant, are trembling, you want to know why you have been summoned here, on this summer night, to play Sancho, Dulcinea and the noble hidalgo of La Mancha, the masks created by a magician centuries ago, while he was a prisoner in a prison in Seville, and without whose imagination we, here, would not even have been able to begin our little spells. That magician from the depths of his cell, infested with rats and poisonous scorpions, called the hallucinated knight to life.… That, also beaten, beaten bloody, mocked and mocked on social mediacriticized in fashionable salons and ignored by the people who matter, he never stops proclaiming his love for Dulcinea, for Justice, for Truth”.
A monologue follows which in turn questions the story, heartbreaking, masterfully interpretedfrom the “girl”. The child “nameless – specifies Hermanita -. It bears the name of all of them. It comes from India, Nepal, who cares. From the boundless immensity of the earth. It’s a rag. Grabbed and then thrown away. In the desolation of this world.” The story of a girl kidnapped as a child from her town, and sold, exploited, “defiled” in a thousand different ways, and of his hope that rises again and then founders every time, untilwith his body, reaches the bottom of the Mediterranean. Like so many. Like so many who are no longer even mentioned in the news.
It is dark inside Palazzo Teodorico, Don Quixote is silent. Only the crackling of the lit brazier next to the scene can be heard. It is Hermanita who points this out, giving an appointment for next year, the third year of this “world opera” performed together by actors and citizens of Ravenna:
“What if we, here, left this fire burning tonight? – he proposes -. Sancho, put some more wood to burn! Let the fire burn in the brazier. May others find it. And they feed it. So that the memory does not fade. Of the nameless girl. May his words remain among these ruins. And even those who will think that “it’s little, it’s nothing”. Guarding a song in the darkness. Whisper it with us. Waiting the light of dawn”.
