by Pietro Favari

 

director, stage scene, lighting design Franco Gervasio
music Creativity® Music Ensemble

 

with the cast of the “Teatro del Mondo” from Albania, Camerun, China, Philippines, Morocco, Poland, Rwanda, Somalia and other countries

and with Dario Vergassola

 

costumes Laura Strambi Ferrini

production Creativity® International Arts Factory

 

Italy is a multiracial country. Our tradition of immigrants has not stopped the disturbing episodes of intolerance, often due to ignorance of the culture of those living nearby.
Brothers of Italy?means discovery and dialogue with different worlds. Universality is not only globalization of markets, but also the opportunity to communicate our own humanity and culture.
Brothers of Italy? puts immigrants of different origins and experiences side by side, telling stories on stage about the needs and dreams that brought them to Italy. The stories become a text, written by Pietro Favari.
The show by Franco Gervasio, uses music by Paolo Marzocchi and costumes by Laura Strambi Ferrini.
Strong emotions, cast in a dream-like dimension, evoke the atmosphere of the interpreters’ home countries, what  they have lived recalls the mythical hero´s journey.
The other protagonist is the Italian, "interpreted" by a famous person, speaker, interviewer, provoker and host  of the show.

Brothers of Italy? arises from the encounter between Creativity International Arts Factory ® and an idea of Pietro Favari, author sensitive to immigration issues. His proposal to create a performance through the stories gathered from interviews with people from all over the world, quickly found our support. The hospitality of the Festival dei Due Mondi, has further motivated and accelerated the project.
After collecting about fifty interviews, Pietro wrote the text that we put on stage, choosing, on the basis of the potential expressive ability and the willingness to assume a constant effort, a group that has become a spokesman for all the people surveyed. This group was trained so that all the interpreters would be in condition to acquire the basis for the character’s expressiveness and the stage techniques.
The group opened up to Paolo Marzocchi, great composer and pianist, who collected the suggestions from our protagonist’s lands and made an intense and continuous soundtrack. The music implicates, as always in my shows, all of the development; it is the soul, a word that expresses itself in a universal language and touches the viewers’ sensibility.

Laura Strambi Ferrini had the very effective idea to mix the interpreters’ modern clothes with memories of their lands: refined fabrics found in remote districts, sometimes owned by the protagonists themselves or found in archives and secret collections. Lived ® fabrics, as she calls them, just like the stories that are told.
The result is a show of strong emotions, a bit dreamy, fairy tale, in the footsteps of the story tellers who all over the world, from Africa to Eastern Europe, from Latin America to the lands of the Indian Ocean, brighten the holidays and entertain adults and children with tales of ancient myths, of distant enterprises, of heroes such as Ulysses or other mythical travellers in search of a miracle. That golden fleece which today could be represented even only by a job, in order to live honestly on one’s own.