Theatrical performance about the beloved Italian poet
A homage to the great Milanese poet Alda Merini, conceived by director and author Antonio Lovascio and actress Isabella Carloni. The text is based on an interview between Lovascio and Alda Merini. From this intriguing experience, Lovascio created a theatrical piece interwoven with the poet’s biographical elements and extracts from her work, exploring the dichotomy which characterised Merini’s personality. Indeed she was capable of unexpectedly extemporising poetic verse in the course of the most mundane conversation, only to turn suddenly to such prosaic matters as petty problems with the management of her apartment building – just like any person of a certain age. What emerges from the theatrical piece is precisely this duality: the genius and the ordinary human, the elevated and the base, the tangible and the intangible, the Apollonian and the Dyonisiac. Through the experience we come to perceive Merini’s gratitude towards life and towards those who recognised her talent and saved her through poetry. We come to know her profound humanity, her capacity to create incredible beauty. Actress Isabella Carloni masterfully recreates the poet’s humour, her searing wit and passionate nature, her combination of cynicism and innocence, and her capacity to transform even the worst misfortunes and the most unbearable suffering into opportunities for existential growth.
The backdrops for the piece are created by Bruno d’Arcevia, and the performance will include two of the poet’s previously unpublished compositions.
About the poet
Alda Merini (1931-2009) was a renowned poet in her native Italy, and author of several poetry collections. She was twice nominated for a Nobel prize in her lifetime, and received the prize of the Italian Republic for her contributions to poetry. She was institutionalised for mental illness for nearly two decades, an experience to which she referred as “the blessed years of innocence” (i beati anni dell’innocenza) – the phrase which serves as the title for this theatrical piece.
Merini’s work is complex, traversing myth, religion, eroticism and especially love. Her poems cover a vast spectrum of registers and emotions, from the grotesque, of which she was a master, to the mystical, from the colloquial to the noble. Dominant themes include those of otherness and madness, her experience in mental institutions having had a decisive effect on her life and her art – but it is crucial to distinguish between madness and artistic creation, since the two are not necessarily linked.
FREE admittance.
Venue:
Lisser Hall, Mills College, Kapiolani Rd, Oakland, CA
Please enter through the main front gate of Mills College at 5000 Macarthur Blvd and tell the security guard that you are going to Lisser Hall. You will receive simple directions. Map.
Information contacts:
Antonio Vitti: 510 430 2105
Giuseppe Tamagni: 510 430 2107
Mills College event coordinators: 510 430 3230
ariggio@middlebury.edu