Mariano Dammacco and the rigour of Total Art in Franco Casavola's "Il Gobbo del Califfo"
Mariano Dammacco, il rigore dell’arte totale nel “Gobbo del Califfo” di Franco Casavola" articolo di Carlo Coppola su InCittà Giovinazzo diretto da Papas Antonio Calisi
From Japigia Teatro to the Teatro Petruzzelli it is a mere seven minutes by car, 5.64 kilometres without traffic. Between the two lie thirty years of career and constant growth — a first and a second artistic youth. Just as the distance from the Premio Scenario to the Premio Ubu seems, in hindsight, a short step, so too, we trust, will come further recognition and accolades for his direction of opera.
Mariano Dammacco is a director-demiurge: one of those — increasingly rare on the Italian artistic scene — capable of both hypnotising his audience and holding forth on a genuine directorial vision; capable of persuading and leading critics, actors, and collaborators away from their received convictions, without a trace of rhetoric. Directors of that lineage can still look at works from within and without, can know their own characters, can compose from nothing and rewrite already-formed material, mould and recompose. Dammacco — and mercifully he is not alone — has taught us, over the past thirty years, that theatre — of which opera is the supreme expression — is either total art or it is nothing. His is an honest art, a craft, a workshop of the immaterial, and at the same time matter in its purest state: sets, costumes, concrete actions, the psychology of characters, cables and electrical rigs, fabrics, lighting design, props.
From Carmelo Bene to Peter Brook, calibrated by the measure of his love for Leo de Berardinis — figures most of today's theatre-makers cannot even name — from Eastern philosophy to Nekrosius, to Kantor, to Brecht, passing through Vecchioni and Nietzsche and Saint Teresa of Ávila and Saint Joseph of Copertino and Pina Bausch: he knows them all, has already metabolised them. He has shared, metaphorically, a beer or something stronger with every one of them, a coffee with some, a meal of bread and roses with others; he has descended into Hades like Orpheus without Eurydice, without "the blows", without "fists in Pasiphae's face" or with feet caught in jars, like Asterion. From Sonia la Rossa to Dialoghi con le piante, rigour and method have always been his constant — since he was twenty years old — demonstrating that even when theatre appears to be a soliloquy, it is always the work of an ensemble of people and situations, living, collaborating, entering into relation with one another and with the stage itself. Many lives in dialogue: with the rent to pay, with someone who every now and then "abandons the struggle", and others who pursue the "obstinate and contrary direction" (cit.). "Dammacco" has always been saved by many: a constant Ariadne's thread, with art as his own conscience, soaring over the world like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — or better yet like Lieutenant Suglia, the "first man to fly over" Bari.
It is no coincidence that he arrives today — by the inspired and perhaps fortunate intuition of the Directorship of the Teatro Petruzzelli and of other enlightened Bari intellectuals — at the direction of a work by Franco Casavola: complex, difficult, little known, prickly, beloved, and bewildering. The Casavola of Il Gobbo del Califfo is perhaps his most experimental incarnation — a citationist in love with the obsessive motifs of the classics, his most Orientalist self, the one who refuses to be cerebral, the one "lost to Bari", the most candid: the man who had already renounced the comforts of family and a pre-written legal career in order to choose a life of freedom, with relationships of his own choosing — the fascist of the moment (perhaps), yet capable of adoring even "that particular day" and the paradoxical spaces of freedom it afforded him, even attempting, by his own account, to "die a soldier's death".
In his own freedom, Dammacco resembles that Casavola. He has chosen visionary yet concrete personalities capable of elevating his genius and his project: the costume designer Franca Squarciapino — winner of the Oscar, the Goya, the César, the BAFTA, and three Silver Ribbons —; Angelo Linsalata, set and lighting designer, a true son of Hephaestus, able to build and have others build light and scenery with the care of Appia or Gordon Craig; Luigi Spezzacatene, a long-standing companion from his first forays into opera, who today directs and superintends, with the refinement and meticulousness recognised over years, the tailoring department of the Petruzzelli; and, not least, Gianluca Altomare, assistant director — strongly desired by Dammacco himself — a former stage manager with a background in piano, who, knowing to the fraction of a second every pause and every cue of the orchestra, the singers, the chorus, the movements of technicians, stagehands, prop masters, electricians, and sound engineers, becomes indispensable to one who knows opera without reading from a score.
With these premises, it will be a pleasure to witness, at last, a performance of Total Art, in that spirit of Futurist permanence — and to dream once again of Bayreuth.
The work of the orchestra, the singers, the chorus, the conducting of Maestro Matteo Del Maso, and the achievement of every department — including Giordano Bruno Guerri's introductory remarks — we shall recount, instead, after attending the performance/ritual on Saturday the 23rd of May, thanks to the inestimable assistance of the Teatro Petruzzelli's press office, directed by Monica Sbisà, and to the extraordinary photographs of Clarissa La Polla, whose images and press releases grant us a measure of the plausible.
Carlo Coppola
