Una tragedia epica del mare: “Rumore di acque” di Marco Martinelli – Franco Nasi – Stratagemmi 20

Descrizione

Rumore di acque, written by playwright and director Marco Martinelli and produced by the theatrical collective Teatro delle Albe, was first performed on July 10, 2010 in Ravenna. The text has recently been trans-lated into English by Thomas Simpson with the title Noise in the Waters, and is now available on line, both in Italian and English, in the scholarly journal “California Italian Studies” at <http://escholarship.org/uc/ item/95d7c407#>. Rumore di acque is an intense theatrical monologue that deals with the epic tragedy of the thousands of African migrants who have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean into Italy. This analyses focuses on two archetypal elements of Martinelli’s epic tragedy: the Sea itself, seen as a concentrationary lager, a realm of death, and a mirror of our inability to act; and the Storyteller, a combined military official, state bureaucrat, and porter, who rules over an imaginary island where the migrants’ souls are gathered. Through a wide excursus over more than 25 years of Teatro delle Albe productions and the identification of recurring literary allusions and intertextual quotations from authors including Dante, Coleridge and Levi, the essay detects the consistent stylistic and thematic features of Martinelli’s poetics and the collec-tive’s dynamic, ritual and original practice of what they call “politttttttical” (spelled with seven t’s) theater.