“Cantiere Dante”

Teatro delle Albe and Dante Alighieri

 “Cantiere Dante”
Teatro delle Albe and Dante Alighieri: a conversational retrospective amongst
Ermanna Montanari, Marco Martinelli and Federico Rampini (La Repubblica)

In 2017, Teatro delle Albe started to follow an artistic path with the objective of transferring the Italian MASTERPIECE that triggered the start of the Italian language and literature – the Divine Comedy – to the stage. “Some had already tried to do that: we believe that the process does not have to do with the idea of MATCHING Dante’s cantos with scenery, but rather to dig out its intimate theatrical nature. The word “teatron”, which means vision, embraces what the author defines as an “enchanting vision” (mirabile visione),  hence an “enchanting theater,” able to include its focus on the whole of humanity in its diverse experience, from the obscene ANNOYANCE of Inferno (Hell) to the melancholic color change of Purgatory, to its rise to a level where vision and words turn themselves into AN indescribable Paradise”.

During “Cantiere Dante,” Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari will share with the audience the experience of “Inferno”, performed in Ravenna with the participatory support of its citizens, and “Divina Commedia,” the experimental piece directed by Marco Montanari performed by 140 children and teenagers in Kibera, in one of Africa’s largest slums on the outskirts of Nairobi. Ermanna Montanari will read canto XXXIII from Dante’s Divina Commedia and the poem “Ahi serva Italia”, from “fedeli d’Amore”.

Federico Rampini will stress the ‘unfortunate’ effectiveness of Dante’s work in our times.

In ENGLISH.

From the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo.