Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari - Ravenna Teatro

Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari
Alchemy at Work: Teatro delle Albe
Writings and interviews 1997-2010

Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari
Alchemy at Work: Teatro delle Albe
Writings and interviews 1997-2010

Politttttttical Theatre
Politttttttical Theatre
by Ermanna Montanari
1. I’m renovating the old cottage where I was born in Campiano, a village of a few hundred
inhabitants some twenty kilometres from Ravenna. My parents, brothers, sisters,
nephews and nieces live there, plus a lot of old people. The cottage will be habitable in a
few years. Twenty years ago I ran away from Campiano, got married to Marco Martinelli
and set up the Teatro delle Albe with him. We started wandering around while maintaining
our base in Ravenna, a county town with a population of 130,000.
2. In July 1987 we were invited to a convention in Narni, Theatre and Politics, organised
by Giuseppe Bartolucci. Marco and I wrote our own definition of political, reflecting on
the relationship between our theatre and the world over those first ten years. We had
just debuted with a work on cannibalism, inspired by a Lu Xun story, the eternal law of
human relationships. Marco had rewritten it and set it in fin-de-siècle Ravenna. Was our
theatre political No, we said, ours was politttttttical theatre, with seven ts, boundless.
The following is a fragment of what we said in Narni.
The Albe produces politttttttical theatre. Why politttttttical Why with seven ts Let’s look
at seven possible answers.
1. The polyptych 1 is a sacred object, architectonically subdivided into panels and intended
as an altarpiece. The etymology is enlightening: of many folds. And that’s just the polypty-
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1 In Italian polyptych is spelt polittico and political politico.

ch, with a double t. Imagine it with seven! Even more exalted are the numberless folds of
the real. Fervid people are not in need of ideologies but of powerful, complex politttttttical
thought.
2. It’s the error of a crazed typographer.
3. It’s poetic licence.
4. It is the grinding of a cry on teeth and tongue, on the ts like blades, a kid getting stuck,
an irreducible, a Third World guerrilla fighter.
5. It’s knowing that we can’t change the world (read Revolution) but something, in some
corner, something of ourselves, of someone else, scattered on a small planet turning
round a suburban sun, in one galaxy among many, we can stop a tear, heal a few wounds,
survive, be hateful to somebody, be able to say no, plant the apple-tree even if the bombs
are to fall tomorrow, get lost in a Schiele painting, take care of friends, write certain letters
instead of others (read Revolution).
6. It’s thinking that “being poetic is a desperate battle”.
7. It’s black humour.
While Marco was reading aloud I stood near him in an attitude of prayer: I was wearing
a green jacket, just used in the last play. We’d stuck forks into it that seemed to pierce
the skin. That’s how we went to the convention. Eaten.
3. Marco and I and the other Albe members have never liked political theatre. At least not
that bleak political theatre of our youth in the seventies. It was arrogant, gave easy
answers to the horrors of the polis and claimed the spectator’s consent. It took no heed
of the abysses of the psyche, of its “infinite desires”. It knew everything beforehand, gave
us lessons like a pedantic schoolteacher, reducing the stage to a political meeting. During
the eighties, contrarily, when we were making our way in theatre, it seemed that you
could no longer speak of politics. In Italy those were years of collective amnesia, of taking
refuge in stupidity and a bank balance. We didn’t like that either. The horrors, the knots
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of the polis were still there in front of our noses, inside our brains, unresolved. You
couldn’t make them disappear by pretending to forget them.
It was from this twofold refusal that the politttttttical slowly came into being, a thought
which took conscious shape in Narni. To bear the horror, not to set it aside, even if you
have no answers or cure, even if you risk madness. To look at the polis, which can no longer
be just the village where we live because it’s the polis-planet that the video brings
into our home every day, where everything is linked and the destruction of a forest a
thousand miles away is our concern. To bear our own impotence in a boundless world
where individual action seems to get lost and vanish like a drop of water in the desert.
The politttttttical was not a theatre of responses. Those on stage had no solutions to
offer, only wounds to show, infections that regarded the psyche and the polis at the same
time. The politttttttical was this untreatable relationship, and its stubborn, asinine raison
d’être lay precisely there.
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4. Did we think about the Living Theatre About Pasolini Maybe. We went back in time
to Dionysus and Aristophanes. Within those reflections on the politttttttical, the urgency
of a confrontation with Tradition took up more and more space. Marco and I blazed our
own trails, interwoven and distinct, as an alchemical couple. Marco started to work as a
playwright-director, narrator of theatre stories. What had Aristophanes, Molière and
Shakespeare done if not tell stories They didn’t do it at a desk but onstage, working with
the actors, on their bodies, mixing writing and stagecraft. They weren’t litterateurs, their
writing was impure, inseparable from the living limbs of the actors. Their ambition was to
bring the dramas of history and the storms of the soul to that Wooden O.
We felt there was a lot of the politttttttical in that Tradition, a secret betrayed and forgotten
by many who staged Aristophanes, Molière and Shakespeare as monuments
deserving homage. They weren’t to be brought to the stage but brought to life, by resuscitating
their original gesture. We needed stories written in flesh and ink, stories that
had to do with the polis. Weren’t Athens, Paris and London the bubbling melting pots into

which our predecessors plunged their hands to give form to their art Fine, we had
Ravenna, Romagna, Italy, the polis-planet. Hadn’t those authors employed the dialectlanguage
of their community Well, we too started to put forward a multilingual theatre
where the playwright-director could use Romagnol dialect, together with Italian and
other languages spoken in the polis-planet, like the various instruments in a single orchestra.
And as Marco proceeded along this path, I tackled a procession of ghosts who’d
exhibited their body-wound on stage, from Hroswitha – a tenth century nun-actressauthor
– to La Clairon 1 (“How much study to cease being oneself!”) and that incandescent
Theatre-Figure Eleonora Duse 2 . So I contributed to the politttttttical, not from the narrator’s
viewpoint but from the body of the actor that inspires him. The puppets we created
– Daura, a tough Romagnol mother, the androgynous taxi-driver Spinetta, the magical
funambulist she-ass Fatima and yet others – grew out of the same magma. Within the
politttttttical, the one onstage is the Muse of the one who is writing offstage. The playwright
doesn’t work with abstract concepts but with the living matter supplied by we
actors. The actor at once inspires and betrays him because the actor must not (under
penalty of death!) reduce himself to being functional to the story told, as often happens
with actors in so much institutional theatre. The actor is himself a story, a glance, a voice
and nerves, the black hole that alludes to something else that precedes narration, the
organism that precedes language.
I work from a place which I know is inaccessible to Marco’s pen: a terrain often barren
and untellable. Where the well of my stagecraft lies, the well I draw from in order to turn
up bright and shining for my date with narration. Just as Marco has his mind-holes, reserves
from which he fishes out the stories that will come to life on stage. Today this still
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1 Madame de Clairon, French actress lived between the 18th and 19th century.
2 Eleonora Duse, the most important Italian theatrical actress lived between the late 19th century and early 20th.

seems to us the only possible alchemy between the techniques of playwright and actor,
committed to loving and betraying one another, jealous of their own specific quality and
ready to offer it to the shared work.
5. We must avoid one of the traps set by the polis-planet: the illusion that everything is
the same as everything else, a facile cosmopolitanism, the loss of differences, “Fashion,
sister of Death”. One kind of dizziness that seizes us when we’re hitting the motorways
and service stations is an awareness of the Emptiness-Fullness-Of-Merchandise, the
Everywhere-the-Same that flattens all differences.
When in 1991 the Ravenna Administration offered us the management and artistic direction
of both of the town’s theatres we accepted on impulse, taking on a great burden and
responsibility because we felt it to be an ethical and artistic challenge, hence politttttttical.
To increasingly penetrate that thing which makes our predecessors illuminating, the
loving and critical dialogue with the town that gives us expression, the piece of earth
beneath our feet which, in a boundless world, nonetheless remains the place where we
can get something done. Aristophanes insulted and entertained the Athenians, gave
them outlandish and fantastical stories, Athens was in the stalls and on the stage, there
was no separation. But the situation then, as in other golden ages, was due to the centrality
of the theatre event. Nowadays, with the theatre banished to a corner, that fertile
stage-polis dialogue can only be reinvented as a paradox. In this western world condemned
to sterility, fertility is a paradox!
As part of this dialogue with the town, I ran a five year project for women called The
Language of the Goddess. I stole the title from the Lithuanian archaeologist Maria
Gimbutas and also the idea of a pre-Indo-European gylanic society, a balanced and peaceloving
social structure, neither patriarchal nor matriarchal, highly developed and devoted
to the objet d’art. Over those years – through works and meetings and open workshops
with theatre scholars, playwrights, administrators, philosophers, actresses and directors
– we drew up a possible alchemical avenue and a possible relationship in the polis.
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6. If fertility is the artistic condition of the politttttttical it was perhaps inevitable that our
path should intersect with that of people born in other civilisations. In 1987, just a few
months after the convention in Narni, the Albe became Afro-Romagnol, enriched by the
contribution of Senegalese actors, musicians and dancers. The encounter with the black
Albe reinforced us in what we wanted to do. Were we seeking a theatre in touch with
those tortured realities, terrible to describe, which today are the “roots” and the “people”
Were we seeking a dialect theatre, epic and ethnic, the being-in-life of Tradition
Something was there that resembled these things, vaguely, but it was there. Watching
Mor Awa Niang’s archaic animalistic comicality you could imagine the original pre-
Goldoni Harlequin. The sight and sound of El Hadj Niang’s furious drumming raised questions
about the nature of shamans. My Campiano dialect contrasted with Mandiaye
N’Diaye’s Wolof, with the ballad singers of the Apennines, with tales told in Senegalese
villages, with the fulèr, the Romagna storytellers, and with the African griots. And so on,
mixing languages and identities, and at the same time preserving them, at the same time
creating a new way of being for the group, crossbred, doing a job of resistance to standardisation.
We didn’t meet the black Albe at the Conservatoire of Dakar but on the beach at Marina
di Ravenna. They were plain immigrants, selling T-shirts and elephant sculptures. Their
families were griots, the storyteller-artistes found throughout francophone Africa. Since
griots hadn’t been earning a penny for decades, the new generations got a kick in the
backside and were sent to Europe to sell elephant sculptures to tourists. This is what happens
in the polis-planet: you find griots on the beach. Entire populations, compelled by
the political and economical forces of History, are emigrating from the South, changing
the face of old Europe, making our cities black, and this concerns us politttttttically. Mor,
Mandiaye and El Hadj had been “eaten” like us, in a different way: the jacket with the
forks fitted them like a glove. For them, doing theatre together these past ten years has
meant experiencing something that was unthinkable in the beginning, at once a bold,
new choice and the revival of a tradition. Their Senegalese friends made fun of them at
first because they got paid so little!

7. While I’m renovating the old cottage in Campiano, our Senegalese counterparts are in
Guediawaye, a village on the outskirts of Dakar. They’re building a “theatre house” that
will bear the name of the village: Guediawaye Théâtre, a place to invent a theatre immersed
in the African scene, and open to the best European theatre because Mandiaye, who
will be artistic director, is well aware of Odin Teatret and Peter Brook. The Teatro delle
Albe is one of the founder members and supporters of Guediawaye Theatre. No separation
then but a new phase of the crossbred adventure, six months a year in Senegal and
six with the Albe in Europe, foiling the destiny that made immigrants out of Mandiaye and
his countrymen. And we in turn will become immigrants, for artistic reasons, since we’ll
often be joining them, working in their world as they did in ours. New stories will be brought
to life. Senegal is a nation of kids – the average age is sixteen – and there’s so much
Dionysus in the air, a thirst for life in the midst of poverty. As I scrape paint off the old
cottage doors I think of the songs Mandiaye will be hearing at this moment, and I treasure
them jealously in my ears.
The Open Page n°3, March 1998
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I’ve never thought my voice had a sex
I’ve never thought my voice had a sex
by Ermanna Montanari
I’ve never thought my voice had a sex, my voice doesn’t have a sex, it’s the voice of a figure,
every time. Each figure takes on its own materic specificity during construction, and
the more it abandons the little bios the more this becomes crystalline and without sclerotic
form. The more the figure you’re building no longer corresponds to the little bios of
the actor the more it lets loose corporeal emotion, musical wholeness, the theatre puppet.
Mêdar Ubu is music organic to the mathematical vitality I Polacchi, just as Alcina is
in the severe architecture of her Island. My voice isn’t Ermanna’s voice, isn’t important.
Ermanna isn’t important onstage. I’ve always liked a saying of Mademoiselle Clairon’s:
“How much study to cease being yourself”.
The word brings my body to its knees, it has the power to make me perceive the whole.
So the music of Romagnol dialect, its miserable locality, lies outside of form, of the clean,
of civil familiarity. It overbearingly illuminates every word, even the most modern,
making it the supreme language of the dead, materic and utterable.
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A question they often ask after seeing one of our shows has to do with the voice. They
ask if they might work with me on the voice. It’s always embarrassing. There’s nothing I
can teach anybody about the voice. The voice isn’t a part distinct from the rest, from life.
The voice lies on a crux so fragile that it should be distanced rather than given. Of course
you can work on your voice, as on your feet or shoulders. Maybe singing in octaves, trying
to hit the right notes, to faint with the voice and suddenly break out in an asinine bray.
That’s it, do this for hours and then discover that something has happened, a certain
vibration in unison, or everyone stopping at the same moment. Maybe from there you

can go on to work on the voice, in perceiving that instant which unites everybody and
which everybody in their own person can decide to let through. But this has to do with
life and with liberating yourself from it. The same goes for feet and knees. And then I prefer
listening to people talking on the phone, hotel switchboards, disguises, nasal sounds,
conversations on mobiles, on trains, in public toilets, the conversations of people who
don’t know each other, can’t see each other, their attempts to make themselves understood
in noisy places, in hospitals, churches, cemeteries, in the fields at the fruit harvest,
people who read aloud and their bodies at the mercy of every vocal shred.
The voice lies in the ear, in its narrow canals.
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Sguardi dentro e fuori dall’arte edited by Gioia Costa, Editoria & Spettacolo, Rome, 2002

The technicians of Dionysus
The technicians of Dionysus
interview to Marco Martinelli
One of the fundamental concepts of your work is the idea of “bringing to life”. What is this
“bringing to life”
It means taking the Dionysian origin of theatre seriously. Dionysus is the god of indestructible
life: the Greeks didn’t distinguish between beautiful and ugly, they had a more efficacious
and deeper way of telling good theatre from the useless kind: they said “Dionysus
is here” or “Dionysus isn’t here”. Dionysus is the sphalèn god, literally “he who perturbs”.
A theatre incapable of stirring the spectator’s soul, of eliciting physical thrills, is not theatre,
it’s something else and doesn’t interest me. “Bringing to life” is the overturning of
“bringing to the stage”, interpretable in its oldest and still valid sense. As far as we’re concerned
it’s the only possibility.
Since the mid 80s the Albe’s poetics has neither repudiated Tradition nor accepted it passively
but is based rather on an “upside-down” vision of theatre Tradition.
These were Meyerchold’s teachings at the beginning of the twentieth century, but how
quickly we forget the masters! The great tradition isn’t a museum piece. If we rummage
in the dust and go questioning the masters we come up with the “new”, which is to say
the contrary of what we are offered by pseudo-traditional plays. That’s not tradition. We
shouldn’t be taken in by words. Often we’re given nothing more than a piece cobbled
together in haste, with a couple of half-baked ideas and clumsy, approximated fake nineteenth
century art. Not many know how great the Italian actors of that century were,
from Gustavo Modena to Eleonora Duse. If we pay a visit to the worlds of Aristophanes,
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Molière and Shakespeare, if we try to imagine their relationship with the public, we realise
that their theatre was a furious mirror of their times, that those dead people were
alive and contentious, off-putting, lined up against power even when they were dependent
on it. Not the nauseating monotony that often gets served up as a “well made play”
in straight theatre. When we think of Tradition we think of rebels. Time has turned them
to statues, but they’re rebels all the same.
Something you share with the great writers you’ve mentioned is the idea of playwriting,
the way your texts come into the world…
I’m a “company playwright”, a pretty rare species nowadays. I’ve always thought that the
Tradition, here too, was more interesting than the present: Shakespeare, Molière,
Eduardo De Filippo were company playwrights who wrote with the company in mind,
almost “calculating” a play for the actors who would be putting it on. Those actors
weren’t mere performers: on the contrary, they were the author’s muses, they were
authors themselves… this is what I call “impure dramaturgy”. Which doesn’t mean “diminishing”
the playwright’s role but rather reinforcing it, highlighting it within a collective
dynamic. I’ve defined my work in this way to distinguish it from the concept of drawingboard
playwriting, which I have nothing to do with but which still appears to be the dominant
approach. Impure dramaturgy grows out of the alchemy created between the
playwright-director and the actors. Mirandolina wouldn’t have been what it is without
Maddalena Marliani, Goldoni’s favourite actress. She herself “prompted” the author on
many of her lines and mannerisms. And what about the relationship between Luigi
Pirandello and Angelo Musco, between Pirandello and Ruggeri 1 In the history of theatre
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1 Italian theatrical and film actors lived between the late 19th century and early 20th.

they talk only about the “fathers”, the playwrights, whereas there are also the “mothers”,
the actors. The result is an absolutely original creation: Renda’s Dr Merletto is a flesh and
blood marionette whose vital strings are held by both me and Renda.
How do you think your plays will live after you
Well, Aristophanes and Shakespeare didn’t give it any thought. And they lived better than
many writers.
In everything and throughout, your writing is the word made flesh: it feeds on linguistic
inlays, on the use of dialects…
It’s writing that accommodates several languages, like a mosaic. Firstly the Romagna dialect,
made of earth and guttural sounds, an iron dialect as Ermanna calls it, a rough bond
that includes gestures and meanings, it gets down to the rawness of things. At the end of
the eighties, in shows like Ruh. Romagna più Africa uguale, Ermanna brought as dowry
the dialect of her village, Campiano, marking a path that would turn out to be decisive for
all of us: for me, writer without dialects, who started robbing the actors and their linguistic
reserves, and for Luigi who found some directions there.
Ermanna sings the dialect like a queen. In Alcina for example…
And in this she’s a child of Alfred Jarry, even before knowing Jarry. Ermanna has been a
pataphysician since birth. Campiano is like Jarry’s Laval in Brittany, an ultra-local and ubuniversal
place, a well of mysteries. When Ermanna uses that language she’s like a piece
of earth with a voice, that earth of our plain which hides the marshland underneath. And
at the same time it’s a high-sounding language, it sounds-on-high, a language of art.
Dionysus has something to do with this – how could it be otherwise
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This was followed by Mandiaye’s Wolof and other dialects borrowed from the actors you
worked with: from Bari, Naples, Tuscany, and then Bandini and Pergolari’s Foligno dialect
for Salmagundi and Vi e Ve.
Ceaseless theft. Never be ashamed of what you pinch. Stealing is like breathing.
The Albe have developed their poetics through falls and victories… do you feel we can talk
about a “method” with regard to the performance of the Albe-actor
Let’s look at the etymology: in Greek it meant “the journey I have made.” So maybe it’s
better not to have a method at the start, because if you set out already with a method
you’re setting out on a journey already made, but made by whom By others. And that
way you don’t lay yourself on the line, don’t make the journey. We found out what the
Albe actor was by trial, show after show: the Albe-actor grew within that alchemical process
we talked about, there wasn’t any preset method. Which doesn’t mean not having
models to look at, quite the contrary. There were various models that excited us: Totò for
example, a monster of wisdom, a ghost who still shakes us up on video; or living examples
in the theatre, the rigour and madness of Carmelo Bene and Leo de Berardinis, the Odin
Teatret actors, the glance elsewhere of Jerzy Grotowski with whom Ermanna did a workshop
in Pontedera that was fundamental to her. You need models and you need to get
rid of them later.
The Greeks called actors “the technicians of Dionysus”. You feel it’s the perfect definition.
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It contains something of an oxymoron: the actor seen as a technician, therefore a craftsman,
a carpenter, a plumber, someone who must be the perfect master of his trade
otherwise he’ll flood your bathroom. But this “technician” belongs to a god, Dionysus,
who manifests himself as the god of sexual rapture, of wine, of the ecstasy aroused by
drums and flutes. How can you reconcile the know-how typical of any technician with an

ecstasy that sends you out of your head How can you be at once “technician” and “bacchante”
Inside and out There is an answer, but it’s to be sought through work.
So you think the actor remains important in the theatre of the third millennium…
Central.
The theatre of the Albe feeds on the Tradition, “brings it to life” once more, filling it with
topicality, with our own history. Contemporaneity through the story…
As early as the first half of the 80s we were taken by the desire for a theatre that was
“also” history, a story. At the time hardly anybody wanted to hear about such things:
there was considerable mistrust of text and word. We were thinking of a theatre where
the energy of the tale wouldn’t be to the detriment of the energy of the actor, indeed
they were to be mutually exalting. And this vital interchange shouldn’t be enclosed on
stage but should overflow into the audience, exuberant and fertile, restoring meaning to
the roots of an ancient language. The best subversion had to pass by way of construction:
no through yes.
Does the definition of “politttttttical theatre” approach the idea of a theatre that recounts
and derides topicality
There’s also the idea of beauty in the politttttttical. Of the polyptych as sacred object,
radiant. The work (theatre or otherwise) is in this time out of time, is the possibility of
contemplation in spite of time. It makes me pause, it makes me live reality in a way that
is different from the empty frenzy of the everyday. It arouses amazement, a marvel that
strikes at the roots of being. At the roots of that ego I don’t know about, which I “feel” to
be something but if I try to describe it I stutter. Just like the equally mysterious bond of
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eing in a “chorus” that links me up with others. The theatre takes account of this stammering
chorus, together with the violence and separateness that make us non-communicating
monads. It’s Dionysus who guides us towards this simultaneous presence of opposites,
“light-bringing star of the nocturnal mysteries”, as Aristophanes puts it: a Dionysus
in relation to Christ, a Christ-Dionysus, the victim, the lamb, following in this approach the
insight of the German romantics from Hölderlin to Novalis, an insight two centuries old
which, when cleansed of the rust of the worst romanticism, is still alive and kicking. At
least it’s been beating in my heart for thirty years… and I encounter it each time I arrange
people in a circle and set them off on perturbing chants and rap-dance.
Your company has held its own for more than twenty years… you must have heard a lot
about the theatre crisis, but you’ve forged ahead. Aren’t you concerned about the idea
that the theatre might become increasingly narrowed down to a niche sector, an island
for the few
They’ve been talking about the death of theatre since the second half of the twentieth
century. Because there’s always somebody who dies, but then somebody else is born.
And as for the margins, there’s more than one way to get along. You can lock yourself
away in the museum, you can clock in and dust down the monuments every once in a
while, do a repaint job on past masterpieces. You neither suffer nor enjoy: you dust
down. Or you can wander uneasily in a labyrinth, question yourself and the monuments,
the present and the ancients. You don’t dust anything down but plunge into the dust in
search of the secret, and in this anxiety for knowledge you suffer, enjoy, understand,
don’t understand, question yourself: you create. And you always keep the doors and windows
open so that reality might come in.
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Monade e coro, Conversazioni con Marco Martinelli edited by Francesca Montanino,
Editoria & Spettacolo, Rome, 2006

Critical glances
Critical glances
“Martinelli has been most influenced by the Brecht of ‘levity’, an important characteristic
in Brecht notwithstanding his Goethean origins. Martinelli doesn’t write plays in verse
and doesn’t believe in identifying the poetic with the true. He admits no truths that do
not pass through relationships of disfigurement, since even the hope of his own generation’s
emancipation is disfigured. So in his writing the political has become politttttttico
(with 7 ts) as if to say that there can be no resistance to abuse of power without creating
stumbling blocks, by turning, so to speak, the very act of revolt on its head. In this odd
and Romagnol sense Martinelli too has taken up the levity mode: such as his cultivation
of the magical-playful element that allows you to break down the resistance of everyday
habits, to choose your own world in the world.”
Claudio Meldolesi, A Hyperrealist of the Theatre and a Collective of Irreducible
Individualities, in An African Harlequin in Milan, Marco Martinelli Performs Goldoni, edited
by Teresa Picarazzi and Wiley Feinstein, Bordighera, U.S.A., 1997
“Ermanna Montanari, in the part of the mad sorceress, screams whispers sings her exalted
punishment, evolving the vocal acrobatics of her earlier Lus, . and makes pure sounds of
Nevio Spadoni’s Campiano dialect poetry. Indeed the words are an essence of contrasting
feelings in the fiery and passionate struggle triggered off with the notes of Luigi Ceccarelli’s
Romagnol horn; and these, electronically aggravated, dance with Vincent Longuemare’s
lights which inflame the tableau vivant on Byzantine gold or Ferrarese Dossi backgrounds.
[…] It is a unique emotion for the spectator, a shock to be experienced.”
Franco Quadri, La Repubblica, October 19, 2000
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“Fifteen or twenty experiences were fundamental for me, plays I’ve seen and seen again
and which led me to get to know the companies and their work methods. The last time I
felt this ‘fatal attraction’ was for Teatro delle Albe. […] They’re one of my favourite com-

panies and there’s no way I would miss the chance to see a play of a quality that’s become
rare in my country.”
Susan Sontag, from an interview by Antonio Monda, La Repubblica, June 24, 2002
“The name Nevio Spadoni is by now inseparably linked with the undertakings of the
Teatro delle Albe, and in particular with the staging of his splendid monologue Lus, .
performed by actress and director Ermanna Montanari. If I’m not too mistaken due to little
knowledge of the language, I should say that Spadoni’s poetic machine triggers ‘substratum
reactions’. The monologue or canto of the clairvoyant played by Ermanna
Montanari brings back to life a certain way of perceiving, and corporeal vibrations that
we haven’t seen for some time. I’m thinking about when Ermanna does the voice of an
old woman, of a wicked witch, as if she were in a cavern, but also as if the vibrations of
her throat brought down the walls that protect civilised man. And another thing that
comes out through Spadoni’s poetic machine is the clairvoyant’s invective, an invective
without compromises. Sometimes the protagonists of Lus.
and Pèrsa bring to mind biblical
prophets who speak of the overthrow of Jerusalem.”
Gianni Celati, in Teatro in dialetto romagnolo by Nevio Spadoni, Edizioni Il Girasole,
Ravenna, 2003
“So I prefer the Teatro delle Albe with I Refrattari, a tragicomedy (seemingly from the
school of Jarry) about a mother and son who want to go into exile on the moon because
ma’s tagliatelle aren’t so good any more. Not even the mafia is what it used to be and,
lastly, the Senegalese refugee they’re taking with them as a servant can always be outvoted
two to one. But he brings all his brothers and sisters with him in the rocket (thus altering
the balance of democratic power), the mafia also has a branch up there and mother
finds herself suspended above the roof like a saint. The piece is witty, with great linguistic
power, and is brilliantly staged and acted. Marco Martinelli, playwright, director and
theatre manager, has made the Ravenna company famous throughout Europe, especially
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with I Polacchi which has been going from festival to festival for years. I hope the deserving
I Refrattari will follow suit.”
Renate Klett, Neue Züricher Zeitung, July 23, 2003
“I saw an amazing actress, a woman of 1.000 voices – growls, squeals, minedeep exhortations
of woe, birdlike chirps of maliciuos glee. The American stage debut of Ermanna
Montanari wasn’t the only reason to see I Polacchi, an hour-long Teatro delle Albe adaptation
of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu the King at the Museum of Contemporary Art. But Montanari,
longtime artistic and marital partner of writer/director Marco Martinelli, played the
power-mad Mother Ubu […] and without unbalancing a very interesting evening, she
made it difficult to watch anyone else.”
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune, June 11, 2005
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“After such memorable shows as I Polacchi and L’isola di Alcina, here come the Albe with
A Midsummer Night’s Dream which stands up very well to comparison with other
‘Dreams’, notably Peter Brook’s. It’s in the invention of the day that Martinelli unleashes
his freedom as director and violates Shakespeare with much love in a spine-chilling and
highly vivacious portrait of all the Days of Society and Politics that speak about ourselves.
There are many references to our own day, for example in the ‘prophesies’ or invectives
in Romagnol dialect from Ermanna Montanari’s unrestrained Titania, but this wealth of
inventions and preoccupations brought into play is effortlessly interwoven in a sort of
cheerfulness in spite of everything, which needs intelligence and lucidity, with the sad
realisations and fears resulting therefrom, but which does not renounce a kind of subdued
and persistent youthful vitality imbued with slightly Mozartian pain. The play is one
of the best of recent years for imagination, intelligence and topicality.”
Goffredo Fofi, Quando sognano le Albe, in Monade e coro, Conversazioni con Marco
Martinelli edited by Francesca Montanino, Editoria & Spettacolo, Roma, 2006

“Marco Martinelli is a sui generis playwright and director, a man of the pen but not of the
drawing board, of the book but also of that Gaddaesque ‘baroque’ book that is the world,
a visionary whose eye penetrates his actors, a fisher of actors in the everyday sea, a founder
of city-theatre, inventor of parables with asinine settings, of poetic gestures in apocalyptic
scenarios.”
Cristina Ventrucci, Martinelli, le Albe e l’attore selvatico, in Teatro Impuro, Danilo
Montanari Editore, Ravenna, 2006
“Marco Martinelli is a very fine director of genius who manages to remain faithful to a
text and to betray it, as only the best theatre succeeds in doing. He brings together the
surreal dimension, making it a concrete and not only metaphoric instrument for understanding
his times. All this with the language and faces of kids who, through Jarry, want
to talk about their own days. When they line up with the cowardly king Ubu to challenge
the army of the Tsar, their imaginary war becomes real, very real. Close, very close. To
the extent that it appears to be the war of Scampia.”
Roberto Saviano, La Repubblica, April 2, 2007
“These plays are indicative of the powerful, evident and unique journey of an actress. The
path taken by Ermanna in fact neither runs through a multiplicity of characters nor stands
on a foundation of pre-existing skills. It unfolds, invents and finds its ‘own’ technique, at
once forceful and personal, with movements that develop not so much in breadth as in
height and depth, decanting dramatic substance and stagecraft from lived experience.”
Gerardo Guccini, Antologia personale in Atti&Sipari n°3, Edizioni PLUS-Pisa University
Press, October 2008
“For the staging of Mighty Mighty Ubu in Chicago – once the Albe arrived after three
years of organizing efforts among universities, public schools, foundations, museums and
consulates – I quickly found myself transformed from college teacher into factotum,
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chauffeur, janitor, host, secretary and cheerfully annoyed jailer of the young participants
in the project. The miracles Marco and Ermanna realized with the kids during rehearsal
were at the heart of everything, but due to the reigning culture of distraction here in the
U.S., the most exhausting challenge was always the task of getting everyone together in
the same place to concentrate on that one single thing for three or four hours every evening.
It’s more than simple logistics.”
Tom Simpson, Teatro e impero americano, in Suburbia, Ubulibri, Milano, 2008
“So the Albe’s work continues to ask us questions, continues to be ‘as necessary as gas
and electricity’, precisely due to their disturbing construction of language, this putting the
forms of their theatre to the test with different latitudes of our present. […] The Albe
have been doing this for thirty years now: they question themselves about the word
‘truth’, about its value which changes from year to year; they listen to what the world
says on the subject, they move around and travel to put their own and others’ convictions
to the test, and they never renounce spreading heresy in seeking utopia: in a word, we
would say community.”
Lorenzo Donati, Ravenna&Dintorni, March 16, 2010
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“I remember how I felt when Harpagon enunciated his first words: ‘out, out of here’. But
going back to my experience as spectator at rehearsals I cannot but point out the difficulties
of my eye which for a long time observed one show at a time: either Harpagon or the
world swarming around him. I believe that it was because I myself had taken on
Harpagon’s point of view as a result of his magnetism. The show around him had to bloom
and grow in order to return to less schizophrenic modes of montage.
Something remains to be said about the work methods. About that never taken for granted
alchemy which is created and recreated among roles which nonetheless remain well
defined. First of all and substantially between Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari –
an extraordinary ‘art couple’ as Claudio Meldolesi often said – but we would have to go

into detail to talk about Martinelli (director-writer-pedagogue-theatre manager) and
about Montanari who directs her own acting at Marco’s side and devises the whole show
together with him, as well as being instrumental in creating posters, lighting systems and
costumes.”
Laura Mariani, In viaggio con L’Avaro delle Albe, in www.teatrodellealbe.com, May 5, 2010
“On stage the black satirical tone is coloured, thanks to the music of land and the faraway
in the Mancuso Brothers’ funereal dirge and to Renda’s taut intensity, by a note of pain,
of pietas, that move and wound. The show leaves us astonished, indignant and not only:
it digs beneath indifference, carving out faces, stories and sufferings that continue to live
within us for days and days.”
Massimo Marino, “Siate un po’ più umani, squali!”. Un disgusto, in Rumore di acque by
Marco Martinelli, Editoria & Spettacolo, Roma, 2010
“It’s no surprise that a multilingualism composed of local Italian dialects (such as
Romagnolo), hegemonic global languages (English), and peripheral languages (such as
Wolof) has been a strong feature of Martinelli’s playwriting. His use of language evokes
the plain non-acting that so marked Rossellini’s neo-realist cinema and the raw, untrained
performers in Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life (his Decameron, Canterbury Tales, and Arabian
Nights). In standard theater the professional actor wears a mask of phony naturalness.
Against this, the Albe’s pirate theater parodies and desecrates every form of supposed
naturalness, opposes every canonical acting style. The spectator can never settle cozily
into his or her red velvet chair, sure of what is going to happen next. Instead the spectator
feels riveted to his/her seat, immersed in a precarious event pulsating with novelty, uncertain
about the outcome up to the last moment. Only when theatrical action is vital action,
a lived and shared ritual and not a passive, consumerist display as it is in bourgeois theater,
only then is theater’s true purpose accomplished: to be a vision of a vital experience.”
Franco Nasi, Specchi comunicanti, traduzioni, parodie, riscritture, Medusa, Milano, 2010
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c o n t e n t s
Politttttttical Theatre
by Ermanna Montanari 4
I’ve never thought my voice had a sex
by Ermanna Montanari 12
The technicians of Dionysus
interview to Marco Martinelli 15
Critical glances 22
Photocredits
Lidia Bagnara, Marco Martinelli
and Ermanna Montanari 7
Marco Caselli, Ouverture Alcina 13
Alessia Contu, La mano 21
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30
Traslations Franco Nasi, Tom Simpson, David Smith
Cover photo Ermanna Montanari
Grafic design, layout Cosetta Gardini
Editors Barbara Fusconi, Francesca Venturi
Printed in December 2010