A poetic text by Pasolini, little known but with a disruptive expressive force, a non-finite in the author’s magmatic laboratory, a jumble of words and images, of sound and pain, an expression of power and the ways in which man succumbs to it, with the emblematic title: L’italiano è ladro (The Italian is a Thief). Here the voice and the poetic word, accompanied by the sound design of the staging, reach the public in their increasingly lacerating and at times disturbing symbolic significance.

In 1955, a fragment of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s L’Italiano è ladro (The Italian is a Thief) was published in a fascicle of the literary magazine “Nuova Corrente”, the only printed trace of a multi-lingual poem of long gestation composed between 1947 and the second half of the 1950s. Because of its openness to the representation of the popular classes and its tendency towards narrativity, this work, despite having passed almost unnoticed, is undoubtedly a representative witness to the poetic season of the 1950s and the cultural and literary political history in which it is embedded. Anagoor attempts to restore the fervour and complexity of a boiling writing, of a thought and a language that were then becoming a system and a vision, illuminating the theatrical virulence that seems to pulsate beneath the poetic verse. The company chooses to mediate this complexity by comparing the different versions of the text and illustrating the workshop of the Friulian poet, before leaving the language free to break the banks and overwhelm the ear like a torrent that drags along recent transformations and ancient pain.

info duration 80 min.

c/o Teatro Out Off, via Mac Mahon 16

Voices: Luca Altavilla, Marco Menegoni Mediation: Lisa Gasparotto Sound: Mauro Martinuz Direction: Simone Derai Production Anagoor 2016 Co-production Stanze 2016, Centrale Fies

The Anagoor company, which takes its name from Dino Buzzati’s short story Le mura di Anagoor (The Walls of Anagoor), was founded in 2000 in Castelfranco Veneto on the initiative of Simone Derai and Paola Dallan, who were later joined by Marco Menegoni, Moreno Callegari, Mauro Martinuz, Giulio Favotto, Silvia Bragagnolo and many others, making the experience a community project. Since 2008, Anagoor has been based in the Treviso countryside, at La Conigliera, a burrow farm converted by the company into its own atelier. With this choice, the desire to preserve the architecture of the place and the wish to keep a name that would reveal its history, Anagoor experiments with the possibility of stopping pieces of a changing civilization to graft them into a new vision. Anagoor’s theatre responds to an iconic aesthetic that precipitates into different final formats where the performing arts and the hypermedia scene enter into dialogue; it penetrates the territories of other artistic disciplines and yet forcefully claims, by virtue of the nature of this art, to remain theatre.

photo by Silvia Bragagnolo©