"Man and technology" in Italy that no longer exists

Nature loves courage. You are committed and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.
He dreams of an impossible dream and the world will not afflict you, but it will lift you. This was Dario Fo's dream.

Dario Fo - Mistero Buffo Gramelot in inglese

Provoker, desecrator, jester, nonconformist, Dario Fo spent his life to take sides, not just in politics. Not surprisingly, the first major Italian TV scandal is due to him. When in the early 1960s he spoke of white deaths and was thrown out, and with him Franca Rame, from the conduction of "Canzonissima".
Obstinate and tireless bearer of controversy. Arguing on the temporal power of the Italian Church, and with politicians, with journalists.

Among the many contributions he has left to the history of contemporary theater, certainly the most important is linked to the grammelot. That is to that invented language, daughter of the language of medieval storytellers, born from the fusion of dialects of different areas of Europe, from the Padana Valley to France.

It is a language that has no real words or grammatical structures, but that imitates words and grammatical structures of various other languages. Thus, without interruption, they are words taken from the Lombard dialect, from French, from Veneto, from Tuscany, from Piedmont, and from English.

How can we understand a language that has substantially invented words, which resemble those of other idioms but which at the same time differ? We manage otherwise. One hears a word from time to time and ties it to the actor's gestures on the stage, who with his tone of voice, cadence, rhythm and actions succeeds in making the audience follow the thread of his speech.

Dario Fo's magical invention is all in this. While he mumbles incomprehensible sounds on the stage for minutes and minutes, the public can follow him and understand. Laughing at his gags, understanding the social satire hidden in his words, perceiving the change in the moods of the characters. Nothing escapes, not even when Fo abandons a speech similar to that of the Val Padana and ventures onto other linguistic registers - in this case close to English - painting an Italy that no longer exists.

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Testata giornalistica registrata
al Tribunale civile di Venezia.
Autorizzazione n.8 in data 30/08/2018
Direttore Responsabile Vincenzo Maddaloni
Responsabile Trattamento Dati Paolo Molina

 

 

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