directed by Elisabetta Granara
with Giovanni Baruffa, Anna Peretto and Umberto Zarantonello
co-production Gruppo Teatro Campestre and Livello 4
Once upon a time, there was me.
I've been through a lot in my life: death, deformities, losses, abandonments, going too far, arriving too late, chasing a white deer without ever being able to catch it and travelling, travelling across seas and mountains, for long years, disguised as old women, as kings, as beggars, transformed into frogs, snakes, crows, deer, beasts of all kinds. Losing one's tongue, keeping silent for a hundred years, suddenly understanding the language of birds, waking up without a head, or with one's hands cut off, and having them grow back with fairy roots...
Humans are endowed with an instinct to invent stories that can make them escape from the stark reality: we are born, we grow, we die. If that were the case, it would be a sad story. But in between, there are many other lives, hundreds of adventures with us as protagonists: we live them in dreams, we share them on social networks along with a beautiful photo.
""We are the great masterpieces of our storytelling minds, the products of our own imaginations. We think of ourselves as very solid and real. But our memories constrain our self-creation less than we think, and are constantly distorted by our hopes and dreams. Until the day we die, we live the story of our lives. And, like a novel in progress, these stories are constantly changing and evolving, being corrected, rewritten, and embellished by an unreliable narrator. We are, to a large extent, our own personal stories. And they are stories that are more likely than true."
The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall
"The feeling of finitude is the feeling of having only one life. But that's what stories are for: to multiply life, to relate it to its infinity."
Storie comuni. La narrazione nella vita quotidiana, Paolo Jedlowski
Photos by Daniele Calabretti.
