By Antonio La Cava
“Without this, today we would not have been here”. The actress Graziella Galvani raises a book, showing it to the audience present at the Italian Cultural Institute to attend the reading of one of the most important books by Italo Calvino. During the evening of 18th April, Graziella Galvani performed four pieces taken from the thirty-three Cosmicomics: All at One Point, The Aquatic Uncle, The Origin of the Birds and The Sky of Stone.
“This – the actress says – is the 1965’s first edition of the Cosmicomics, and is autographed by the writer himself. And if it is so worn, it means it has been much read in London”.
To accompany the show were Mario Mariani on the piano, who commented with both music and words the four stories, and the young Beatrice Pucci who drew the characters and the events narrated inThe Origin of the Birds.
The staging of literature has always something magic: and with the works by Calvino magic doubles. Beyond an over-simplified interpretation, the stories by Calvino hide a metaphoric meaning with an extraordinary impact.
The protagonist of the Cosmicomics is always a character, Qfwfq, difficult to describe because about him – Calvino said – nothing is known. We can not even say with certainty whether he is a human being, he has more or less the age of the Universe. Each story is introduced by a short paratext to explain, in a parascientific way, the topic that will be dealt with in the story itself.
Galvani’s voice, intimate and deep, took the audience through the story of the Universe, with the poetry and simplicity of an author able to charm the children, too.
In fact, Calvino not only does re-invent in a playful way the story of the Universe, basing himself on scientific theories, but he tries to give a moral meaning to the story of the Cosmo.
Calvino himself specified that his work had not any links with Science Fiction: “The procedure of the Cosmicomics is not like in Science Fiction (i.e. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells). The Cosmicomics have behind them especially Leopardi and the comics of Popeye”.
Graziella Galvani, one of Giorgio Strehler’s pupils and actress in many of his plays, started to stage the Cosmicomics in 1995 – the twentieth anniversary of the writer’s death – in different European capitals, like Varsavia, Bruxelles, Amsterdam and Budapest.
The dimension of surreal and paradox characterising the performance highlighted the ability of literature to express some complex ideas through “simple” stories, because “modern science, physics, cosmology, molecular biology – in Calvino’s opinion – do not offer visual images and they can be understood conceptually only, abstractly”. Literature, instead, has the incredible capacity to construct bridges among the models of scientific logic, experience, and everyday language.
A short of the show is available on our website www.giorgiostudio.co.uk.
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