"A director carries the weight of an idea that haunts him, that he feels compelled to realize. But he cannot do it without his actors. He is not theatrically independent, just as a disabled person is not independent in daily life. The only currency he possesses is his capacity for vision." For Dimitri, that capacity means being able to live, also, through the stage. Through theater, which becomes like an extension of himself, a projection of his imagination. And of his body.
Dimitri Galli Rohl is thirty-three years old, from Lucca, and he is a theater director. The first person with a disability to graduate from the Silvio d'Amico Academy. Since 2000 he has moved in a wheelchair, after an accident fractured two of his cervical vertebrae. In seventy-three years of the Academy's history, no person with a disability had ever achieved what he did. "If you look at it closely," Dimitri says, "directors are disabled by nature"—because a director "must control countless elements when staging a show; as a disabled person I must plan my day meticulously if I want to reach the end while limiting the strain my condition puts on my body and my life. Basically, I am the director of myself."
"Getting my degree in directing," Dimitri is convinced, "was the only sensible thing to do after my accident." The Academy's doors—still the source of eighty percent of Italy's actors and directors—opened for him in 2005. He passed his first audition with a production of "The Minotaur" (written and directed for the Sant'Andrea Theater in Pisa), inspired by the Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt. He then passed the subsequent auditions with flying colors. His final project was the work that earned him his diploma: "U.s.d.e. Unione Sociale Per Una Destra Estrema"—a piece reworking Shakespeare's Hamlet with a distinctly Italian twist and sharp political edge. "Usde" is an Italianized mangling of Hamlet's opening line: "Who's there?" A sentinella named Francesco asks it at the play's beginning, before vanishing. On stage the phrase becomes a meaningless acronym—a military-style greeting used by a Danish minority nostalgic for a supposedly glorious past. "But 'Usdè,'" Dimitri explains, "is also a salute accompanied by a sharp thrust of the right arm, or a grotesque vocal echo of that jingoistic 'Alalà' that flows through the veins of every self-respecting Italian."
The production was warmly received at Rome's Teatro Eleonora Duse. It was a triumph for Dimitri, who in his life has also been an actor, sculptor, painter, waiter, laborer, and office worker. "Now," he says, "we'll see if I can make directing my profession, and relegate disability to a hobby I pursue in my spare time."
Tiziana Guerrisi, 2009