On the evening of March 25, Milan's Teatro Smeraldo hosted La Norma Traviata, a theatrical event billed as "a delirious musical"—conceived, performed, sung, and danced entirely by people living with mental illness, physical disability, and social marginalization.
The story unfolds in a post-atomic Milan where a "respectable" audience attempts to watch a performance of Norma at a bombed-out La Scala. But those cast out from society—the "undesirable" ones—contest this order. They emerge from the rubble, advance toward the stage from the audience, their suffering written on their bodies: bandaged wounds, tattered clothes, and among them, someone with angel wings.
Social and musical collision gradually gives way to composition, then erupts in brilliantly hybrid dances and rhythms: Casta Diva intertwines with the toast from Traviata; Paris turns bitter; the Norma must tremble at the return of the Traviata. Opera melodies, rock, and popular songs coexist in ingenious, successful musical arrangements.
Hymns to Love
The direction is careful and forceful. Ninety-nine people shared the stage. They communicated their vision of the world and their lives through words that were sometimes strange, sometimes desolate—words that gradually wove themselves into soaring hymns to love, a love that "goes and goes" out into the world in the most unexpected ways.
We in the audience, in a packed hall, lived through an overwhelming experience: here was music, dance, the full expressiveness of each person and all of us together. By the end, we all wanted to be onstage—and perhaps we were, because we left with a sense of wholeness, genuine joy, and a fraternity born from having shared so much happiness.
Maestro Denis Gaita, psychiatrist and composer, brings immense participatory force to every gesture, deep affection for his "theater-makers," and faith in the power of their work together.
The same intensity of engagement rings through in the words of the coordinator of Stravaganza, a volunteer music-therapy organization that has been creating theatrical events for more than a decade.
- Antonella Bulgheroni, 2002
