This theater production is unlike anything we usually see in our groups and associations — those informal gatherings where we celebrate and share feelings.
The language, the vision, and the commitment are different from what we know. But there's something extraordinary happening here: people with mental disabilities are not being used to perform something they don't understand. They are genuine participants in this show, integral to what it says.
"Working in theater with people with handicaps is a beautiful experience," says Enzo Toma, the director of "Vangelio," a production freely adapted from Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Gospel According to Matthew." It stars Teatro Kismet Opera — a mixed company of actors with handicaps and professional actors. "You just have to let them act. They know how to move on stage with a spontaneity that comes from deep sensitivity."
Toma's artistic encounter with people with handicaps began roughly ten years ago, though his formal work with A.R.C.Ha. — the Bari-based recreational and cultural association for the handicapped — started only six years ago.
"A.R.C.Ha. was looking for volunteers to start a theater workshop with their young people," Toma explains. "I'd already worked with handicapped people, so I was eager to take it on. I knew their power as performers, the extraordinary sensitivity they bring to theater. A.R.C.Ha. gave me the chance to pursue a project I already believed in and had already tested."
In "Vangelio," you find Pasolini's great gift for vision — his desire to show events rather than explain them. The entire production becomes a dialogue between the emotions of those on stage and those watching. The actors with handicaps, unhampered by the rational mind that sometimes blocks emotional flow, communicated intensely with the audience on a purely emotional level.
Some scenes unfold like painted icons, brimming with spirituality, awakening the sacred in the spectator. These moments of emotional intensity are balanced by a "popular" strain — also dear to Pasolini's cinema — a way of mixing with ordinary people, of bringing apparently distant messages into everyday life.
The actors — professional and nonprofessional alike — roll across a dusty stage that dirties them, assimilating them to a Christ unafraid to soil himself with human suffering. All speak of their enthusiasm for this work.
Vito, the charming archangel Gabriel, says he feels completely at home on stage, where he's been given almost complete freedom to act, as have all the other actors with handicaps. "The dance of Vita Maria with flowers," Toma recalls, "wasn't directed at all. I told her she would move across the stage holding a bouquet, and she created something like a sweet, desperate lullaby." This may be where the show's greatness lies: in transforming a language that might seem different — even wrong against the script — into a point of contact through which we can see life and art from another perspective entirely.
- Sabina Fadel, 1996
Documentation
The Pedagogical Consulting Service of Trento has published the 19th volume of the "Italian Bibliography on Hearing, Vision, and Speech Disorders," 1996, by S. Ligati, pp. 128, L. 20,000. The volume contains 579 bibliographic entries (books, articles, Italian and foreign periodicals) on these topics and others relevant to different kinds of handicap: educational problems, mental retardation, various forms of therapy, school and social integration, family, religious education, conferences, legislation, films, videotapes, and more. The volume can be requested from the Pedagogical Consulting Service — P.O. Box 601 — 38100 Trento — tel. 0461/828693. Articles listed in the Italian Bibliography are available as photocopies. Books must be ordered through bookstores; publisher catalogs can be obtained by writing or calling the publishers.