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Camilla Rigatti
Sand is the first thing to emerge from the darkness of history. Sand that forms an arena, sand destined to be the imprint of a thousand footprints, immediately erased by new passages, new generations, new lineages of victims and executioners that follow one another incessantly until someone decides to take the sand in hand, to bring it to light to make the frenetic stirring of footprints History and Memory.
History and Memory that do not feel the crisis, but spread like wildfire the possibility of bringing true testimonies of the past to all ages. This is the aim of LE TREDICI ROSE (The Thirteen Roses), a performance conceived and directed by Firenza Guidi and sponsored by two municipal administrations, Fucecchio and Cerreto Guidi: to take the audience on a journey where the grains of true stories of individual human beings are transformed into the boundless expanse of sand that is History.
The project was created to involve schools: six schools in the municipalities of Cerreto, Fucecchio, Empoli and Vinci are involved, for a total of over five hundred children who will have the opportunity to attend the performance at a special morning time designed for school needs. And then the citizens, with five evening performances on 30 November and 1 and 2 December.
Sewing machines, tools that symbolised and enabled women’s work and independence for over fifty years of the last century, crowd the stage to bring us the true and vivid stories of thirteen young women who experienced history first-hand, paying for it with their lives: imprisoned in the Las Ventas women’s prison as subversives by the Falangists of Francisco Franco’s neo-dictatorship, in reality almost none of them had any real connection with the revolutionary forces of the Popular Front. Innocent and powerless in the face of a regime hungry for exemplary purges, they desperately live out their fate as victims together.
A performance with a cast of twenty Italian and international performers, set in a new location, a circus tent built ad hoc in a key location between the two municipalities involved. A choice that seems to tell us that life is also a crossroads of cultures, it is also the world and the game created by the circus, whether it is a fun game or a ruthless game like the one that takes place in the arena where the figures of the thirteen protagonists and their executioners move. The spectators at the centre or on the periphery of this circular world will move with the actors, sometimes to watch unnoticed and sometimes to take their own position within the scene. Those who attend the show will end up walking and standing in the arena, a space that symbolises how history is capable of changing and sometimes crushing human beings, making them as tiny and powerless as a grain of sand.