"Pasolini. Why?" at the Galleria Toledo, a theater that questions the present.
All Toledo Gallery of Naples, a stable theatre of innovation, goes on stage "Pasolini. Why? What's new?", the new work of the Chille de la balanza, a historic company of Italian experimental theatre. It is neither a celebratory operation nor a reassuring tribute: the show chooses a harsher and more necessary path, bringing back Pier Paolo Pasolini within the present as a still alive, uncomfortable voice, capable of disturbing.
From cultural genocide to genocide
The subtitle of the show – From cultural genocide to genocide – clearly defines the scope of his work. Pasolini's thinking on the destruction of cultures, on homogenization, and on the violence of power is pushed to the most painful current events. Pasolini becomes a lens through which to interpret today's world, its wars, its collective responsibilities, its repressions.
The scene opens with a powerful image: white bundles laid on stage like bodies in a mass grave. It's a theater that doesn't explain or guide the spectator, but rather exposes him to a raw, immediate vision.
A dramaturgy in fragments
La dramaturgy by Claudio Ascoli and Sissi Abbondanza It proceeds through fragments, poetic flashes, period materials, and original writings. Pasolini is not narrated in a linear fashion: he emerges through evocation, through contradictions and unresolved tensions. The text rejects biographical narration and constructs a true Pasolinian tension field, made of fractures, silences and dissonances.
A contemporary Pasolini
The stage space is reduced to the essentials: a few chairs, a lamp, a table that recalls an interrogation. lights by Sandro Pulizzotto They work by subtraction, alternating shadows and sudden flashes of light that convey a sense of abandonment and solitude. The costumes don't reconstruct a specific era: Pasolini isn't confined to the 1960s or 1970s, but acts as a figure of the present.
The choice to use is particularly significant monologue-letters projected into the present, even through artificial intelligence: texts that speak to the young people of the planet, to the powerful of the Earth, up to the direct reference to Gaza, one of the hardest and most destabilizing passages of the show.
The interpreters and the sound of the scene
On stage, Claudio Ascoli, Sissi Abbondanza and Rosario Terrone They create a rigorous and sharp presence, capable of conveying a torn and contradictory Pasolini. Alongside them, Martina Capaccioli and Matteo Nigi they bring a youthful fragility that makes the monologues even more exposed and alive.
Le original music by Alessio Rinaldi and the sound work of Francesco Lascialfari they create an emotional score made of voids, pulsations and sudden tears, which accompanies the word without ever taming it.
An ending that closes the circle
The final moment is entrusted to the figure of the Mother of Gaza, clutching a small white bundle and uttering the "why?" that gives the show its title. When the veil falls, the mother is revealed to also be Pasolini's mother, who appeared in the first scene. Pasolini and genocide, past and present, overlap in a single image.
The stage remains wounded, bare, as it has been throughout the performance. No catharsis, no resolution: just a question that continues to resonate.
A necessary theatre
“Pasolini. Why?” is a dry and uncomplacent show, which chooses to to hurt and rememberA theater that seeks responsibility rather than consensus, that doesn't reassure but forces reflection. In a lost present, Pasolini is evoked not out of nostalgia, but out of urgency: as a voice that continues to question our time.