TEMPESTA
inspired by
"The Warsaw Ghetto"
by Mary Berg

I dedicate this play to Memory. To the memory of my mother Elka,who wore a ribbon in her hairwhen she boarded the polish shipthat took her away from the Warsaw Ghetto,to land her on the "island" of salvationwhere she learned to be a dressmaker and actress. To the memory of her brother Berele,painter Jew cobbler singer. To the memory of my father Natalio,poet anarchist business consultant. To the memory of all the angelsthat continue to ask themselves Why? Why forget To my children in order that they don't forget.
Cora Herrendorf

In this production Tempesta presents many tempests in one, in an undetermined but, at the same time, extremely precise location.
This location, that doesn't only belong to the past, is both symbolic and concrete and leaves traces of perceptions that are so disquieting that some of us still find themdifficult to face.
Tempesta is a seal that the end of the 1900's man, looking over his shoulder, could put on this century, as a judgment - and as a warning.
In this place we are accompanied by the voice of a father talking to a daughter, urging her to remember.
The father's name is Prospero, but it is also "something more than Prospero" (as he himself says), the daughter is called Miranda and, its true, these are the names of the father and daughter in Shakespeare's "The Tempest", but here they are only heard as an echo.
The father and daughter are not seen living, they are Voices that reach out from another place evoking the account of abuse and power that turned them, in a certain sense, into survivors.

But looking back, pronouncing the word survivor today, opens a deep rift in the recent past, and this Miranda's memory refers to precise and near at hand event: the exterminating fury of the Nazis, unfurled with blind determination against all kinds of diversity.
Prospero and Miranda are therefore emblems, simply the re-traced voices of a father and daughter that had eyes to see, and Tempesta is a symbol, the same for each place where this fury is repeated: here it is Hitler's Europe, but we can't help thinking of all the other "europes" and all the other "hitlers", both before and after Hitler.
With this 'mise-en-scene' the Teatro Nucleo want to take another look at some parts of the world, where attempts are still made to minimize these situations.
This is the paradox in which theater exists, it can see once more what has never really been seen, or bear witness with eyes that are no longer here.
For a limited and enchanted moment it can make events be re-born.
The choice is clear, men and women appear before our eyes and we recognize that they belong to precise races because they sing in a particular language, they carry determining objects with them, because the way they move and the way they pray makes them identifiable, as with their clothes and hairstyles, the way they look at each other, the way in which they wed and weep. Everything that happens can also be placed historically: we are in Europe, in Warsaw, then in the ghetto, in the first half of the 1940's, then we are in an extermination camp.
In short, we find ourselves among those voices that are no longer here and who, through this play, return to speak to us or, better still, to sing to us, notwithstanding the events.
Because it is certain that a world that permits the transmission of this knowledge, song and accompanying dance, cannot be entirely forsaken, even if in this production there is a powerful perception of all that has been canceled (as well as that which remains), and of the difficult task of precisely separating the white from the black, the high from the low, the smile from the sneer in all human affairs.
Song is the medium that unites the drammaturgy of Tempesta. Fourteen songs (Yiddish, German, Sefardite, Jewish, Italian) open and replenish the action, providing the breath of sound and the etherealness of dance that sometimes accompanies them, bestowing air, the clarity of verse, naturally combined with the shout, the deep, acute and abnormal pain of that which is spoken.
It is song that is the instrument of information in this play, supplying the energy of poetry to this 'mise-en-scene', the syncopated rhythm of sobs or of interrupted thought, that does not explain, but unfolds in chains of visions, choral choreographic inventions, rapid epiphanies releasing bubbles of intimate recollections that disappear immediately, proceeding as a result of the production and accumulation of perception, calling on emotions that demand listening participation.
"Sing!", Tempesta, exhorts at the end, with the words of the Bielorussian Yitzahak Katzenelson, victim of the Holocaust; notwithstanding the horror "raise your voice" and sing, even if it is for the last time in this world, leave your traces in someone's memory with the transfiguring force of the word, as only what fails to live in our memory is irremediably dead; leave sound-tracks so that someone else can sing again, and leave chromatic tracks, draw white if your background is black, leave ink-written words if your background is white.

Cristina Gualandi