In the middle, she is nicknamed the Sicilian Popess. It must be said that Emma Dante’s theatre, just like her surname, is impressive. A little dark-haired woman with an inimitable bagou, the director has a lively and mischievous look when you meet her, one late afternoon in a small, cramped office at the Théâtre de La Colline, in Paris, where two of her plays are played throughout the month of June. This pure Italian, whose plays claim loud and clear that she belongs to Sicily, the island where she was born, brings to the stage a theater that knows no equivalent. And who regularly meets with great success in Paris, where his plays are scheduled at regular intervals. Even if it means going back and forth: after Pupo di Zucchero and La Scortecata in June, his play Misericordia, already performed at the Bouffes du Nord last winter, will make a new stop at the Rond-Point theater in the fall. Everyone is fighting for “la” Dante.
Since its inception, the Sicilian has been deploying a unique theater of its kind. The plays are always very short, written like burlesque tales, and speak to us with love of colorful characters, victims of poverty in Italy. She had a small success in her country – where the theater is little subsidized by the public authorities -, before arriving in France in 2006. The Théâtre du Rond-Point was the first to program her and, today, again today, is full of praise for his work. “She is a singular artist who describes all the misery in the world without ever being miserable,” enthuses Laurence de Magalhaes, the new director of the establishment. She carries with her a very powerful universe. When we look at it, we travel.”
If she can deploy “her universe”, it is because Emma Dante has definitively renounced the classical forms learned during her youth at the Dramatic Academy of Rome. “I work like in a laboratory, she explains to an employee sitting next to her, who provides the translation. Very attentive, she sometimes corrects (Emma Dante understands French but does not speak it perfectly), adds details and goes further. What interests me is travel. If possible, on an unpaved road and with lots of obstacles.” In practice, the actors – all regulars – arrive at rehearsals and know nothing but the theme of the show. “They come with their personal baggage and make me proposals. I put them in difficulty, I provoke them, I change the order of things”, enumerates this passionate about Pasolini, convinced of the power of the “journey”, which matters much more, according to her, than the final result, the piece. presented to the public. Rehearsals can last for several years. Whether it’s the text or the staging, everything is born of improvisation: “The most important thing is that we are never certain of where we are going to arrive.”
Emma Dante’s oddity is guided by her taste for “social theatre” – showing poverty without ever falling into misery – and for death, which is never far away. Death almost made him stop everything at the start of the course. “I wanted to stop everything after several deaths in my family,” she explains. She left the Italian stages for five years, before returning. “Death is omnipresent in my theater, I myself try to stay close to my dead. In my plays, they are never far away.” To this memory of the disappeared, she dedicates an entire show.
In Pupo di Zucchero, which corresponds to the name given to these sugar cakes made on the feast of the dead, an old man remembers his missing family. Three sisters dressed in black dance around the old man on the empty stage, like three missing ghosts. The narrator’s mother, limping, waits every day for the return of the father who will never return. At the end of the show, the actors, avatars of the narrator’s missing family, dance with puppets representing them as skeletons.
The laboratory is also that of body language. On stage, the actors move with a limp, their limbs disjointed, always clumsy. The bodies are resolutely imperfect, especially those of the women, freed from any form of shame. Sometimes, as in Misericordia, which stages the adoption of a handicapped child by three prostitutes from the Palermitan ghettos. To represent this handicapped child, Emma Dante summoned the dancer Simone Zambelli. His dance steps take over from the words and his body twirls on stage at the same time as he limps. The claimed oddity of the performers turns into poetry.
A few years ago, the director fell in love with an old Italian author, Giambattista Basile. From this dead author – who died in 1632 – a collection of about fifty fables has survived. “He is not well known in Italy. I rediscovered it while working with another Italian director, she explains. It was love at first sight.” She gets it into her head to make a trilogy of it: Pupo di Zucchero first, a small success of esteem presented from 2021 at the Avignon festival. Then La Scortecata, a comedy in which a king with endless desires falls in love with a woman whose voice he knows only. The tale is intended to be burlesque: the woman is in reality a poor centenarian with an unsightly physique, who tries to make herself desirable in the hope of spending a night at the castle.
A third fable on power, also written by Basil, is being put together by Emma Dante, who has lost none of her fascination with Basil. This time, it will be the story of a king “disabled because he has a hen in the ass from having wiped himself with poultry”, she smiles. The bird lays golden eggs – which means it won’t be killed. When the king finally dies from a hunger strike, the people crown the animal. “It’s a very nice metaphor for the disease of power. The king is at fault, but so are the people. This refers to a form of stupidity that I have observed a lot in Italy, ”she theorizes.
After a whole life spent directing Sicily, the director will soon leave her island. Traveling from Palermo, where culture is becoming increasingly rare, to European capitals exhausts him. She has just bought an apartment in Rome, where she is going to live with her ten-year-old son. But promise not to forget anything about this “wonderful” city that forged it. “It was Palermo that shaped my theatre. Now I feel like it’s been long enough that I can take Palermo anywhere with me, carry it inside like luggage.” We bet that in Paris too, Emma Dante will be well received.
