"Laura allo Specchio"
(Laura In Front Of The Mirror)
Dedicated to Laura Betti
Project of a concert-show created and performed by Fatima Scialdone
Stage text by F. Pannullo
DEDICATO A LAURA BETTI is the product of a chance meeting, many years ago, in Palermo, in the Teatro Libero. We were performing on the same stage different plays. My play was a text by V. Havel, while hers, Laura’s, was Una disperata vitalità by Pasolini.
She saw me, we talked and she invited me to Rome in order to give me ‘some song scores’. She had seen in me something that reminded her of her previous self…
I went.
It was the complete set of scores of a memorable show, GIRO A VUOTO, with songs specially written for her by Pasolini, Arbasino, Fortini, Flaiano.
She asked me to learn them by heart, she gave me a record, and I was supposed to come back to her later.
She liked the way I sang, she recommended that I should not get fat… It was essential that I should keep my image and my voice in order to sing that collection of songs so dear to her heart and so precious to me.
That was many years ago.
Now I am ready.
This project is based on that personal memory of mine and is finally ready a year after Laura Betti’s demise (on July 31, 2005). Unfortunately it was not possible to have it ready a year ago. However, thanks to the Italian Foreign Office and especially the Italian embassy in Belgrade – and its Italian Culture Institute – a preview of the show was performed in front of an ‘international’ audience in the SCK Students’ Culture Centre.
The texts and the songs had been entirely translated into Serbian, and they met with great success. The musical arrangements are by Francesco Bancalari. I am highly honoured that the guitar is played by the great Fausto Mesolella, who enriches my performance with his precious solos.
Laura allo specchio was first performed in Italy, in Rome, on July 21-22, 2006, among the events of the Estate romana, in the FontanonEstate location, and was produced by A. T. M.
This show is not meant to be a commemoration, but just a concert-show inspired by GIRO A VUOTO, a show made of stage-adapted songs specially written for Laura Betti by Flaiano, Arbasino, Moravia, and Pasolini.
It will be the rediscovery of a repertoire that was an avant-garde one at the time and is still extremely up-to-date as far as music, cinema, theatre and customs are concerned. It is a revival of the subjects, characters, music and images that marked the 1960s and that now seem mythical. It is a homage to one of the most complex, many-sided, and controversial personalities of our culture and of the Italian showbiz.
Laura and Pier Paolo then… The little heartfelt tale that Laura tells as I will report it…
Laura Betti promoted this culture all over the world. And she was highly appreciated in France in particular, in Europe, and all over the world.
"Laura allo Specchio"
(Homage to Laura Betti)
Written by Fernando Pannullo
Based on an idea by Fatima Scialdone
Musical arrangements by Francesco Bancalari
Featuring Fausto Mesolella on the guitar
A woman is in front of a mirror. Laura Betti, just like another Narcissus, admires her own image, winks at herself, smiles, turns, turns again, takes off her clothes, puts them on, questions herself, gets excited, reveals herself, talks about her present and past. She is young and vital - we are in the 1960s -, she is determined to carve out her own future, to lay strong foundations for an explosive artistic career. She has become very famous, newspapers mention her name with ironic comments, she has been accepted within a circle of highbrow friends, including the best intellectuals of that period - writers, journalists, poets, musicians. They have coined nicknames and definitions for her, such as ‘the female jaguar’, ‘the dolce vita singer’. She is overbearing, sexy, and cheeky. She is a ‘living oxymoron’, some say. Generous and impertinent, humble and aggressive… A character that day after day acquires new amazing features, and produces additional gossip and scandals. She is an unconventional person, a pioneer libber, and a communist into the bargain. She uses a coarse language. Oh dear! That is enough to fall foul of the blue noses. And despite the mayhem she produces, she is perfectly aware of her being a bourgeois and she is determined not to change. She is a part of those booming years, she is their product and symbol. She is sometimes doubtful about her future identity. She suspects that one day in the future she might not feel comfortable in the unconventional character’s clothes she is wearing now and forcing the world to accept. She is worried that her own current image might turn into a cliché very difficult to get rid of. But she is not afraid, she laughs about it all, there is no guarantee, life has to be recreated day after day. Today, today… What about tomorrow? Who knows? The future is totally uncertain.
She is happy. Her life has reached a turning point. She is performing on theatre stages with a show entirely made of songs. It is something that she has really wanted. For months on end she has asked for help, she has blackmailed, she has been throwing tantrums. Her friends, some VIPs of the literary world, have helped her to find the money. People belonging to the cream of the intellectual world have written the songs for the show - first of all Moravia and Pasolini, then Arbasino, Parise, Soldati, Mauri, Flaiano, Leonetti and Marinuzzi, Nebbia, Umiliani, Carpi and so on. All involved in the Giro a vuoto melting-pot, with Filippo Crivelli being an accomplice. ‘She is nothing more and nothing less than a sort of Mina that irreverent people like’, in Fofi’s words. ‘Mina was loved by intellectuals, not being an intellectual herself. Laura Betti was loved by intellectuals, being an intellectual herself’. She could not be prouder of herself. She has created the first Italian one-woman show, her cabaret inspired by French models has never been seen in Italy before. And she brags about it all. She talks about it with her double in front of the mirror. And she mentions another turning point in her life, reached when she met Pier Paolo Pasolini, an inhabitant of Veneto born in Bologna. He has sneaked into her life and changed it for good. Very soon she has become his ‘non carnal wife’, long before being defined ‘Pasolini’s widow’. Years go by and their relation is always very difficult. They quarrel just like man and wife. They make peace just like lovers. Going through every kind of weather, their friendship grows stronger and stronger. A relation artistically very productive. It was impossible to avoid some hint, as in a dreamlike vision, about the following tragic stages of their lives, and about a bond that death itself seems incapable to undo. An ominous nightmare brings Laura face to face with Pasolini’s tragic end, his funeral, and Moravia’s funeral address in Campo dei Fiori Square.
The show is a monologue, strictly speaking at first, then evolving into a dialogue-monologue. This monologue is intermingled with the famous songs from Giro a vuoto. There is no real break between what is said and what is sung. The enthralling mixture includes irony among its ingredients, consistently with the original inspiring source. As a result, sadness, disquiet, and impending despair are made a little weaker and less excruciating.
The stage elements are very simple ones. A mirror, reflecting memories. A multicoloured bunch of telephones, symbolising Laura’s extrovert and provocative relationship with ‘the others’ - her friends, the writers, her director. A piano providing the music, thanks to a piano player of course.
(Fernando Pannullo)
THEATRE: LAURA BETTI LIVES AGAIN THANKS TO FATIMA SCIALDONE / ANSA
MUSICAL MONOLOGUE ON STAGE IN ROME TWO YEARS AFTER BETTI’S DEMISE
ROME
(ANSA) - Rome, July 22 - (Maurizio Giammusso) - People called her ‘the female jaguar’, she showed off her sex appeal and boasted about the friends she had among the most famous writers. Her face, her voice, her words offer a clear image of Italy as it was thirty or forty years ago. Laura Betti, a woman and an artist, a singer and a muse inspiring poets lives again on the stage thanks to Fatima Scialdone and her show Laura allo specchio, which debuted last night in Rome in the Fontanone location. It is not a commemorative show, and it just aims to remind the public of Laura Betti, two years after her premature demise, at the age of 70 (July 31, 2004). Written by Fernando Pannullo, the show is a beautiful female solo. Scialdone is on the stage with a piano player and a guitarist (Fausto Mesolella, a member of the Avion Travel), and for almost a hundred minutes she sings and recounts, plays and performs. She reminds us of the fact that Laura started as a jazz singer in the late 1950s in Milan, and that in 1958 she brought to the stage a show entitled Giro a vuoto, from which Fatima Scialdone has taken the songs for her own show. Performed for the first time in the Italian embassy in Belgrade, Laura allo specchio is also the product of a chance meeting that took place in the Teatro Libero in Palermo many years ago. ‘Laura saw me’, Scialdone told us, ‘and decided to give me some song scores. She had seen in me something that reminded her of her previous self long time before. The scores were those of Giro a vuoto, a memorable show’. Now those songs live again, included in a light going and thrilling tale, on a stage where a piano is surrounded by few functional elements: a mirror, a chair, a red sofa, a bunch of telephones. Very wisely Scialdone does not even try to look like Laura Betti or imitate her. For her Laura Betti is just a voice and a face, the crossroads where a hundred stories and some gossip meet, as long as the quotations from Flaiano, Arbasino, Fortini, Moravia, and the music by Nebbia, Carpi, and someone else. Thanks to her, Laura Betti is also a thin provocative body wearing a black body-stocking, very fashionable way back in the 1960s. A deep voice able to produce also sharp tones; poems becoming songs or tales. Among the many histories hinted at, the many characters involved, the name of Pier Paolo Pasolini stands out. He was Betti’s friend, her intellectual guide, her almost lifelong partner. Most of all he was her impossible love. Already famous as a singer - not only in Italy, but in Paris too - and as a film actress - from La dolce vita to Novecento -, Laura fell in love at first sight with Pier Paolo, although she knew he was homosexual. He tried to reciprocate the best he could, but was not certainly able to become her lover or husband. Their love story was a very special one, and Scialdone’s show manages to conjure up lightly and precisely its atmosphere, avoiding the gossip, and highlighting the emotional energy this relation was a source of for both partners. The same energy permeates the whole show.
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the trailer of "Laura allo Specchio" |
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