CASAVUOTA. A THEATRE STUDIO IN BOLOGNA
Who’s the crazy guy opening a theatre, a private, cultural, non-commercial place, today, and here? Casavuota is not a theatre, anyway. It’s a house. Empty, almost. In the centre of Bologna. With a living room big enough to make performances in it. For a little audience. And a kitchen, as in every house. We don’t really combine dinner and theatre: dinner would win, belly always wins here. No. Just this: after the performance, for those who want to, we can stop here together some time, without going all over the Bolonese Entertainment Factory in search of a place quiet enough to allow a little talk. Those who come are invited to bring something to share, to eat or drink. But why have I started to talk about food, me too? Let’s talk about theatre. So: I couldn’t find a place to rehearse anymore, not in town. Better: I could but there were always more ifs and buts. I’ve always been kind of spoiled, you know, I don’t like ifs and buts. Then they started to ask me for money, never happened in twenty years. So I decided to take a place myself, paid by me, where to rehearse my performances and invite who I want to invite. Ahi ahi: you’ve endend up resigning your own garden. No. No business here, no charming house, no vague places like Berlin or Kobenhaven, no radical chic circles, no vintage, nothing like that. Just an uncool house in an overrated area of an overrated city. Casavuota: empty house, empty city. We’re at the beginning, we’ve to re-start from the basics. Will I resist? I mean, with my kind of moral theatre? Or a dadaist senility is awaiting? Anyway, we were saying: the basics. First of all an invitation: get out of your houses, for God’s sake, get out of’em! Not just to go shopping during Tdays, get out and enter other houses, see the underworld, the sadness of the houses, of kitchens: is there still some slice of reality left, with its taste, its poor ugliness, here too? Are the poor condemned to hide? We need to invent some strategies to remain, or come back, or get for the first time, to a rougher contact with things. The little Casavuota condo, via San Felice 39, Bologna, is so composed: on the first floor a law office with very easygoing, a little dorky lawyers, and beside them eight young refugees from Gambia and Nigeria, on the second and last floor our theatre-studio. Beside the condo: the old roofless San Martino and Felice Church, a corner of Palermo in the neat Bologna, one of the few ancient places in town not yet transformed in superstore.
ALESSANDRO BERTI
Alessandro Berti was born in Reggio Emilia. He’s a playwright, theatre-director and actor.
Among his theatre plays and performances we remind: SKANKRER (1996), TERRA DI BURRO (1997), TRIONFO ANONIMO (2000), L’AGENDA DI SEATTLE (2001), IL QUARTIERE (2002), CONFINE (2006), PIETRA,PIANTA (2009), L’ABBANDONO (2010), COMBATTIMENTO SPIRITUALE DAVANTI A UNA CUCINA IKEA, (2011, Premio I Teatri Del Sacro), MAESTRO ECKHART (2013), UN CRISTIANO (2014), FERMARSI (2016), LEILA DELLA TEMPESTA (2017).