MALAGUERRA: THE ANTI-STATE SUPER-HERO OF SICILIAN PUPPET THEATER

Athenaeum Review , 2020

The essay first outlines the principal chivalric narratives that found their way into traditional Sicilian puppet theater, and then turns to how today’s puppeteers are refashioning the stories for contemporary audiences. (Fall/Winter 2020: 139-153)

Palgrave Mcmillan, 2022

With the advancement of cybernetics, avatars, animation, and virtual reality, a thorough understanding of how the puppet metaphor originates from specific theatrical practices and media is especially relevant today. This book identifies and interprets the aesthetic and cultural significance of the different traditions of the Italian puppet theater in the broader Italian culture and beyond. Grounded in the often-overlooked history of the evolution of several Italian puppetry traditions – the central and northern Italian stringed marionettes, the Sicilian pupi, the glove puppets of the Po Valley, and the Neapolitan Pulcinella – this study examines a broad spectrum of visual, cinematic, literary, and digital texts representative of the functions and themes of the puppet. A systematic analysis of the meanings ascribed to the idea and image of the puppet provides a unique vantage point to observe the perseverance and transformation of its deeper associations, linking premodern, modern, and contemporary contexts.

Representing Alterity through Puppetry and Performing Objects., 2023

From the perspective of alterity, the predominant figure of the Other in Sicilian puppet theater is undoubtedly the Saracen (Muslim). As antagonists, Saracens have been associated with different historical aggressors, from North Africans to Ottoman Turks to the House of Bourbon ruling Sicily in the 19th century. However, depictions of Saracens across the source texts, time periods, and puppet theater companies are exceptionally multifaceted. Many non-Christian protagonists were beloved by the traditional opera dei pupi public. A chivalrous Mongol khan, for instance, was affectionately depicted with the characteristic mustache of Vittorio Emanuele II, “il re galantuomo” (the honest gentleman king). And some puppeteers reversed the angle and fostered identification with the Saracen underdogs in the face of oppression coming from elsewhere. At the same time, the “Paladins of France” cycle, with its more than 300 nightly episodes, is replete with stories that eschew an opposition between an “us” and a “them” and instead underscore our common humanity across borders of all kinds. Camaraderie, friendship, and even romance can readily emerge between individuals from the most disparate corners of the globe—from China to Africa and from Syria to the islands above the Russian landmass—in extended narratives that encourage and promote understanding and peace. In recent decades, moreover, some Sicilian puppeteers have staged plays that thoughtfully challenge collective confrontations and question conventional societal attitudes. With such boundless material in both traditional and contemporary Sicilian puppet theater, scholars may shine the spotlight on features that either emphasize alterity or embrace diversity. The plays themselves sometimes stage a shift from one perspective to the other, as when an unknown foreign Other becomes a friend, benefactor, or lover. My essay focuses on a selection of examples under the guise of alterity before moving to three principal storylines that celebrate diversity through heterogamous marriages. https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/ballinst_alterity/14

Annali d’Italianistica, 40, 519-522, 2022

Italian Bookshelf 519 convenzionali e "a-canoniche" (18). Ne viene fuori un racconto molto personale attraverso il quale un ricercatore interessato alla figura di Fontanella potrebbe rinvenire materiali interessanti per ricostruire le influenze e il percorso evolutivo dell'autore stesso; Raccontare la poesia può essere quindi considerato anche come un invito a leggere e analizzare l'opera poetica del medesimo Fontanella attraverso la sua avventura di lettore e di critico.

Italian Canadiana

In providing an explanation for the cultural-aesthetic functions of the Italian puppet in the Italian-American cinematographic context, this essay weaves together historical notions on the role of the puppet (and Sicilian pupi in particular) in the Italian-American community, on the collaboration between puppeteers and filmmaker, and on the emotional and ritualistic power of the puppet. Analyzing films such as Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather Part II, the experimental film Tarantella by Helen De Michiel, and John Turturro's autobiographic documentary Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy, this essay focuses on the cultural and cinematographic function played by the puppet in preserving and reinterpreting the Italian-American identity. The discussion also includes an American production such as I Am Suzanne!, where the Italian-American puppet channels negative stereotypes and anxieties towards the Italian immigrant.

Midwest Modern Language Association, Chicago, Illinois, 5 November 2010.

Session A 1. Teatralizzazione di un romanzo: i costumi di scena degli Indifferenti di Moravia Chiara De Santi, SUNY Fredonia 2. Pasolini e lo strappo nella coscienza dello spettatore Fulvio Orsitto, California State Univerisity-Chico 3. Lina Wertmüller regista-burattinaia Federico Pacchioni, University of Connecticut-Storrs Session B 4. Manzoni’s Count of Carmagnola and Kleist’s Prince of Homburg: History between Fiction and Factuality Maria Giulia Carone, University of Wisconsin-Madison 5. Teatro e teatralità nella poesia del primo Palazzeschi Daniele Fioretti, University of Wisconsin Madison 6. Mario Luzi’s Plays: A Plurality of Voices Ernesto Livorni, University of Wisconsin-Madison Session C 7. Distinctive Nature of Masques of Commedia dell’Arte in their Relationship with Food in 18th Century Paola Monte, Royal Holloway, University of London 8. Arlecchino is Lying: Deconstructing Goldoni’s II bugiardo Stefano Boselli, Gettysburg College 9. The Spectator in Dario Fo’s Performances: From the Foyer to the Post-Performance Debates Marco Valleriani, Royal Holloway, University of London

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2012

Inspired by the writings of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Denis Diderot, between 1796 and 1799 Italy lived through an intense period of theatrical reform trying to diffuse the concept of ‘national theater’, financed and controlled by public authorities. This process resulted in the opening of new theaters and opera houses. During the Restoration period, the same idea found a different political declination but with similar results: an even more powerful propagating of public theaters as spaces of urban sociability. The article examines the impact of this process on Italian society since the end of the eighteenth century, identifying some specific characters of the Italian theatrical system in relation to other national cases. The network of Italian theaters during the early nineteenth century shows seemingly contradictory elements whose dynamics have to be explained: local aspirations of excellence and participation in a national circuit of opera production; market dynamics and censorship; police control and involvement in political nationalism.

gender/sexuality/italy, 2019

This essay offers a reading of Mario Mieli's militant political project through the theoretical lens of performativity. Performativity, suspended between, and fully incorporating both the linguistic and the theatrical, courses through Mieli's cultural production. I begin with a discussion of the role of the travestito within the context of Mieli's involvement in the emergence of gay theater in Italy in the late 1970s and its necessarily political valences. I then move on to discuss a performativity that is particular to Mieli's cultural production: to dare, elaborating on the performative structure of Mieli's insistence that to dare is also to give of oneself. I conclude by reflecting on Mieli's figuring of the actor as masochist. For Mieli, masochism makes it possible to dissolve the individual self in favor of a liberated communal self, a subjective process that is enabled through daring acts.

The book is divided into four main chapters, each of which explores different and very specific dramatic conventions and theatrical cultures. Through these case studies Van Pelt strives to illustrate how "certain plays and topoi were used throughout Europe, and that they found themselves reevaluated or reinvented, at times repressed or attacked, so that alternative forms arose that replaced, or existed alongside, their predecessors" (4). The first chapter discusses religious plays and pageants from late medieval Italy, France, and the Low Countries that depicted the desecration of a consecrated Host. The second centers on the figure of Mary Magdalene as represented not only in lesser-known works from the Czech Republic, Germany, and Cyprus but also in plays written by blockbuster dramatists, such as Baroque Spain's Lope de Vega. The third focuses on two different archer-hero characters, England's Robin Hood and Switzerland's Wilhelm Tell, presented as exemplars of elite appropriation of popular and subversive figures across early Renaissance Europe. Finally, the fourth chapter explores a series of civic street performances that took place in 1607 in Wells, England, by examining them in their wider European social and cultural contexts. Clearly the breadth of this book's scope and subject matter is remarkable, especially when considering its length (144 pages). It is much to Van Pelt's credit that she manages to bind these wide-ranging chapters closely together and make them read as a monographic study. Such cohesion rests on the selection of performances that share an underlying element of strategic thinking: as she explains, all the plays discussed in the book "stage a cross-over between the world of the play and the world outside the play" (126), and in doing so attempt to exercise some form of leverage in real life through the medium of performance. Also connecting these chapters is the author's pervasive commitment to transnational reading, abetted by her dexterity and fluency in various languages and cultures. Accompanying its readers across an impressive range of geographic, temporal, or linguistic boundaries, Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe guides them toward a better understanding of the common ground on which the theatrical cultures of medieval and early modern Europe were built.