Davide Enia, Self-Portrait with Mafia‍

Text by Massimo Marino
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Davide Enia in the creation of his shows proceeds by turbulence. In the stories he tells he inlays memories, feelings, bewilderment, thoughts, reactions, indignations.... He begins to putting the pieces together by studying archives and documents, he interrogates people who were close to the events, he looks at photographs, he goes to places and confronts himself with the marks left by actions. His is a theater of memory that already at the stage of the magmatic composition of the show is designed as a theater of the body, of the body voice, of the body song, which relives things, facts, people, conflicts transforming them into a very special music, a music of the heart, of reason, of sensation, propitiated mostly by Giulio Barocchieri's friendly and virtuoso guitar.

In this way in Italy-Brazil 3 to 2 he recounted the soccer match of his childhood (he was born in 1974), that of the 1982 World Cup, with a victory that gave enthusiasm to a nation that was soccer-depressed and in the grip of the twists and turns that followed the clashes of the 1960s and 1970s: he narrated it in a Palermo interior, in an apartment but also in the balconies and balconies of the building, with a weaving of voices of relatives, neighbors, and the folgurations of life.
So in May '43 he went back as far as the bombing of the Sicilian capital in that wartime spring, making use of witnesses and his gaze that so many times had interrogated the gashes, the gaps left in the city by the bombs.
Thus in Abisso he interpreted, like a symphony composed of jarring movements, intimate reflections, and passionate pity, the tragedies of Lampedusa, the arrivals of men and women from across the sea, the shipwrecks, the deaths, in a tight dialogue beyond the silences with his father, a doctor and photographer by passion, and with his gravely ill uncle, a journey into the pain and explosion of existences and language.
to these and other performances we can associate with the 2012 novel Così in terra, a story of boxers and aspirations spanning fifty years of Sicilian history, from the African war to the Mafia massacres that cut short the lives of judges Falcone and Borsellino.
These dragging works, centered on a main character, often young, naive, enchanted, surrounded from a polyphony of voices, those of a complex southern city, go beyond historical memory and autobiography. Rather, they are dense, chiaroscuro self-portraits of the author and his city, of a self that sees itself growing, dreaming, existing in a place full of contrasts, in a world that it nevertheless loves, that tries to understand why it offends at so many moments, deeply, its will to live. In this sense, the self-portrait, full of smears, erasures, real explosions of colors and figure deformations, the "Francis Bacon-esque" portrait (this is Enia's suggestion), becomes a passionate sorrowful environmental painting, a deflagrated Guernica of the twenty-first century that seeks pauses of peace, smiles and sociability in the devastation.‍

Self-Portrait is the title of the show Davide Enia is bringing to Festival dei Due Mondi to Spoleto. At the time of writing this note the matter is still in turmoil, awaiting accommodation. We know, from a preview made to Radio 3, that to at some point he will narrate the assassination attempt on Judge Borsellino, as Davide, who lived across the street from the judge's house, experienced it.
It was a hot July. The boy's parents were on vacation. He was preparing for maturity with a friend and heard a bang, far away. He looked outside and everything seemed to right. Then came to to know of the explosion, of the assassination perpetrated elsewhere, in front of the judge's mother's house on Via D'Amelio.
More: like a vanniata, a selling cry from Palermo's street vendors, the play will begin with a statement, "The first dead man killed I saw to eight years old, returning to home from school." It will recall the murder of Don Pino Puglisi, Enia's religion teacher, and the deadly assassination attempt to Giovanni Falcone to Capaci. Here the words will explode, as in the cunto, the tale of the exploits of Charlemagne's paladins, when the battles become bloody and the accents of the phrase shift, the saying becomes syncopated, the words explode in the clash of swords or shields or, as in this case, under the roar of TNT that breaks lives and dreams.
But the center of the show," the author anticipates, "will be the ferocious murder of little Giuseppe Di Matteo, son of a collaborator of justice, 'kidnapped, held for 778 days in captivity in appalling conditions and finally killed by strangulation and then dissolved in acid. An inhuman story that is configured as the appearance of evil, the sacred in its declination of darkness."

Evil contiguous to everyday lives. He still anticipates the author, who will transfigure in his body and voice, in his sensibility, all the material he is collecting by studying documents, interviewing people, with the collaboration of three retired former Anti-Mafia officials, who help him to walk through the endless pages of the trial: "In a cultural cradle in which 'to megghiu parola è chìdda ca 'un si dice, the best word is the unspoken one, which is configured as the first threshold of omertà, to really confront Cosa Nostra is to begin a process of self-analysis. to Palermo all of us have very few degrees of separation with Cosa Nostra."
This show is analysis, hot, hot, but also self-analysis, deep: "I have no memory of May 23, 1992. I do not remember where I was, with whom, when and where I learned the news of the highway bomb that killed Judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and some agents of the escort. My relatives, my friends, my comrades, all the people I know have a clear memory of that day. I have a void that will not be filled. My emotional defenses have effected a removal that is as deep as it is painful. But isn't removal one of the effects of neurosis? In Sicily practically all of us had, at least until the massacres, a relationship of pure neurosis with Cosa Nostra. It is a discourse that has to to do with shared collective consciousness, with the practice of everyday life, with millenary structures of thought. For various reasons, from we the Mafia has been minimized, underestimated, trivialized, removed or, on the contrary, mythologized. That is: it has never been addressed for what it is. And, to this blurring of the object from study, has been matched by an unconscious introjection of those identical modes of behavior, same practices, similar emotional outbursts. For a glance that lingers on a detail, to Palermo can start an aggàddo, a fight. The father who imposes on his son the enrollment to a given university faculty multiplies the logic of the patriarch who must be obeyed. The difficulty of naming desire and the consequent surrender to the dictatorship of silence makes the logic of Power ready to attack and to impose itself with greater ease. This, then, is one of the problems we have with Cosa Nostra: in a painful and disconcerting way, to sometimes the Mafia represents a mirror of our family life, our decision-making and operational processes, our way of observing the world and understanding relationships, our relationship with religion. These are all operations that dig to unconscious level, and that precisely in the common linguistic base create the first emotional scars."

And this narrative also poses questions for the theater: why act all this out on stage? Can the Pirandellian step out and into the facts, into the parts we wear, heal the neurosis? How far to can stage action go inside the truth, into that terrible truth of who mercilessly slaughtered a child? The mob is a little theater of poses, of phrases, of rituals: how can our other rituals of theatrical revival undermine it? What is it, finally, and what can or what cannot theater be?