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LA PARANZA DEI BAMBINI
"The Nuovo Teatro Sanità and Mario Gelardi are not just resistance and are not simply theater. They are the core around which at the Sanità, to Naples, a real present is being built, one that can be touched, seen and heard. A future that can be imagined. They are voices that overpower screams, they are outstretched hands. With them, with Mario, I work to bring La paranza dei bambini to the stage. Only they can transform my words into bodies, faces and voices."
Roberto Saviano
They have designer shoes, almost normal families and big "belonging" wings tattooed on their backs. They speed on their motorcycles against the grain through the streets of Naples because they know that their only chance is to gamble everything and now. They do not fear jail or death. They shoot, they deal, they spend. They are the children's paranza.
In Camorra slang, "paranza" means criminal group, but the term has seafaring origins and indicates the small fishing boats that, in pairs, pull their nets into the shallows, where mostly small fish are caught for paranza frying. The expression "children's paranza" indicates the battery of fire, but it also renders with some fidelity the image of fish so small from that they can only be cooked fried, just like those very young people linked to the Camorra that Roberto Saviano recounts in his latest best seller.
And that novel now becomes a play that tells a raw, violent, no-holds-barred truth. Don't to chance the play was born in the Nuovo Teatro Sanità, a 'miraculous' place in the heart of Naples, where people try to build a real present and imagine a possible future.
"Childhood is a disease, a malady from which is cured by growing up," said William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies. And as in Saviano's novel so too in the play, the protagonists create their own community that imposes fierce rules to lose their innocence and grow up.
After the successful experience of the show_ Gomorrah_, Roberto Saviano and Mario Gelardi join forces again in this theatrical project to tell the story of a teenage tribe's controversial rise to power, ready to to plunge into the darkness of Shakespearian tragedy (didn't scholar Jan Kott say that it is slaughter that is one of the nodal themes of Shakespeare'sopera ?) and into the infinite blackness of Frank Miller's comic books.
"It took me ten years to become a child, to shoot you in the face takes a second."
By Roberto Saviano and **Mario Gelardi **.
directed by Mario Gelardi
with Vincenzo Antonucci, Luigi Bignone, Carlo Caracciolo, Antimo Casertano, Riccardo Ciccarelli, Mariano Coletti, Giampiero de Concilio, Simone Fiorillo, Carlo Geltrude, Enrico Maria Pacini
scenes Armando Alovisi
0770 costumes by Irene De Caprio
music Tommy Grieco
lights Paco Summonte
collaboration on direction Carlo Caracciolo
assistant director Irene Grasso
Mismaonda programming Gianluca Russino and Laura Montagna
a project Nuovo Teatro Sanità
product from Mismaonda
in collaboration with Marche Teatro
charity partner** Amref Health Africa**
He was born to Naples in 1979. He graduated in Philosophy from the University of Naples Federico II. In March 2006 he published his first novel Gomorra, published from Mondadori. Translated in more than 50 countries, it became a bestseller with 10 million copies sold worldwide. A play (awarded at the 2008 Theatre Olympics), a film of the same name (Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival) and a TV series were made from the book. Roberto Saviano has also published_ La bellezza e l'inferno _(Mondadori 2009), La parola contro la camorra (Einaudi 2010), Vieni via con me (Feltrinelli 2011), ZeroZeroZero (Feltrinelli 2013) and _La paranza dei bambini _(Feltrinelli 2016). He writes for several Italian and international newspapers including La Repubblica and L'Espresso, Newsweek, the New York Times, El País, Die Zeit, Expressen, Dagens Nyheter and The Times. Since October 2006 he has been living under escort following threats he received from clans he denounced. In 2008 he received the solidarity of several Nobel laureates and to November that year he was invited to Sweden to to give a speech on freedom of expression at the Nobel Academy.
Born to Naples, he began to working in the 1990s, first as an assistant director of independent film productions, then as an author and director of short films and documentaries. He is currently the artistic director of the Nuovo Teatro Sanità in Naples. In 2017 he received the Giuseppe Fava Award for artistic and cultural commitment. He was director and author with Claudio Finelli of the project Do not disturb - Il teatro si fa in albergo (Festival di Todi, Benevento Città Spettacolo). He signed the text of L'abito della sposa, a show presented at the Todi Festival in 2014. Director and co-author together to Roberto Saviano of _Gomorra _(Premio "Olimpici per il teatro", Premio Enriquez for civil commitment), he is also author of the German and Swiss versions of the same. Also together to Roberto Saviano writes Santos. He directs and adapts La città di fuori, based on from Angelo Petrella'sLa città perfetta, which debuted in the 2010 edition of the "Napoli Teatro Festival Italia." Ustica Prize for theater 2005 with Quattro; 2005 Riccione Prize finalist with Becchini, written with Giuseppe Miale di Mauro. Flaiano Prize in 2002 with Malamadre, currently on stage to Prague as Zlomatka. He wrote with Giuseppe Miale di Mauro Santa Maria del pallone, performed to Duinsburg for the 2006 World Cup. With Idroscalo 93, a show produced by the Teatro Mercadante in Naples, he participated in the "Progetto Petrolio" directed from Mario Martone. He directed the festivals "Theaters of Legality" and "Presente Indicativo" and conducted writing and theater workshops with young people from the IPM in Nitida. He has been a lecturer of the Master of Dramaturgy and Theater Criticism at the University of Naples Federico II in Naples.