A project by Caridi, Ferracchiati, Menegazzo, Zanetti, Zani
Text by Irene Petra Zani
with Linda Caridi
production PAV, Teatro i
within the context of Fabulamundi Playwriting Europe – Beyond borders?
A woman on the seashore with her lifelong companion: an inflatable doll.
She can’t swim. For the Woman, he is real; his eyes are the only eyes that she can tolerate being looked from.
The relationship has existed and has lasted for over ten thousand years.
This love is degradable, like plastic. An illusion.
IL BAMBOLO deals with the pathology of anorexia, understood in the sense of symptom and defense following an abuse that occurred during childhood, and tells the comic tragedy of impossible love and its inexhaustible request for an encounter and dialectic with the Other, eternally present and assent.
The work comes from a meeting of languages: the poetic, delicate one of the author, Irene Petra Zani, and the sharp, shrewd, sardonic one directed by Liv Ferracchiati. A language that has to do with despair and irony, with lightness and distance, with a tireless “hand-to-hand” between stage and audience. The text focuses on a “relationship disease”, which has its roots in a family void, crossing three themes: anorexia, (paternal) abuse, and (maternal) abandonment.
Based on the potential of the thematic nuclei addressed, since its writing, the show has been nourished by the support of the Eating Disorders Department in the Niguarda Hospital in Milan, where, in 2015, the interpreter Linda Caridi undertook a theatrical workshop with the patronage of Officine Buone and the Erika Onlus Association. Within two years the course was recognized as being of medical interest by the ward team. In view of a direct confrontation with disease experts, the project also obtained the support of the Il Pellicano Onlus Association of Perugia, which deals with Eating Disorders.
