Raw and living stones of a chapel, a white screen where words are printed, a black piano, a metal table, a few subtle lights. Gustavo Giacosa, total theater man specializing in Art Brut, and Fausto Ferraiuolo, composer and pianist, bring to life the madness of Fernando Nannetti, interned for nine years in the insane asylum in Volterra, in Italy. He engraved with a stylus an open book on the walls and facade of the hospital, full of poetic outbursts and puns.
A red clown nose, a microphone for the texts of Nannetti, solar madman. Nothing naturalistic, and yet it is indeed the fragility, the chaos of madness, the overwhelming solitude of confinement that the actor-dancer shows and hears. Accompanied by silences, smiles or the brutal bursts of Ferraiuolo’s intensely jazz piano. There is also this insistent presence of the stars, this freedom of a butterfly, this softness of foliage until the final video: the character Fernando Nannetti and his ferryman, Gustavo Giacosa, sink and disappear into the ruins of the hospital of Volterra, closed for around thirty years: upsetting!
That art “calls” the dead, the Mediterranean Fausto Ferraiulo and the Argentinian Gustavo Giacosa give us proof. Painful. Joyful.
Nannetti, astral colonel at the Théâtre des Halles, until July 21 at 4:30 p.m. (releases on July 3, 10 and 17).
Prices: from 5 to 22€. Tickets theatredeshalles.com and on 0432762451.
Danièle Carraz
