“A composite, mature, expert work, a perfectly calibrated structure of technique and heart where the Mana Chuma’s showed all their high know-how: the music and sound design by Luigi Polimeni, the installations by the artist Aldo Zucco, the text and direction, by Massimo Barilla and Salvatore Arena, an effective, solid, dense construction that exalted every detail and element of the theatrical ensemble. The set is subdivided into many altars to be experienced and inhabited, to be entered into (almost like Antonio Rezza in Flavia Mastrella’s works), a space that Arena takes, expands, enlarges, breaking through the fence of possibilities. In the skeletons, in the frames, amidst the skeletons of ships, sails intertwined with bandages and wrappings, keels and hulls of Zucco (that reminded us of Claudio Parmiggiani’s work Naufragio con spettatore – Shipwreck with a Spectator), Arena brings to light all his skills as a structured, solid actor (…) and he grinds pathos and lavishes breath, spreads strength, drips passion, spins power. (…)
Arena is earth and clouds, he is crazy energy and the stage is his natural habitat: the audience is enraptured. “Un’altra Iliade” is a hymn against war, it is a song to life”.
So writes Tommaso Chimenti, journalist and theatre critic, on “Un’altra Iliade” (Another Ilaid), a new Mana Chuma Teatro production, in his review of the 2023 Festival Colpi di Scena for Gagarin Magazine.
