Sentiti Tabacchine (Feel Tabacchine) - seventh art residency Playing Memories

For its seventh stage, “Playing Memories” – the artistic residency project conceived by the Saint Louis College of Music in Rome – returns to L’Aquila, at the A. Casella Conservatory, already the site of one of the previous residencies. Leading the new project is dancer and choreographer Mattia Carlucci, who presents the idea of a performance inspired by a tragic but little-known event that occurred in his homeland of Puglia. On June 13, 1960, St. Anthony’s Day, a fire ravaged a tobacco factory in Calimera, in the heart of Salentinian Greece. Triggering the flames was a cigarette butt thrown perhaps not by accident. Twelve tabacchine, workers not assigned to that department, are trapped in the fire. Six of them will lose their lives. From this forgotten episode – deeply rooted in the history of Southern Italy – Mattia Carlucci builds a work that, by placing the body at the center as an instrument of memory and narration, becomes both a performative gesture and an act of denunciation. “Feel tabacchine” wants to turn the spotlight on the South: exploited, abandoned, wounded, but also alive, plural, resilient. A South in which “myth and ritual,” folk beliefs, archaic songs and ancestral dances resist time, creating a powerful and invisible glue between generations. Mattia wants to tell the story of the feeling that runs through her land. “Sentiti tabacchine” is the gesture by which he seeks to restore voice to the dignity of women’s labor, to oral memory, to the strength of community. The six tabacchine of Calimera, brought on stage, represent the Voice of those women, while the burning factory thus becomes a symbol of a place that sometimes turns work into a trap with no return. The body is not only a means of expression, but becomes an altar, archive and denunciation, in constant dialogue with music – suspended between electronics, percussive elements and archaic sounds of the Mediterranean and folk tradition – and with visual art. The heritage of the oral tradition dances and songs of Southern Italy thus embraces the panorama of World Music, in an ancestral, timeless and mythical atmosphere, to tell the present. “Sentiti tabacchine,” will make its debut at the Auditorium of the A. Casella Conservatory of L’Aquila. The international replication will take place in Prague, where, thanks to a partnership with the Music and Dance Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts, the show will be replicated at the Ponec Theatre. “Playing Memories” is a project of the Saint Louis College of Music, co-produced with the Alfredo Casella Conservatory in L’Aquila, the Fondazione Accademia Teatro alla Scala in Milan, RUFA – Rome University of Fine Arts and ISIA Roma Design – Higher Institute for Artistic Industries.