Bitef

it then becomes the exercise of a negation, you appear to repudiate every divinity, every doctrine, even your own profession. You can even now, or perhaps only now, be useful, A utility in spite of the waste. Or for the utility of your waste. Some people said: »Yes, but yours is not a political theatre. You could not make your mark on the reality of the people. Yours is a small theatre for a few people, which cannot be understood by the uninitiated. You would have no function outside your own milieu, here in southern Italy, for example.« And they forget that function means relationship, something dialectical which changes, not something static. Many motives contributed to our decision to go and work in southern Italy. Among others, a form of contempt for all who talk a lot, judge a lot and act little. We can live in a world where we know the rules. Or else we can abandon that world and leave. The what do we meet? We meet men who do not recognise our coin. You hold in your hand that which, elsewhere, is defined as your art, like an ancient copper coin, rare, altered by time, by the use of generations, corroded by the earth which kept it hidden. The figures on its two faces are now an enigma. The coin has now become an object whose value is greater the less it is used. It used to circulate in the markets, in the hands of those who bought and sold. Now it stands on the shelves of coin collectors, well protected in the glass cases of museums. You want to take it away from what is apparently its definitive world. You take it back to where it was originally minted as though to restore a fragment of the past to a present which gives it life. But here no one any longer recognises it as something belonging to them. Of course you should have known. So you can go back, clutching your coin. Or else you can stay, and deciede to use it, exchange it. But now you know that years of research and specialised catalogues count for nothing, and that its value coincides with what it can be reduced to in material terms: the weight of its copper. The circle of the theatre can be broken. Your theatre can be used as an object of exchange in a reality without theatre, to confront people who you wish to meet, whose needs are different to yours. You may not be able to start a dialogue, but you can perhaps approach these diverse needs which are otherwise so distant. But you must rediscover a new humility. Be a clown, a stranger who dances. People will gather around you because you have accepted that you are not the navel of this living organism, that it is not your audience. Yet you must have the same strength, the same pregnancy, the same courage to go forward all the time. Why deny it? I watch this performance with a strange uneasiness. As one might perhaps watch a child of one’s maturity who talks to us not of our future but of our present. Who talks harshly. Another image, another of the starting points for »Come! And the day will be ours«: Sitting Bull the shaman, the chief who had inflicted on

Why deny it?

the United States the greatest defeat of their history was there in Buffalo Bill’s circus. He played the part of the terrifying Indian. Afterwards he signed autographs, sold photograps of himself to the audience. Cody-Buffalo Bill, satisfied, gave him his own trained horse. At the end of the American tour he asked him to go with the circus to Europe, but Sitting Bui refused; he wanted to return to the Reservation: an unhealthy place, wretchedly poor, where the Indian nation had degenerated. Those who had once smoked tobacco as a sign of brotherhood, as a ritual sign of communion, now smoked cigarette-edns to pass the time, with the same gestures as the whites, alcoholic, dressed in old cast off clothes. Sitting Bull is buried thanks to the pity of a white soldier, after being killed on the Reservation by the Indian police. It was in 1890, when the Ghost Dance should have brought freedom and the re-awakening of the dead. The Indians on all the Reservations danced at length, danced and danced. But we do not remember that year for the message of hope of the Indian prophet Wowoka. We remember it for another massacre the usual women and children and old people the last, which carries the well known name of Woundod Knee. I imagine that those who see »Come! And the day will be ours will« find in the performance other leaves and other roots, different to the ones I have gathered here. Just as the new tree develops and ramifies according to the various saps which each actor carries within him. The last word does not belong to the director. After months and months of work, the moment arrives when he must step aside and watch, try to penetrate the web before him, and the meaning of this new presence. What more can I say? There are dark forces which blind. And there are dark forces which give insight. Dark forces are carrying me. I do not yet know where. (Eugenio Barba )