chere are shows that need nothing, three tables and two sheets are enough to glue the audience to their seats. It’s what happens with The trains of happiness by director Laura Sicignano, her new work written together with Alessandra Vannucci produced by Luzzati Foundation Teatro della Tosse and Made Association.
The interpreters of The trains of happiness: Federica Carruba Toscano, Egle Doria, Fiammetta Bellone.
The trains of happiness
On stage a true story that belongs to us, not only because it is an extraordinary example of solidarity between women, but because it tells what it means to know how to rebuild on the rubble and create community. A page that is not in school books. Between 1946 and 1947 in post-war Italy there were thousands of children in conditions of absolute poverty and many parents who with broken hearts decided to entrust their children to those who could feed them and give them a dignified life.
On those “Trains of Happiness” about 70,000 children of all ages and dialects went up to “Upper Italy”. To host them there weren’t rich families, but generous people capable of welcoming them as their own children. To arrange that wonderful “Peace Machine” were the women of the newborn Udi-Unione Donne Italiane starting with Teresa Noce, a partisan and Communist leader who recently returned from the extermination camp at Ravensbrück.
A real story that lands in the theatre
An important episode in our history that lands in the theater and gains a voice thanks to the interpretation of three excellent actresses, Fiammetta Bellone, Federica Carruba Toscano and Egle Doria, three women of different ages and origins just like the many protagonists of the story were, who in balance between fiction and reality on stage question themselves on how much past and memory have contributed to forming their present identities. A delicate interweaving of real lives, therefore, a winning choice for a show where civil commitment, poetry and empathy are one.
An entirely female show (the only man on stage the musician Edmondo Romano), another step in Laura Sicignano’s thirty-year research journey.
How did the idea for this show come about?
«I’ve always tried to give a voice to the losers and to those who didn’t have one, therefore to the history of women. Only now are we starting to say how much we have been present in the social and political life of our country, but for millennia we have been removed. In my previous Women at War I tell how in the Second World War women tried to maintain dignity, femininity and normality when nothing was dignified or normal. No narration, it all really happened, just like in The Trains of Happiness. An episode erased from history even if it involved millions of people, including children, relatives, families and organizers, but only now that the protagonists are disappearing do we start talking about it».
We forget about history
What do you think are the reasons for this oblivion?
«The reasons are various: on the one hand the shame of the parents who abandoned their children because they could not feed them, on the other there is that tireless “Machina di pace” was organized by women of the Constituent Assembly, of the Udi and anti-fascists who sometimes they worked at odds with their male partners.’
In the show, the actresses enter the stage to put History in order according to a different order, another point of view of the facts, but also a different ability to act.
“Yes, women sprinkle death with flowers. They are industrious without respite: even when they reflect on the meaning of history, they hang out sheets, even when they get together to re-design the world they handle the wool. They have very little at their disposal to create a new world, but they do it with intelligence, imagination and freedom. They have to invent a new language and new values to rebuild from the rubble and they do it starting from the work on stage. They have to fight against oblivion in order to rebuild».
The trains of happiness, the value of hospitality
The trains of happiness are also a practical example of what solidarity and sense of community means. But here we are also talking about motherhood as a political act.
“Women Constituents were able to undermine patriarchy with revolutionary and constructive action. Children abandoned and welcomed out of love expanded the biological role of the mother. Added to this is the political value of hospitality. The children were hosted by very normal families and the community mobilized to help them so they didn’t feel welcomed only by the new parents, but by everyone”.
Did the children then go home?
«The majority yes, they will return to live with their original family. The others will stay in the welcoming families».
Feminine universe, responsibility, care, sharing, interculture, hospitality, themes that have always fueled her research path.
«I don’t like giving lessons, I prefer to tell stories in which I feel involved. For years I have worked with asylum seekers and unaccompanied minors, I have done four shows with them, and I have learned a lot from them. They told me “that’s enough, we don’t want to be called migrants, refugees, but travellers”. They were kids who left Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, countries from which they fled as children, an important experience that has the value of a rite of passage: if you arrive alive on the other side, by birth you are small, but in truth you are a great , a man. When I listened to the stories of these kids who left desperate countries for other places where there was a different food, culture and dialect waiting for them, I felt like I was hearing my grandmother’s stories about the war».
An all female story
Many lines intertwine in his work. Another all-female story is Scintille. The tragedy of the Italian women who left to work in that blouse factory in New York which caught fire. An episode from which March 8 was born.
“A story of women traveling in search of economic independence, who leave without trade union rights and burn like witches”.
Among forgotten heroes, pages of the past to be reconstructed, and the traumas of travelling, the encounter with the Other is always the central element of his way of making theater.
«I don’t conceive of any other way of working than to get personally involved. For Kakuma, the recent work on refugee camps, I went to Africa to share the reality of those who work in those places. People who have made extreme choices and can help us understand what we are talking about».
A way of working that chooses theater as a form of knowledge and mediation of reality.
«You can’t throw pages of history or news directly in the face of the public, it would be an act of pornography, of voyeurism, you risk rejection, de-responsibility, detachment. In The Trains of Happiness empathy is triggered because it is a founding story of our identity and even if it has been forgotten we have it inside. We all have an “uncle from America”, we are all migrants. My migrant grandfather is today’s little traveling boy, with one difference, my grandfather had it easier».
Laura Sicignano wants to leave us a final thought on the borders and differences that separate cultures and peoples?
«I have never seen the world divided between foreigners and natives. I’m sure that if we all started to see the nuances and not just the colors, history would be different and without a doubt the winners would be women».
iO Woman © REPRODUCTION RESERVED