Marco Paolini: «Let’s not fall into the trap of nostalgia»

«CWhat is parka, father? «It was a kind of uniform, a kind of left-wing burqa. But mine was out of order.” «Why, father?». «Instead of green they bought me blue. The only wrong parka in the city, mine: blue! “It’s more elegant” my mother said. How do you find a girlfriend if you have a blue parka? At this point of Boomers the audience in the theater – Boomers in flesh and blood, but also Millennials and Gen Z – he laughs loudly. But this is not the goal of Marco Paolini, that he interprets and directs the show, as well as having written it with his partner, Michela Signori, and with the advice of Marco Gnaccolini and Simone Tempia. No consolatory-reassuring effect like “We weren’t that bad”. No rogue nostalgia, despite some quotes and memories being a bit heart-stopping.

“Not a Bignami”

«It’s not a Bignami of the events that marked a generation, I used a trick that allowed me to choose freely and assemble in bulk, like in a blender» he begins. The trick? Soon said: Nicola (his alter ego / avatar) finds himself catapulted into the past, in Jole’s bar (his youthful refuge), to provide material to his son, a programmer of virtual reality scenarios who was commissioned to work on Boomers.

The Factory of the World

The re-enactment of adventures and flirtations begins in a kaleidoscope of 50 years of history. Here is Vietnam, the cloning of Dolly the sheep, the anarchist Pinelli, the Tuca Tuca, Great songJohn Lennon, the pacifists, Aldo Moro kidnapped, austerity, Giovannona Coscialongadivorce, abortion, Mexico and cloudsthe Berlin Wall, Italy-Germany 4-3, AIDS, “Ugo Tognazzi head of the Red Brigades” according to the satirical magazine Evilsandwiches, overbuilding, highways, “Don’t eat mushrooms because of Chernobyl”, coins in Craxi, Tiananmen Square, karaoke, Super Mario Bros, Maradona’s Mano de Dios and Clean Hands.

«I missed ’68 (I was in middle school), so I start from ’69, from Apollo 11 and the moon landing» explains Paolini, who is already working on a new text on Darwin and his explorations in Argentina from a contemporary optics (“Patagonia, with global warming, will become cultivable and decisive for the agricultural economy of the Southern hemisphere within half a century”). Not only: the “Factory of the world” project continues, «a construction sitea meeting ground between people with different professions – artists, scientists, citizens – who reflect together on how to realize the objectives identified in the UN 2030 Agenda for sustainable development”.

Marco Paolini: «Being a father is not legitimate»

Boomers it is, in his words, an “attempt to maintain the transmission belt of experience”. Did having a child eight years ago inspire you?
I do not know. It seems to me that – cyclically – certain reflections come back to me while, in the meantime, I have changed. Like Monopoly: I go around, yet each time following a different path. What happens around you affects you, but it would be a romantic and stupid explanation: “he became an adult because he became a dad”. It’s not a step that legitimizes you.

So how did the idea come about?
In a naive way. For years I have been thinking about the impact that technologies have on me, almost as if I struggled to admit it. The first time you see someone talking to himself while walking you sneer, but then you’ll put on your earphones and you’ll be like him. If you don’t take note of these changes, you risk considering everything as a degeneration of what was in the past to the point of, simplifying, arguing that the world before immigrants was better and justifying a demagoguery based precisely on nostalgia and regret.

What to do?
Physiologists and neurologists explain that the brain suffers from the same problem as the stomach: it must “digest”. When there is acceleration (and this is an accelerated society, so the distance between us and those born after increases exponentially), you swallow, you swallow, and you are unable to assimilate. We invented slow food (smiles), we should invent something similar for the mind. The theater, in part, serves this purpose.

Boomer… Old or vintage?

The son, in his show, claims: once fathers were contested, “now we ignore them”.
Sociologists say there is no contestation because there is no common context. And it cannot be otherwise if you as an adult consider the young person to be a device-dependent misfit or a superficial addict to horizontal learning (multiple things together, not one at a time, to the detriment of depth) and he silences you with: “Ok, Boomer! ”. My approach is: if we can’t suspend judgment, at least let’s maintain curiosity towards different perspectives. Otherwise those who are left behind just seem old, like my theatre.

No old, come on: we use “vintage”, as you note regarding the Christian Democrats.
(smiles) The risk is that, without realizing it, you find yourself belonging to a category that for some is vintage (and has admirers), but for many it is waste age, garbage, having had a heavy impact on the planet in environmental and economic terms. Are we disposable or, instead, should we not run the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

The answer?
Politics understood as participatory democracy is the child not to be thrown away. In a moment of crisis like the current one we cannot suffer choices, we need to recover participation, give meaning back to politics: it is a powerful tool, although it takes a lot to make it sexy.

For the Boomers it was.
I remember – both at school and in the neighborhood – a long series of tiring assembly demonstrations: being present, intervening was important. Democracies today appear tarnished, a dream of the twentieth century: pragmatism is pushed, there is a passive acceptance of market logic as universal logic. Borders are permeable to goods, impervious to people. However Boomers he is also ferocious with those close to me: he demands effective change. If you tell yourself that it’s enough to be satisfied with small steps, you’re justifying the fact that you haven’t done a damn thing.

“A rubbish at tennis”

Ken Loach told us that the Right has an intelligent strategy because it is based on some truth.
Your opponents’ proposals are not always ideologically and radically different from yours, and sometimes you get lost in the nuances, you lose motivation.

She has been offering her civil contribution from the stage for four decades. How did you choose this path?
I played tennis badly, I was rubbish at basketball and football: I tried acting, there was less competition.

Jokes aside?
For me the theater came as a continuation of political activity. At the beginning you are on the border between amateur and militancy, with Bertolt Brecht’s texts. When you meet Jerzy Grotowski and the avant-garde, you start following seminars around Europe and discover that, more than words, the body has something to do with it… And you choose not on the basis of an egocentric strategy but to enter into relationship with others, with notable radicalism. That youthful radicalism that depends on a thousand reasons, perhaps because you are fragile and use the barriers they give you, having not yet built your own. Where did the text go? I will find the text again years and years later.

In 1990 the Album“collective biography” from the 1960s.
The first ones talk about children, then the children become teenagers and go straight from the parish to the café. The Jole bar? It is a literary construction, a montage of various places I had frequented with various characters I had met.

Why “Jole”?
It has a sound that reminds me of something anachronistic, I certainly didn’t want a fashionable, “trendy” name. This is also the name of a type of boat that was used for rowing and on which I used to row (Paolini was born in Belluno and grew up in Treviso, a city of rivers and canals, ed).

Vajont, 60 years ago

1993, great success of the monologue The tale of Vajont for the thirtieth anniversary of the dam disaster (two thousand victims). He has just presented it again at the Piccolo in Milan for the 60th anniversary accompanied by VajontS 23 (Civil theater choral action)which involved schools, universities and institutions.
The mobilization that took place had many people with white hair… Or without hair, like me. It was very clear to them that the environmental challenge is a political challenge, but should not be addressed on an ideological basis. I don’t have the presumption to give little lessons, I won’t hold my little finger up anymore.

Sometimes the little finger is useful, and a lot.
We have tools older than the raised finger.

Meaning what?
The Greek classics didn’t raise their little finger, it’s the dramaturgy of the 20th century that raises it. Our colleagues from a few centuries ago showed us the way to reach hearts and heads (laughs).

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