Ossa di Crita | Friday 16 September, Studio Solipsis, Rabat, Malta
Reading-performance from Massimo Barilla’s poetry collection Ossia di crita (Mesogea 2020). Original live music by Luigi Polimeni (piano, synth, theremin). With the participation of Elizabeth Grech and Adrian Grima.
A reading performance created as an open and dynamic conversation between poetic words and music. Each original composition dialogues with each and every poem read or chanted in the dialect of Reggio Calabria, a sound substrate rooted in the linguistic waves that travel to and from Sicily and Calabria crossing the Strait of Messina.
Ossa di Crita – Reading-performance by Mana Chuma Teatro
Reading-performance from Massimo Barilla’s poetry collection ‘Ossa di Crita’ with original live music by Luigi Polimeni (piano, synth, theremin)
Collected and published for the first time, the poems written in the dialect of Reggio Calabria are like stumbling pebbles scattered along a path of over twenty years of research and writing that travels through the experience of theatre to reach poetry verses.
Small concretions of the soul nourished by words and visions of earth, matter and body in which sonority and meaning are intimately related. The musicality is not only the skeleton of this body of earth but it also becomes flesh itself, a living audio matter with low sounds, twisted and dissonant cadences that claim a voice to live, to vibrate in the language of the soul and memory: the dialect
Cogghiu supra ’sta strata, chi munda comu persica matura a facci da muntagna, petri ianchi comu la peddi nova di la stati chi veni a lu ’ntrasattu
On this road / that peels / the mountain’s face / like a ripe peach / I pick up stones / white as the / new skin of a / sudden summer. (Translated into English by Elizabeth Grech)
This event forms part of Studio Solipsis’ Programme of Events 2022/3, which is supported by Arts Council Malta.
“In Barilla’s words (…) there are the terms and atmospheres that identify this sharp-pointed land that wounds and embraces, clods that produce chicory and thistles as well as the bitter sweetness of the intensely scented bergamot. There are the hands, the flavours, the knowledge, the scratches, the nails and the wind, the father, the teeth, the wine, the blood, the footprints, the pain, the flesh, the stone, the dust, the mud, the shadows, the mother. (…) Playing the Theremin, the musician and composer Luigi Polimeni accompanies Barilla. The magic it creates is one that surfs on the nothingness, gives meaning, cuts the silence. Barilla’s poetry is tactile and natural, it is a poetry of cuts and bites, artisan words, embers, narrow eyes, of love and death.”
Tommaso Chimenti – Recensito
adriangrima.org 