There are cases in which you feel the show’s climate as soon as you enter the room. Often, this happens when the curtain is absent and the actors are ready on stage, focused on the silence and waiting for it to fall. A bare scene, two women and a dancer dressed like a horse, panels suspended from the high sky of the Teatro Studio Melato in Milan. The lights go down and the poetry begins.
The show is written and directed by Camelia Ghazali, a young Iranian woman of the eighties. I’m a woman. Do you hear me? is the story of the female condition narrated by a group of women. Words with syncopated rhythm, sounds and lights, the snow descends and whitens; the imaginary mountains collect and send back voices: life and pain are told. The words and the breaths emphasize the gashes of life, masterfully supported by Mehran Mirmiri’s music as far as action and words are concerned.
A plot-non-plot in which the protagonists open themselves by alternating their voices, without overlapping. Each woman collects the previous story but at the same time grafts her own. The protagonists move on stage in a chase of word and gesture, physically and symbolically hindered by the horse. The animal is interpreted by the dancer Soroush Kariminejad, the only male on stage. In a choral representation the actresses listen and claim their female identity harassed by pain and painful loneliness. Do they seek their own identity, or do they know it well? Are they looking for a place in a powerfully masculine society that does not see them, or are they aware that they exist only in inequality? In short, a humanity whose breath is gathered and listened by the mountains, the only friends in a deaf country.
You must say that it is really interesting the coincidence between this show and the day dedicated in Rome to defense of women’s rights (end of November). On that occasion, in Milan, at Casa delle Donne, the Iranian Praxis Theater Group presented I’m a woman project. Do you hear me? It has been brought to Italy by Anna Piletti, author of the text and P.R. Piccolo Teatro. The drama text is by Toomaj Daneshbenzhadi. The author, for his scanty scenes (for example, the play of shadows created by panels-hiding places), has been inspired by the Iranian canons of German matrix. The music of Mehran Mirmiri reminds us thuds to the heart or boulders hurled from a cliff, while the performer-actor-dancers make, without flaws, the poetic dynamics of human suffering.
From birth to death, life is a succession of anxieties. And Camelia Ghazali, with her painful narrative, is decidedly convincing: one falls and gets up again, without losing hope. The best future is the breath calming down and the noise, farther and farther away, of the wheels of a suitcase: a beaten woman is moving away from her tormentor.
