Why Pinocchio?
Why staging it with people who awoke from comas?
We were given an address.
Via Altura, 3 – 40139 Bologna.
We got there. We found a hospital in front of us.
We asked if the “Gli amici di Luca” theatre company was based there. At the end of the corridor on the left: “Sala del Durante”.
Our question: Why do you act?
Their answer: We were put aside from society, acting is the only way to get back in again.
To go back in a society that rejected us. That pays no attention to us. That doesn’t see us.
We have fallen in love with them.
With their honesty. With their imperfection. With their filth.
We have seen them as a mirror of real society.
People very different from us.
People with stories, experiences and thinking that don’t belong to us, that don’t belong to the people we hang around with.
Wit them we met the world we have always wanted to portray, narrate and give back. A world to listen to and amplify with no pietism, paternalism nor racism.

Pinocchio represents their humanity. Their weakness and incoherence and ours as well. The eternal opposition between innocence and awareness: facing up one’s responsibilities or running away from them. Pinocchio means taking a side. Listening to the talking cricket or to the cat and the fox, going to school or to Mangiafoco’s theatre, following candlewick or asking for the fairy’s advice, obeying one’s father or doing it one’s own way.

Pinocchio is our temptations. Our contradictions. Our lies.
Building Pinocchio with Gli amici di Luca for us has a profound meaning. It answers our need for an idea of theater as a necessary issue. Theater in which life floods in with all its might, with no fictional mediation. Where the actor doesn’t show himself out there, with his personal experience, his unawareness, his sincerity. Where what’s important is not the skill but the truth of real bodies and lives that speak for themselves.
Is this the land of toys?