Abbecedario per il mondo nuovo – Unni
Unni by Michelangelo Zeno, with Alfonso De Vreese, Anna Manella, Marco Mavaracchio, Francesca Osso
Podcast on Spreaker from Sunday 30th May 2021
Unni (Huns) is a wonderful word for a wonderful population. They were invaders, and this is fun, because often the most fun people at a party arrive late, after dinner, and often haven’t been invited. Everything I know about the Huns I got from Wikipedia, a free encyclopaedia that is extremely popular on the internet. The word Unni has a double letter, but this was not the choice of the Huns. It was a decision made by a group of historians who have no respect for the wishes of the deceased. One thing that everyone knows is that the Huns cooked meat by putting it under their horse saddles. What many do not know is that sometimes they got confused and ate the horse by mistake, meaning they had to walk. If they had been more careful, they would have invaded the Roman Empire a century earlier, and we would have been saved an hour of history. The Huns are an extremely interesting people. My piece is not about them. Michelangelo Zeno
Synopsis
In a typical kitchen in a typical house, four people are having breakfast. A silent man, a woman tidying up, a young girl in a tracksuit and a teddy boy who has just been dumped by his girlfriend. Endemic inability to communicate, difficulty in accepting failure and repressed desire create a fertile ground for the invasion of something that is apparently unknown, but that is permanently before us.
Biografia
Michelangelo Zeno (1987) lives and works in Milan, where he graduated in playwriting at the Paolo Grassi School. Between 2011 and 2014, together with the Famiglia Mastorna group, he worked on re-writing and directing classic works (Bernhard, Müller, Ibsen). Together with the composer Gabriele Cosmi, he wrote the pocket-opera MagenZeitOpera, which made its debut in Venice as part of BiennialeMusica2014. From 2017 to 2019, he held the post of production dramaturg at the Cubo Teatro in Turin, for which he wrote Blatte, a piece that earned a special mention from the jury at the Hystrio Playwriting Award and that was translated into Czech by the Letì Theatre in Prague. The theatrical piece Malagrazia was staged by the Phoebe Zeitgeist company and opened the NuoveStorie2018 review at the Teatro dell’Elfo in Milan. The same year it was chosen for the international Fabulamundi Playwriting Europe project. 2019 saw the debut of Tito/Rovine d’Europa at the Festival delle Colline Torinesi, a theatrical suite about a journey between Germany and Poland produced by Cubo Teatro and TPE. During the pandemic, among other things, he wrote L’anello mancante (translated into English and published by OperaDaTreSoldi as an ebook, curated by Teatro i). He teaches playwriting at FE - Fabbrica dell’Esperienza in Milan.
Abbecedario per il mondo nuovo
a Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa production
in collaboration with the Hystrio – Playwriting Award and the Riccione “Pier Vittorio Tondelli” Award
directed by Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli and Alessandro Ferroni