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THE SEARCH FOR CINDERELLA
DECONSTRUCTING
LA GATTA CENERENTOLA
by Ed Emery
Buried in the small
print of
I have had the musics of this show in my head for the best part of twenty years. Taped from a record, barely even labelled, but played over and over, because the songs reach out and take you, somehow, captive. And now the extraordinary good fortune to be asked to translate the libretto. And hence to write a small commentary.
Defining the Undefinable
So what is La Gatta?
It is a level of the arcane, the unaccustomed and the incomprehensible presented with all the musical verve that you could wish for.
At the same time it deals in universals. Primordial human values.
Listen it it with your eyes shut. Search for the moments where you can engage with the show's meanings. Near the end of Act Three there is a scene in which insults are traded and a fight begins to develop. This is the "Scena delle ingiurie" – the "Insult Scene". What do you hear?
Four voices of women. The Washerwomen. Arguing with brawling venom and invective. The idiom is Neapolitan. Somebody has started counting – "One, two, three, four..." – and in between the counting they invoke the names of saints and God the Father. A rowdiness develops, a fight seems about to start, and just at that moment a male voice calls for a tarantella. The orchestra strikes up. A chorus of men launch into a song which sings the praises of six sisters and their sexual parts. It begins to dawn on you that the women's roles here are being sung by men. And they begin trading massive insults across the stage – insults that seem plumbed from the depths of their being. Their target is another woman, the Stepmother, and by the timbre of the voice you know that she too is played by a man. She returns the insults with catty vigour and inventiveness.
Begin to isolate the elements in all this: A density of meanings and double entendre. The intercrossing of sexual innuendo and role-plays. Trans-sexuality. A rude brawling vernacular. Strains of folk idioms in a music that also has touches of the opera buffa. An earthiness of imagery. The extraordinary quality of voice that the singers have. And the sheer physical energy of the material. It is clear that we are in a very, very special place.
But how to define it as a whole? The director himself, Roberto de Simone, makes an attempt in his Introduction. Self-confessedly he fails. As an artefact La Gatta is so many-layered and multifarious that it defies definition.
He offers an initial account, translated here in paraphrase:
"When I began thinking about La Gatta Cenerentola, I thought spontaneously of a melodrama. A melodrama that was ancient and modern at one and the same time. Just as fairy stories (favole) are both old and new at the moment when they are told. A melodrama as a fairy story. We would have people singing as a way of speaking. And speaking as a way of singing. And much would also be understood from that which is not actually spoken in words. So we had to decide which words we would dress in sounds, and which sounds we would dress with words, and where we would make do without using words at all. We would use ways of speaking which were different from those that you'd use to sell cans of tinned meat. They would be the sounds of a different world, in which all languages are one, in expressing the universal experiences of love and hate, of violences that are done and suffered in the same way by everybody. We would develop another way of speaking and expressing meaning – not only through grammar and vocabulary, but also through everyday objects. And through the things that people everywhere have done for thousands of years – giving birth, making love, dying, feeling joy, feeling fear, cursing and being cursed, toiling in physical labour, and enjoying the playfulness of play. Like the sun and moon do, and have done, and always will do..."
His account is also a challenge. In a way it seeks to put La Gatta beyond the range of textual criticism, as if it has a mystical life beyond apprehension.
The critical eye rises to the challenge. For instance, we might locate the piece (what do we call it... a piece of musical theatre... an erudite pantomime... a folk opera...?) in a historical context, and thus fix at least some of its meanings definitively.
The History of Cenerentola
What is the history of La Gatta? Where does it come from?
It is a reworking of a
version of the Cinderella story taken from the Pentameron of
Giambattista Basile, b.
In 1976 Roberto de
Simone composed and put together a musical version of this Cinderella story,
building it around song drawn from the folk traditions of
However it is not just a story of Cinderella. It is a complex reworking of many possible stories of Cinderella, drawn from local folk traditions and from historical sources going back to the Middle Ages. It plays openly with sexuality and violence, with gender roles, with magic and local imaginaries, and with hopes for change in a better world.
Reworking these themes
into a kind of popular mini-opera, it creates a sumptuously-dressed spectacle,
a play that is at the roots of pantomime as we know it, and simultaneously a
celebration of the mystery that is
Themes
To understand La Gatta, you have to know that all human life is there, from birth to death and everything in between. As De Simone himself puts it,:
"In the story of Cenerentola, there is the story of a whole people: their frustrations, their aspirations, their sufferings, their desire for change, their natural religion which has been repressed by the official powers that be, the aspects of a matriarchy which has been subjected to the violence of patriarchy, and the consequent negative aspect of that matriarchy after what it has suffered from patriarchy."
Before we deal with the generalities, let's answer the question from the lady at the back of the stalls:
But why is it called The Cat Cinderella?
In short: it is no
accident that this Cinderella has elements of cat in her personality. In part
her cat-nature derives from Basile himself. In part it is indicative of the
erudite and politically-worked vocation of La Gatta..
De Simone explains that the roots of the Cinderella story lie
in the tradition of animal transformation folk tales. In an alternative
Neapolitan variant Cenerentola appears as a fine-feathered hen belonging to a
washerwoman, and each night sheds her feathers to go to the ball with the
prince. In the area around
Popular song – research – and political movement
The motivating impulses of La Gatta are many and varied. In part the show is a reflection on sexuality, gender, sexual repression and a possible future liberation. In part it is the product of a very specific conjuncture of the late 1960s and early 1970s – the moment when, worldwide, the impulse to political and revolutionary change joined with an in-depth research into popular and folk forms of music to create something entirely new.
The folk musics of
yesterday were researched and found new life in the contestational youth
cultures of today. In the
This then fed immediately into performance, and it is fair to say that De Simone's La Gatta, although a distinctly separate initiative, follows in direct line of descent from Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano's Bella Ciao (1964) and the Dario Fo-directed Ci Ragiono e Canto (1964-5). The folk songs and political songs of an earlier age (from the Middle Ages down to the Resistance songs of the partisans in World War II) were collected, were performed publicly, were recorded and sold in shops, and to the extent that they were contestational, they were sung by the kids in the street. No analysis of Italian revolutionary political culture of the 1970s is complete without an understanding of this moment.
Something of the flavour of this research work comes through in the introduction to a song book published in 1976 (La Chitarra e il potere, Savelli, Rome, p. 11):
"...popular song is always oppositional song, and therefore is always in some sense 'political'. Songs of toil, tavern songs, prison songs and religious songs have always expressed a view of the world that is antagonistic to that of the ruling class, either by overturning that world-view or by contributing to the creation of an alternative conception of work, of popular celebrations, of justice, and of religious observance. When such conceptions transform into an organised collective heritage, they transform rejection into struggle, resistance into attack, desertion into boycotting, prison escapes into destruction of the prisons, work-to-rules into a rejection of wage labour and cultural subordination into a struggle for hegemony. Within this transition, popular song changes from being simply a testimony to the ongoing existence of an "other" culture... and becomes political song, [...] and an allusion to a conception of the world that is revolutionary..."
The confrontation on this cultural terrain had real substance. For instance, the uproar caused at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto in 1964, when Bella Ciao was presented. The historic anti-war song "O Gorizia tu sei maledetta" had been sung from the stage. It attacked the military generals responsible for the disasters of World War I. Immediately after the show (since censorship was still in force) the carabinieri mounted the stage, accused the singer of having sung a verse that was not in the official script, and threatened him with arrest for slandering the armed forces. An artillery colonel left the theatre in tears, threatening to sue...
Voice and dialect
Twelve years later, in
1976, the first production of La Gatta caused a similar stir at the Festival
di Due Mondi. Here the contestational aspect was different. It dealt in the
area of sentiment, emotion and sexuality rather than class oppression. But the
show was similarly based in diligent ethnomusicology, research into oral
traditions, and the re-presentation of those traditions in a modern subversive
format. In that period De Simone was working in collaboration with the Nuova
Compagnia di Canto Popolare, a singing group which still specialises in
research and performance of the popular song of
In his view there can
be no easy categorisations of "Neapolitan music" into high-brow,
low-brow, folk music, classical music etc. Before it was decimated by the
plague of 1656,
This, in part, is what
La Gatta researches. But more than that. Two
hundred years ago the music historian Charles Burney, on his musical tour of
The show also draws on
the stylistic and vocal traditions of the opera buffa, musical comedies
in local dialect which flourished in
As regards the language of La Gatta, it provides fuel aplenty for controversy. First, is Neapolitan a language, or a dialect, or an idiom or what? Second, is it a single linguistic form spoken across a range of social classes, or is it a ghettoised minority form? Third, there are parts of La Gatta which are incomprehensible even to Neapolitans, and where's the point in that? Without trying to provide answers, I would simply observe that another Italian ethnolinguistic performer, Dario Fo, is in the habit of performing two-hour monologues spoken in substantially invented sixteenth-century dialects of the Po Valley, and the miracle of theatre makes even the incomprehensible comprehensible.
The characters of La Gatta
While it is hard not to be taken by the strong on-stage characterisations of the Stepmother, Cinderella, the Sisters etc, De Simone stresses that they are also to be read as archetypes, as symbols. They embody a whole input of symbolic meanings which can be read, in one optic, as an entirely Freudian text. Among the various "meanings" of Cinderella, the author offers the following:
In Neapolitan culture,
there still exists a strong culture of matriarchy. Historically matriarchy was
strong in the countryside, but in sixteenth century
In characterising Cenerentola, De Simone cites specifically the rituals associated with young girls arriving at their first menstruation. In many societies a menstruating woman is considered to be polluted, and is shut out of society – so, in this story, Cinderella is considered "ugly" and "dirty", is excluded from everyday household life and is forced to live by the hearth. At puberty the girl is often entrusted to a second mother, who gives her the secrets of sexuality, and she takes on a new identity as woman before she re-emerges into society – which gives us the well-known elements of Cinderella's fairy godmother, and her dressing for the ball.
"You shall go to the ball,
Cinderella..."
As regards "going to the ball", this too is full of symbolic meanings. De Simone notes that dance is historically associated with religious observation. Popular dance (ballo popolare) takes place in association with celebrations of the Madonna, and people dance in the sacred space in front of the church associated with the given celebration. Once it took place actually inside the church, but it was banned from here by the ecclesiastical hierarchies. So Cinderella's "going to the ball" has symbolic meanings at multiple levels.
De Simone's La Gatta is constructed around popular forms of song – for instance the characteristically Neapolitan form of the villanella. It is also built around regional folk dance forms – tarantellas, tammuriatas, morescas, etc. These in themselves would take an entire article to explain.
For the moment,
suffice to say that in De Simone's use of the tarantella there is a deliberate
reference to dancing mania and possession (tarantism). In the studies that have
been made of this very common phenomenon in southern
In Dario Fo's 1997 show Il Diavolo con le zinne, the
dry-as-a-stick elderly housekeeper of an upright judge is possessed by devils.
Thereupon she becomes sexuality incarnate, and she is seized by an
uncontrollable urge to dance the tarantella. In this persona she abandons her
native
Over and above all,
the show is a celebration of
"
Ha perso la chianella
Al re di Aragona e di Turchia
Ha perso anche la fantasia..."
"
Lost her slipper
To the king of
And she lost her dreams too..."
Epilogue: Gender and sexuality
At a key moment of La Gatta, having explored a whole canon of Freudian concerns from incest through infanticide to matricide and much besides, there is an elaborate, vulgar and sexually provocative stand-off between the Feminella – a transvestite man – and the Washerwomen. It ends in the transvestite being goaded into suicide. Whether or not you choose to read this as a political statement, it poses the issue of gender and sexuality right at the heart of La Gatta – an issue which then finds its resolution in the poignant soliloquy of the Gypsy Woman that closes the show and echoes in your head for a long time after:
"Ma io credo ca
pe' sta' bbuono a stu munno
o tutte ll'uommene avarriano 'a essere femmene
o tutt' 'e femmene avarriano 'a essere uommene
o nun ce avarriano 'a essere
né uommene né femmene..."
"I think that to
make this world a decent place
Either all the men would have to be women
Or all the women would have to be men
Or there would have to be
Neither men nor women..."
++++++++++++++++++
Roberto De Simone (b.
The Media Aetas company, who are touring the present edition of La Gatta, have a 20-year history of musical and operatic stagings of works, ranging from Pergolesi (La Serva Padrona) and eighteenth-century opera buffa, through Stravinsky (Pulcinella and The Soldier's Tale) to the modern idioms of jazz and blues. They have also staged original works conceived by Roberto De Simone, a many-faceted output ranging from sixteenth-century song to a Requiem for Pier Paolo Pasolini.. A musicological feast, backed by many years of musicological research and documentation. Four of the original NCCP members are in the present touring cast – Rino Marcelli (the Stepmother), Virginio Villani (chorus leader and Prologue), Giovanni Mauriello and Patrizia Spinosi – providing a precious continuity with the original production.
Media Aetas is
developing a site at: http://www.mediaetas.it/teatro.htm
The Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare (NCCP) has a web page at: http://www.resoftlinks.com/musica/nuovacompagniadicantopopolare.shtml.
The full symbolism of this piece is not easily available to audiences coming to view it unprepared, nor is it available through the songs, which are extraordinarily opaque and synthetic. What is really needed is a full translated version of the text (La Gatta Cenerentola, Einaudi, Torino, 1977), together with a critical apparatus. This is something that we are thinking of doing.
The original cast
recording of La Gatta, with Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare, was
issued by EMI with the catalogue number EMI 1182158. The Dischi del Sole
records, an archive of the popular and political song movement of
La Gatta Cenerentola will be performed at Sadler's Wells,
Ed Emery
26.v.99
