Plaça Catalunya

Still Life with Death

Le vagine

One of the best things about traveling like you're home rather than traveling as a tourist is the future of a place becomes more visible. Tourists are often directed to the monuments of the past or the institutions of the present. Because I am visiting Viviana Lorenzo my best friend who lives here, I have access to the desires of what Italy is and is becoming as a home. My best time here was our visit to Firenze where my friend lived for six years while she attended university and wrote an outstanding thesis called URBAN CENTER Partecipare al pianificare. L'esempio inglese, le prospettive italiane. We traveled up with Luciana Lepore, her mum, and after getting a cafe, they went to the dentist, and I sat in a park and read my notes for my dissertation. We then walked and had a delicious lunch at Lo Skipper. The food was so good, it brought tears to my eyes. Lunch is 6€ and includes vino, agua, pane, e cafe. Siciallian, the south. Also its worth ordering the canoli for desert which comes with a sweet wine. The weekend continued like that walking through Firenze, the duomo almost always in sight. Stumbling upon the work of Banksy and then inside a church a fresco of a Madonna del latte; yes, she breast feeds her son. Hanging out with friends, going to the market, long conversations about I can no longer remember as we fix a hanging lamp using the wrong-sized allen key.

We return to Perugia on Saturday night in time for a quick dinner that Pietro Grandi, her husband, who wrote an outstanding thesis called Spazi aperti e sistema urbano LA PIANIFICAZIONE DI RETI ECOLOGICHE PER UN SISTEMA DI SPAZI PER LO SPORT, has prepared--proscuitto, mozerella, and bread--before we head out to the industrial outskirts of Perugia to see Le vagine a production by Fontemaggiore Teatro Stabile di Innovazione and l'associazione Centrodanza. One of Vivi's friends, Grazia Paciullo, a scholar of Islamic law, is in the cast.

The program is a single sheet of paper in black and white. The front lists the production information; the back is a brief description of the show, "Liberamente ispirato ai celebri monologhi di Eve Ensler, 'Le vagine' è uno spettacolo in cui dodici donne si raccontano attraverso alcune esperienze fondamentali della loro vita, secondo una modalità che potremmo definire post-enleriana..."

We arrive almost late. The theatre is full but we are able to get seats one in back of the other. The theatre is also small. I like that. A black box; if I remember correctly. And pink. The stage is dressed in pink drapes and in the folds are objects, some of them toys maybe all of them. I immediately feel at home in this black box of bright pink fabric waves. It made me think of a performance at the NY fringe festival in the late 1990s for which Cristina Ruales designed the costumes dressing both men and women up in bright vat-died pink outfits. I also think of Tisa Bryant's "Autodidact" (2006) and a young brown girl's delight in discovering the coveted pink.

I have two confessions to make before I continue. I have never seen nor read The Vagina Monologues nor do I speak Italian. I approached this performance with a Brechtian faith in theatre. I was content to miss plot and semantics of words. I would allow stage design, lighting, body movement, facial expressions, props, the musical score, the music of language, and the music of an audience in darkness, to transform me. The third confession, I write this a week later relying only on dear memory that trickster of friends who delights in masquerading a jumble of time and space as real and linear. Forgive me my transgressions.

The show was a gift. Each woman comes on the stage and introduces herself. She is dressed in pink. A bathrobe, pig tails, or lingerie. Her body is beautiful, and she knows how to use it to create a strong sense of character and story. There are too many to keep track of in a labeling or orderly way of tracking. She is shy, she is playful, she is lusty, she is closed, raunchy, sweet. Mostly she carries a chair, but sometimes she doesn't. And when she is done with her brief introductory monologue, she joins the line of women center stage. One by one she comes on to the stage and speaks to us until we have gathered there the entire ensemble. and then together they animate le vagine through dance. it was so amazing. the chairs are in a long line, and they with fast short steps, the sound of twenty-four bare feet, pattering, pattering, a long thin oval round a line of chairs. This is heaven. It is horizontal. It is pink. It is woman. It is dance and the music of feet against the would of a stage. You do not need to know the languages to appreciate a long list of the different names for le vagine recited like a woodwind solo each woman a different note on the scale.

What does it mean that the cast looked all white? Can I say that in Italy? When everyone knows that Italians are black. How can the cast look white? What does it mean to be Italian? Ayana Vellissia Jackson taught me a coping mechanism called counting. Just the black people. Seeing me walking down the street, I wouldn't be counted in our count. The count doesn't count because we are in Italy and everyone knows Italians are black. The Jamaican landlady on 7th Avenue in Park Slope in 1980 would rent to my friends because they weren't white; they were Italian. Who is Italian now? Which shades count? Which languages? We don't count the people at the train station because train stations are places of transcience a magnet for black people. Who lives in the center? Who goes out in the center? Who lives in the peripherary? Who goes out in the peripherary? How do those terms mean in cities whose walls are nearing a thousand years old but their doors are now arches and have been for hundreds of years?

The finale was spectacular. If first they open with a horizontal vagina, then yes please finish with a vertical vagina, a vagina tower rising meters up off the ground and made of chairs and the bodies of twelve women. Each woman, who we have heard moan, and dance, and talk, and pose, takes her turn to say her final words to the audience before she joins the tower and placing her head framed between the legs of a chair stacked with other chairs, two columns, and the spaces between and within.

To Do List (in code)

1. Fix up Collards
2. Fix up Radishes
3. Search CalliflowerYamJuices
4. Email CucumberatLettuce
5. Email SugarplumLychee
6. Check EggplantEndive
7. Email Watermelon,Apple,&Date

This is obviously a private list. So then why I am posting it on my blog? Well the last list I posted, I did so well completing, like it was easy and almost joyous, while often my handwritten pocket lists go slow and partially ignored. This is a list I have begun ignoring, so I though lets test out my theory about a public list. Even if it is mere proving through tautology, I can dig getting this list done. I didnt write the last list in code because I thought the information would prove useful for other readers as it was about how to prepare for a trip. This list is personal about stuff I need to get done. As a reader, because it is in code, does it make you a curious reader? Another strategy for camaflouge would be to write a really long post and embed the list somewhere in there. I wonder though if it would have the same effect. I am banking on the pressure of visibility as inspiration to act according to word.