singer-songwriters

by Alessio Lega

Genova: stories sung

Minstrel show from Alessio Lega and Marco Rovelli, with Guido Baldoni at the accordion

We tell Genoa. We tell the joy and the revolution of Genoa. Tell a momentous fact that changed our lives. We tell the story of rebels who want to be 150 years a more just world, another world is possible. We tell the pain of broken stories that have broken the story. Tell a thousand hopes and tears that still laughing.

This is a show that takes a great folk tradition, now abandoned, that of the Storyteller.
The Storyteller was information recounted events large and small, made news and comment. He brought with him also some legends, some fables.
His perspective was that of the people, not for abstract reasons, but because of the people was a direct emanation. This gave its origin to his stories a precise point of view, often not consistent with that of power. As we would say today was "counter". As we always knew it was poetry of reality.
These are the words with which I and Marco Rovelli present the show that debuted in Genoa in July 2011 for the tenth anniversary of the G8, and since then we've carried around for Italy. I try to describe, from the inside, what is this show.

Con quella faccia un po’ così…

We met often, we who have been to Genoa.
Me and Marco Rovelli we met often in the name of Genoa, to sing and testify, and ten years have passed since those days of blood and pain, laughter and salt water and steep ascents.
We have that story told and sung, first to those who had been with us and those who had followed the news exciting and terrible clinging to radio and television news. Then, increasingly, has come to the edge of the stage to a generation that had not been in Genoa, that there could have been because at the time he was 10, 8, 6 years ... and so without leaving Genoa entered the history of our personal stories.
Genoa was a point of arrival where they had confirmed our worst doubts, which had broken some thin hope. In 2001 we were both too old to lose our childhood, to be greedy amputees hope: I was 28 and Marco 3 more. But the proportions of a nightmare so far we had not yet lived, and a nightmare is still the wrong side of a dream.
July 2001 was indeed a historic transition. Not everything is understood from Genoa and we clarified many things from then on, that a certain way of doing politics was setting. That the movement which had as reference the experience of compasses social centers - where I grew up politically and artistically - arrived there at its zenith, at its moment of maximum exposure, which coincided with an unprecedented crisis. Unsolder the story definitely Italian political parties and movements from the movement to come: no one could go to the box-office election after Genoa. No one has been able (or willing?) Shed light on the story by benches of parliament.

Who we are.
Marco and I we are still, ten years from Piazza Alimonda march beaten by the next day, by Diaz and Bolzaneto, with the urgency to tell how our lives and our stories revolve around those fateful days. How to reference our stories, our lives together, have converged on Genoa for a moment to stop and start from there.
I came away from that massacre with a song, a little 'shot:

(…) Who are we? Now we are the sea, black sea that rages
that spills over to the port, over which the hog poisoning
the sea more salty tears that we have done
give a kiss to your candles, just before drowning.

Who are we? Now we are the wind that you can not be held hostage
free air from the mills, the assembly
the wind will sweep away, erase the trace of your footsteps
you crash into walls and barriers for unleashing Marassi.

Who are we? Now we are the fire that you never tamed
the burning in his eyes this Grey supermarket
that short-circuits the wires to the alarm and the prohibition
while we rub salt on the ruins of Bolzaneto.

Who are we? Now we are the night, the moon lost the desperate
the poet says: "When a man falls, gets up markets"
and for this man of eternal night, this light that he dies
wait for the sun to melt the black block that we carry in our hearts. (...)

But from Genoa on - and more - it's hard to say "we," who is that "we"? There is a shared memory, a set of reference points, a common tradition? Today it is hard to say "we", for fear that this "we" many, too many people feel excluded. Today, individual hand histories to individuals. These stories, however, always find themselves in a collective history.

Our histories.
Louise Michel, who took part in the Paris Commune, which escaped the summary executions of weeks of blood, which is deported to New Caledonia and there cries for 5 minutes on comrades killed. Then she looks around and sees that there is too much to do to get lost in memories. Rediscovers her original vocation and became a teacher for native Canach children.
Sometimes I think the teacher Louise Michel, seeing spell the word "Freedom" to one of his students to the brutalization torn and illiteracy, think that basically the City has won.
Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. The group of students in their twenties than in full Nazi Germany began, all alone, a strength of passion and courage. 6 leaflets spread, then they were taken and cruelly killed after a show trial. The old Thomas Mann said of them, "Beautiful, brave young people. You will not die in vain, you will not be forgotten. The Nazis have erected monuments to ordinary killers, they have promoted at the inhuman crime, but the German revolution will sweep them away and instead celebrate these guys at a time when history was shrouded in darkness, and said aloud: a new belief in freedom is on the horizon. "
Dino Frisullo, the militant pacifist who, after a sixty-lived extra-parliamentary, not resigned to the illusions of murder and spent all her wonderful inability to accept the world to defend lost causes. When, with their ripped folders, the likes of Dino have to report yet another massacre of illegal immigrants at sea, usually the little people at risk of genocide in the desert, there will always be some cynical fool to laugh behind calling them "beautiful souls" .
These three stories, and others that we sing, are found in the collective stories of the Paris Commune, the European resistance, in the great wave of migration that we live in hope and struggle from the Parisian suburbs to the fields No-TAV, the glow of fires night of the year to come.

Seven are the paintings of our exposure.
nightmare number 0: Genova, July 2001
Dream number 1: la Comune di Parigi, 18 marzo-22 maggio 1871
Dream number 2: la scuola la resistenza, 1968-1943
Dream number 3: La piazza, la loggia, la gru. Brescia, maggio 1974-novembre 2010
Dream number 4: Eterne migrazioni dona loro
Dream number 5: Banlieus No-TAV, le rivolte degli anni 2000
Dream number 6: l’Unità d’Italia vista da Pontelandolfo, 14 agosto 1861
Dream number 7: noi che abbiamo visto Genova, luglio 2001.

How do we bring the real storytellers of our paintings: old photographs, a sequence of still images that accompany the absolute mobility of the music and words.
Everything except the veterans want to do! There it was clear that nothing ends up in Genoa. Genoa gives birth to new stories, like these two that I deleted from the script, two scenes ("dreams" we called them), respectively, written by me and Marco Rovelli.

Dream 3: The square, the lodge, the crane. Brescia, May 1974-November 2010
In 2009 he was finally approved amnesty for immigrants who serve as domestic workers and carers. It is a great hope for many illegal immigrants working in Italy but live as ghosts, so they spend and struggle for the mirage of a residence permit, and who knows, one day, for citizenship. But soon the amnesty reveals a "package". The Northern League has no intention seriously, you put the wrong way. Migrants feel cheated.
In October 2010 in North Italy become principals, and events, but nobody seems to notice. In Brescia, when even allowed to demonstrate in garrison is withdrawn, a groupof 6 rooms of migrants of a crane on the building of underground Piazza Cesare Battisti.
36 years ago, May 28, 1974 in Piazza Loggia in Brescia are 10 in the morning. Nearly three thousand people participating in a demonstration against fascism.
Unexpectedly, it's cold and raining.
From the stage at the center of the square about a trade unionist. Will never end the rally because exactly twelve minutes after his speech was interrupted by the explosion.

The piazza, the loggia, the crane as a cross in a field of war
the wind whipped the rain into streams and goes underground s'infogna
gets lost in the dark alleys of forced, plots, stories of dark
of time passing, passing, and does not cure the pain but suspends it.
Suspended in the wind, on the arm of a crane, there are six immigrant workers
come up to twenty feet in the cold autumn and clung
a slender thread of a thought, a hope that burns the wings
that the men at the bottom to the future, cleansed by hate, is equal to unveil ...
They make fun of the foreign workers / talk
of amnesties and then are stories / inapplicable legal pitfalls / heavy taxes against the poorest / years come to Italy / exploited, cheated / between the need and fear / afraid to show their faces
to meet a uniform that tell you
"Here you can no longer stand there" / and so work in the morning / evening will close at home / and die of nostalgia. / The public way is a fallacy, there's a ghost town / identity is a paper / short an illusion, a strange nation.
Here Brescia, northern production here / here fear the day I arrive / here nothing seems more alive / the square is a desert / thirty-six years ago / was an open / for hope and sorrow: it was a port of strength and love (the May 28, 1974 were in the square, the student and the professor because a better world starts with a better school).

On the banks of Square Lodge the rain that falls splash of dark
inky the sentence that we have left to the future
to tell the grandchildren of the sons of the absurd state secret
when the hour arrived for the dead in the wrong place and wrong:

eight dead eaten by fire, from the URL, the fury, the killers songs
the outbreak, the drain cleaner of blood in a hurry, leaving the manholes.
Past ten years, twenty, thirty years that faded She's mourning
the memory is blind, dying and bereavement memory is fuzzy thinking.

And thirty-six years later, twenty feet above it all
six foreign workers resist at all costs
by October 30 are clinging to a crane looking down
Phantom of the world that has lost its way down into the asphalt

ARUN, JIMI, Rachid, Sajad, SINGH, POPE
names, the sweat, the hours, bolts, screws, stumbles, cracks
POPE, SINGH, ARUN, Sajadi, Rachid, JIMI
I am tired to November 10 and two of them down first ...

Still hunger on the crane and the wind only eleven fifteen
Finally, give the heroes of despair and fall to the ground
November 15 peg to peg down
and eight mute presences from Piazza Loggia standard taking off.

Eight Guardian Angels are done under the arms
a cross of cranes, the wind stings my face
how cold it is in tears, Rachid and others have asked
"Who are you to climb up here on our place?"

Son Julia Banzi Bazzoli woman, mother, teacher
out one morning in May for one important thing
I love the body and I have no voice, crashed into a porch, broken
wait ... I said to my son and thirty-six years ahead.

And I am soaked with rain Livia Bottardi Milani
the rain that has bloodied in May, the rain washes his hands
those who made bombs and hoping the time gates
the graves in the sea and they remain as migrants.

I Louis Pinto immigrant, like you, but I came from Foggia
to work in the north, rain mixed with blood
I came close in a coffin, his back torn to splinters
Italy gathered in the blood that still does not protect discrimination.
I, Natali Euplius / was here partisan in Brescia / anxiety suddenly caught me / and I came to the streets to see / what had to be done / what the liberation / had left in the yard / and came to the streets to die / you know 'we were in many / with Bartolo Talents / Zambarda and Victor / we are the "old" street balcony / old manner of speaking / ready to rise again / on top of the guard post / because those old memories / and sees the same anguish / that the horizon down / the old fascism in Brescia / new racism in the Northern League.
Love the way it teaches that there is a square of a crane
love that is not broke then it can not dissolve more
free love and challenge, tell our schoolchildren
has the name of Alberto Trebeschi and Boots Clementine
until death do us part, a little ritual phrases' horrendous
we were husband and wife and an even offends us
by which a cruel death in a square in May
wanted to break the item, he wanted to undo the courage
but you still love that takes us from a square to a crane
courage, piety is not dead and still clinging there.
(The November 15, 2010 in Brescia immigrant workers and the ruling came down from the crane on the massacre of Piazza Loggia definitely put a tombstone on the eight victims. No one was. Continue the fight.)

Dream number 5: Banlieus No-TAV, the rebellions of the years 2.000.

It starts, again, with the scum to clean,
faceless voiceless ghosts, but a color
the black ghosts that appear at night,
blacks more black, the black right to die

no memorable phrases to be able to remember,
that there is no time to say them when the end is coming
in an electric car hit a transformer,
and "more light" as Goethe can not really say

Zyed and Bounna, adolescents, immigrants born in France,
how wonderful the paradox, a brand of infamy infinite
the police chasing them, they find refuge
in the electrical room, and in that light, the darkness.

The district is facing, stone-throwing and fires,
and then two days later tear gas into a mosque
the Minister of Police engages the battle,
This scum should crush rogue

The battle rages in the places of call
They crush the scum was the command
A mechanical hand has performed
The scum has reacted, took his party

In the heart of the ghetto decided unanimously
to hit the heart to be the enemy
to radically clean sweep
a long life is not inert

Torches to illuminate nights
Rise the cries of the children's children
Light up bare walls of the buildings
We are here

It starts, again, with the city requiring
sense of the word gaze law, the master's voice
the campaign, and the mountain, without any conditions,
immolino is to progress, to his great Reason

mega immense that does not stop and wait
those who waste time asking questions, Who needs it? What is it?
Who pays? Who decided? Why this violence?
And then in Val di Susa a new resistance

Twenty years is a long time, someone is born and who dies,
generations that proceed in the same direction,
embedded in the ground, in the sense of the Municipality,
and no one is immune to this contagion

Against the tunnel on the lawns were resistant at Venaus

the police arrived: heads and shattered bones
the resistance returned from the paths of the forest,
they resumed their lawns, and other years have passed

In the pitched battle of Chiomonte Magdalene,
scores of policemen and scores of bodies on which to spend
but you continue to resist with the absolute conviction
that this is the only reason to be together.

Resists the command of endless progress,
with weapons and violence requires the sacrifice
resist destruction is my mother having
there is no other sovereign decision

This is my land, but also who is
my land is binding only those who refuse
oppose the god of money is a matter of conscience
a natural resistance to

Torches to illuminate the mountains
Rise to the songs of children's children
The Bald Wall lights at night
We are here

Alessio Lega
alessio.lega@fastwebnet.it