Buchettino

For five intense days, we will open a little big window on the work of Chiara Guidi – one of the key figures in European children’s theatre and the co-founder of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio – with this show, the launch of her manifesto-book and a seminar. Buchettino is an “acoustic fable” developed from Charles Perrault’s tale of Little Thumb . This Italian artist and pedagogue, who founded the Scuola Sperimentale di Teatro Infantile in the 1990s, offers us an exquisite sensorial experience, in which she explores the fable’s pedagogic and cathartic elements through the inventive power of the imagination. The stage becomes a dormitory with 50 beds, where children lie down to listen to the story, narrated by an actress. An off-stage soundtrack punctuates her voice with the sounds of the fable: the whispering of the wind, the howling of wolves, the ogre’s steps, the cracking of tree branches. The bed is the spectator’s place, a device that invites slumber as well as a protective shell when fear and unfamiliarity erupt. Buchettino does not reject these feelings, embracing them instead as sources of tension and startlement. In this sounding board that brings “sonority back to the word”, images are kindled through listening. Then, we can see “the presence behind them”.