Seminar by Anna Sica
8 maggio 2024, ore 14:30, Aula A, Ex Vetrerie Sciarra, via dei Volsci 122
After the death of who d'Annunzio referred as the great tragedienne (21 April 1924) to now, thousands of pages in all languages have been published and disseminated to tell the extraordinary personality of the Divine, the incomparable actress Eleonora Duse.
From the donation of the largest bequest of Dusian papers, delivered by her niece Sister Mary Mark (Eleonora Bullough) in 1969 to the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, and subsequently from the discovery of various types of resources that emerged on the great actress, that are preserved by other Italian and foreigners archives and foundations, including the Primoli Foundation, Rome, the Ugo Spirito and Renzo De Felice Foundation,Rome, the Vittoriale, the National Central Library, Rome, the Burcardo Archive Library, Rome, the Murray Edwards College Library Cambridge (UK), critics, writers and theater historians have worked to tell the adventurous and passionate life of the actress, always mixing private facts with artistic solutions, scenic acts with intimate experiences of her life.
But what is most surprising is that, although the documentation and resources on the artist have been recovered in large numbers, and in so doing his biography has been almost recomposed, a mythography, which has been generated by the frenzy of giving shape to a popular or entertaining subject still remains alive, and, in order to be such, it continues to neglect the artistic role that Duse had in the panorama of the great Italian stage leading managers of the late nineteenth century: they were the heirs to an ancient method of acting, the dramatic Italian method of acting, or as it was also said “to the Antica italiana”, with which they directed the actors of their own company with the system of voice modulations. This was an art that they practiced and transmitted even more expertly to the last generations of the nineteenth century’s actors and actresses’, who determined the forms and practices of Italian acting in the first fifty years of the following century. One of the greatest exponents of the Ancient Italian acting method was Eleonora Duse.
Despite the discovery of the Murray Edwards Duse Collection, Volkov's letters to Duse, and the intense correspondence with Boito, d'Annunzio and above all with her company directors, Ettore Mazzanti and Luigi Rasi, that are among the others the most complete and continuous correspondences; despite the deciphering of the declamatory method of ancient Italian drama of which Duse left substantial traces in her marked scripts, most of the people continue to discuss " Duse’s dolorism", the actress who has changed acting, to the point of eliminating its precepts, the actress who “real on stage” represented her intimate discomfort.
This report on Dusian studies that the occasion of the centenary of her death suggests us to do must essentially take into account that we must recognize what is part of the sphere of entertainment, of dissemination and what is instead pertinent and necessary for theatrical philology. Verifying and understanding the documents that constitute the immense heritage that has come down to us on the great actors of the 19th and early 20th century in Italy is the material of which theatrical philology is based, which allows us to reconstruct the history of the theatre and expunge mythography and legends for a necessary passion of understanding.
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