Issue link: http://floodesign.uberflip.com/i/868427
famous by Domenico Modugno. In it, a male swordfish decides to be trapped by the fishermen who have killed his beloved: "If you die, I want to die with you." The ultimate desire may be to die with the dead or, as in the case of "Le Sorelle," to live with them in a dream pregnant with the South. Dante's aesthetic and narrative choices are glorified or vilified for being obsessively Sicilian and, by extension, Southern. Yet her references to the South can be ephemeral, almost encoded, like the cassatella in "mPalermu" or, as in "Le Sorelle," the puppet opera's duels, which briefly capture the theatricality of the struggle for life before turning into props (a line of cross-marked shields looking like a religious boundary). The quintessential element that explains the autochthonous nature of her work (also imbued in her company's name, South Western Coast) undoubtedly remains her linguistic palette. Thick accents, ancestral words, local expressions, ritualistic repetitions, quotations from the folk tradition: a dream and nightmare for Montclair State University student Marta Russoniello, my colleague Dr. Marisa Trubiano and myself as we surtitled her work, recognizing the intrinsic inadequacy of our rendition. "Le Sorelle" will make those titles simultaneously necessary and unnecessary; at times Dante's language transcends concrete meaning and becomes pure sound. This will be Emma Dante's first time in the United States (her work traveled here once, without her). Represented for too long as an enfant terrible in a country like Italy that considers even 40-year-olds still unripe, she is now demonstrating a coherence of vision across several forms and genres — and combines a profound gender consciousness with the seasoned legacy of male maestri, ranging from Antonin Artaud to Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor. Yet when I approached her to discuss the theme of women in theater, she was reluctant to frame her work from this perspective despite some of her statements about women's exclusion — a typical move from an artist who persistently embraces contradictions and illuminates divisions, the better to subvert them. "Le Sorelle Macaluso." Photo: Carmine Maringola "Le Sorelle" brings to a summa Dante's exploration of the blurring of genders, the blending of sorrow and joy, and the dialogue between tragedy and comedy in its intense and refined treatment of family and death. www.peakperfs.org 31