MASTROPASQUA FERNANDO – Prinp Editoria d'Arte

Fernando Mastropasqua IL VOLO DI ICARO

Dario — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 14:14:09 +0000

The book explores the archaic origins of theater and the metaphor of Icarus’s flight as a key to interpreting the theatrical creative process. The author analyzes the ritual dances of the satyrs and maenads in ancient Greek theater, seen as primordial forms of expression linked to nature and fertility. Central to the work is the figure of Dionysus, symbol of chaos and vitality. The myth of Icarus becomes a metaphor for the artistic striving to overcome limits and the “sublime fall”: failure is not the end, but rather the opportunity for the birth of new theatrical forms. Mastropasqua thus reflects on modern theater, from the symbolism of Gordon Craig and Antonin Artaud to the poor theater of Carmelo Bene, where collapse itself becomes spectacle. The essay combines historical analysis, philosophical reflections, and iconographic reflections, ranging from Lucanian funeral rites to the folk traditions of Southern Italy, interpreted as traces of a pre-rational and ritual theater. The volume concludes with an original theatrical script and two appendices on radio and ancient myths. In short, Mastropasqua proposes a vision of theatre as a space of continuous rebirth, where the fall is the beginning of a new flight.

“Perhaps you were asked why you wanted to go into theater, and you couldn’t give a reasonable answer, because no reasonable answer can explain what you wanted to do: you wanted to fly. Perhaps you would have done better to say, “I want to fly,” rather than utter those frightening words: “I want to go into theater… artists are made of the same stuff as aviators: they fly.” (Edward Gordon Graig)

Fernando Mastropasqua LA STRANA PIETÀ DEL SIGNOR BERTOLT BRECHT

Dario — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 15:21:02 +0000

“La strana pietà del signor Bertolt Brecht e altre malinconie teatrali” is a book that aims to look at the theater in a particular perspective: ignoring the chronological succession, it takes into consideration those moments in which the theater has shown life in its essence ephemeral and senseless, with that ironic and thoughtful melancholy that had characterized Ettore Petrolini’s creations in Variety. The attitude, shared by Brecht, intense presence in Karl Valentin’s cabaret, originates in Sophocles’ severe and painful gaze. This is why the essay on Brecht’s Pietà, on the harsh suffering of Mother Courage‘s mute scream opens the way.

Fernando Mastropasqua TEATRO PROVINCIA DELL’UOMO

Dario — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 18:45:25 +0000

“Teatro Provincia dell’uomo” is inspired, in its title and method, by the book by Elias Canetti, “The province of man”. The volume is made up of two parts. The first takes into consideration some fundamental moments in the history of the theater, such as the Greek theater and the Elizabethan theater, and some innovative theories, from Craig to Stanislavkij, in which the actor’s research is aimed at giving a symbolic or realistic image. , of human nature, in its truth and in its fragility. A fragment, taken from the Living Theater’s Antigone, illuminates the discourse. The second part is dedicated to the reconstruction of Carmelo Bene’s text and video-work, Hommelette for Hamlet, in which echoes of Shakespeare’s and Laforgue’s Hamlet are reflected, based on the vision of Lacanian Man. The reconstruction is accompanied by a detailed commentary on all the situations, in which the protagonist, a strange cemetery Hamlet surrounded by Bernini statues that come to life and participate in the representation, is involved.

Fernando Mastropasqua UN TEATRO DI PEZZENTI

Dario — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 15:59:45 +0000

The Commedia dell’Arte was a wandering theater, a being in the world in despair, with no paradises to wait, it was a collective thinking that came from the earth and imagined life as nothing more than a patch of misery and misfortune.
A reconstruction of the scenarios of this mysterious phenomenon, which created forms of art out of misery, is proposed, shadowed in the engravings of the Fossard Collection and in the frescoes of Trausnitz’s Narrentreppe, both from the end of the 16th century.
The memory of the art of comedians, which the documents give us, is due to the passion for the theater of Henry III of France and William of Bavaria. If the first was satisfied with an album of ‘photographs’, the second claimed to enclose, for eternity, the beloved actors in the stones of his Castle, anticipating Morel’s invention.

Ferdinando Falossi – Fernando Mastropasqua LA POESIA DELLA MASCHERA

Dario — Sat, 12 Dec 2015 22:38:48 +0000

About a year after the publication of the book “L’incanto della maschera. Origini e forme di una testa vuota”, Fernando Mastropasqua and Ferdinando Falossi present the second volume, “La poesia della maschera. Una testa vuota fonte di conoscenza”.
After the Enchantment, the Poetry. The mask is the theater.
“L’incanto della maschera” aimed to frame the culture of classical Greece, and in particular the theater and its concept of the metamorphosis of the actor, from an anthropological perspective. The Poetry of the Mask addresses the problem of the poetic language of the mask itself. We enter into the details of the three different genres of the Greek theater of the classical period: Comedy, Tragedy and Satyric Drama, and we see how the construction technique of the mask and its dynamics go hand in hand with the evolution of the theatrical language.
The mask is generated in the sphere of revelation of the sacred. Its original emergence is a cavity inhabited by alien and unknown powers capable of pouring the visible manifestation of their presence beyond the void. Imbued with spiritual substance, it stands in the first instance as a cultural phenomenon of communication, but soon expands its iconic language beyond the boundaries of the supernatural. The cavity opens all the ways of metamorphosis. If being the original, and not simply representing it, is the specific of the icon, then, when what becomes present is no longer a spirit or a god but the pain of man or his ability to laugh at his own being born , that cry and that laugh acquire the dimension of an experiential knowledge of life. When the mask welcomes the vital needs of the human sphere, or in the theater season, the liturgical verb becomes poetic language and, at the origins of our culture, art forms such as tragedy, comedy, satyric drama are born. . From that moment on, the hollow space of the mask welcomes a multiplicity of beings to whom it will give voice and expression, but wearing an icon and becoming what a mask makes present will continue to contaminate even what is exquisitely human with the sacred.

Ferdinando Falossi – Fernando Mastropasqua L’INCANTO DELLA MASCHERA

Dario — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 21:15:25 +0000

Everywhere the appearance of the mask arouses restlessness and contrasting senses of bewilderment, amazement, admiration. It is the enchantment that the Greeks called thauma, a word that characterized the inexpressible, the unheard of, a word that announced a place of wonders, fascination, charms, and also, for Father Gregorio di Nazianzo, the fulfillment of the Christian miracle. The mask is the most ancient and universal symbol of the conscience of human finitude (‘better not to be born’), for this reason it covers the perishable body of man with an ‘immortal’ cortex, as the golden funerary masks hid the face decaying of the dead; and it is also the first perfect realization of a ‘time machine’: slipping into a mask transcends the self, space and time. Among the infinite variety of forms, some of its many charms are collected here: from archaic cults and ancestral rites to the myths of classical culture, from epiphanies in European folklore to circus ghosts. The loss of aura in modern society forces the mask into unusual spaces and deep degeneration. However, its presence in many carnivals spared from tourist commodification and in the scenic practice more attentive to experimentation, in the footsteps of Craig, Mejerchold, Brecht, no less than in the ‘indignant’ squares or in the forests of insurgent Chiapas, makes the invocation still relevant. of Shakespearean Mercutio: “Give me a case to put my face in! One face on one face.”