Ferdinando Falossi – Fernando Mastropasqua
LA POESIA DELLA MASCHERA

Description

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.