Former Cloister of San Cristoforo
Headquarters of the Company and the Pizzarotti Foundation

ANGELA CARTER’S BOOK OF FAIRY TALES

June from 10th to 12th, h. 18:45

durata

BUY

On each of the three evenings, you will be able to enjoy three short stories, which can be chosen from three different combinations:

Pretty Maid Ibronka – The Twelve Wild Ducks – The princess in the Suit of Leather
Vasilisa the fair – The Battle of the Birds – The Juniper Tree
Mossycoat – East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon – Šāhīn

by Angela Carter

a reading by Clara Galante, Sara Putignano, Laura Cleri, Francesca Tripaldi, Lidia Castella, Giada Fasoli

production Fondazione Teatro Due
in collaboration with Fondazione Pizzarotti

The splendid, lush garden of the former Cloister of San Cristoforo is the setting for Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales, an anthology of fairy tales from around the world selected and transcribed by the English author Angela Carter: from the Caribbean to Egypt, from the East to Scandinavia, via Europe and the Americas, Carter weaves a tapestry of humanity that delves into the heart and mind of a female protagonist observed ‘life-size’ in all the multifaceted nature of her being, be she ‘clever, bold, kind, foolish, cruel, sinister, or terribly unfortunate’.

For the last two or three hundred years, fairy stories and folk tales have been recorded for their own sakes, cherished for a wide variety of reasons, from antiquarianism to ideology. Writing them down – and especially printing them – both preserves, and also inexorably changes, these stories. I’ve gathered together some stories from published sources for this book. They are part of a continuity with a past that is in many respects now alien to us, and becoming more so day by day. ‘Drive a horse and plough over the bones of the dead, said William Blake. When I was a girl, I thought that everything Blake said was holy, but now I am older and have seen more of life, I treat his aphorisms with the affectionate scepticism appropriate to the exhortations of a man who claimed to have seen a fairy’s funeral. The dead know something we don’t, although they keep it to themselves. As the past becomes more and more unlike the present, and as it recedes even more quickly in developing countries than it does in the advanced, industrialized ones, more and more we need to know who we were in greater and greater detail in order to be able to surmise what we might be.

Angela Carter