Roberta Bertozzi interno 38

Through body and voice
Using dialect between poetry and drama
in IL PARLAR FRANCO (“Frankly speaking”)
Review of vernacular culture and literary criticism
year IV - 2004

abstract

[...] The corporality of language means that the word becomes one with concrete body gesture; dialect is where words and gestures blend and become a mutual natural protraction to each other, as well as each other’s otherwise unspoken potentiality: this is exactly what happens with drama. On a stage the use of a language is never loosen from the body that is uttering it, as language and body form a whole. The corporality of language that is also experience, silence, gesture: these are forms that stand at the source of all utterance capability, forms that tie dialect’s and drama’s words within a single vocational instinct and intention. Therefore, besides the mere practice of drama-writing, what joins the words of dialect and those of drama is some stronger radical essence and some primitive drive that goes beyond the dramaturgical form of a text: it has more to do with some either conscious or unconscious need to name life without any concealments and to strip it bare without using any artificial tricks. This is a need to tell life as it is, to show it as it stands in front of the body. The practice of life-unmasking is brought about by an ingenuous (or a genuine) linguistics and by its forthright speaking; inside the specificity of vernacular language, unmasking means using words for what they are and calling things as they are, because language and things form a whole. Thus the practice of unmasking is like a lever that is capable of unhinging the several layers opposed by thought vis-à-vis the real world, it is a practice demolishing all rational attempts to settle life through appeasing compromises.
The fight between a desire for rationality or an order that might contain the shape-shifting essence of life and, on the other hand, a tension towards chaos and the constant and stubborn overflowing of reality, is indeed a fight belonging to cultivated languages: when it comes to both drama and vernacular poetry, there is a certain awareness, a reception of the living that touches the edges of pain and of its inexpressible nature. The act of receiving stands for a willing act of compensation for all the misunderstandings that the rational thought constantly applies to reality.

The affection towards the world and the quest for both a primeval contact and a primordial authenticity, are all revealed in the sign of the language’s stripping to its essence. A place where one can, at last, be always present and where immediacy corresponds to the loyal and ritual strength of the gift. Such place aims at becoming concrete on the stage; dialect is perceived as the most suitable linguistic tool capable of giving life to the bodies and the voices.
Not only is dialect aimed at by the practice of drama because of its corporality, but also because of its essentially oral character. Dialect is the language of people’s exchanges and communications and one that has been developing in outdoor environments; it is "a language that would not accumulate in stocks, but would rather spend thus renovating itself; a language used also by cultivated men (along with Latin, language of science, and with Tuscan, language of everyday writing and speaking)" (Nino Pedretti). Dialect never underwent a written codification which would imprison it inside a syntax or a literary tradition. It is a language deprived of all those signs of formal and grammatical strictness which are typical of cultivated languages. Such aspects often inhibit the sounds, the colours, the expressive potential and the pliability that characterize a linguistic organism purely based on the use of the voice. When it is put on stage, the oral nature of dialect helps to provoke an effect of immediacy and acoustic liveliness, it brings about a tone completely unknown to the Italian language: such elements do indeed play a key role when it comes to the dimension of drama. For the rhythm of drama are those of direct exchanges and of swift interactions between an actor and his audience, between a speaker and the receiver of the message being spoken. Thus, any word that is complicated by any kind of textual references, thoughtful mediations or rhetorical devices, would slow down the durations of the relation, which constitute both the very scope and the primary motivation of drama. [...]