Refighting old religious wars in a miniature arena

Refighting old religious wars in a miniature arena
The New York Times
Saturday, December 8, 2001
By RON JENKINS

PALERMO, Sicily - For more than a century, Sicilian puppeteers have re-enacted epic battles between Christians and Muslims, staging miniature massacres with special effects that include decapitation, fake blood and wooden torsos slashed in half by tiny metal swords.
In bringing to life the medieval characters who inhabit Ariosto's epic poem, "Orlando Furioso," traditional puppet masters in Palermo, on the island's northwest coast, and Catania, on the eastern side, have always tried to heighten the contemporary relevance of their stories by updating the improvised narrative that accompanies them.
Now that current events have imbued these tales of interfaith conflict with an ominous sense of immediacy, Mimmo Cuticchio, an internationally acclaimed master of Sicilian puppetry, is adapting his performances to acknowledge the war in Afghanistan.
"There is a villain in the story who betrays Charlemagne and causes the death of innocent women and children," Cuticchio said recently in Italian in his workshop here. "And everyone who sees the puppet plays will understand that this villain named Gano di Magonza is the puppet incarnation of Osama bin Laden."
A robust, bearded man in his mid-50s, Cuticchio performs his puppet plays in a small theater in downtown Palermo on the Via Bara all'Olivella. Episodes from his "Orlando" cycle are being presented here every weekend this month. The action is accompanied by a cacophony of clanging armor, battle trumpets, victory cries and screams of pain, which Cuticchio hopes will emphasize the futility of war as a means of solving problems.
"I am opposed to terrorism," he said. "But I don't want to encourage a modern crusade against the Muslims, so I give the audience the opportunity to listen to the voices of characters who question the usefulness of revenge. These medieval stories have come down to us so-called civilized people as allegories against war."
In the puppet plays, performed in Sicilian, the voice of the common people is embodied by the two clown narrators, Virticchio and Nofrio, who have comic license to express controversial sentiments in blunt language that could never come out of the mouths of noble heroes. And it is through the jokes and ironic commentary of Virticchio and Nofrio that Cuticchio invites the audience to critically evaluate the actions of the warriors who live and die by the sword.
Cuticchio believes that the continual re-enactment of epic battle scenes once fulfilled a basic need for Sicilian audiences that was linked to their island's history of invasions by foreign forces. Over the centuries, Sicily has been occupied by Muslims from Africa and Normans from France, so the legends of Christian Crusaders battling invaders from the East, popularized by Ariosto and other poets, struck a resonant chord in the imaginations of spectators at the puppet theaters in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the historical memory of foreign domination was still fresh.
It was during those years that the Sicilian puppet theater repertory was established, concentrating on the holy wars between Christian paladins of Charlemagne like Orlando and the Muslim warriors known as Saracens. According to Cuticchio, the specific identities of the heroes and villains are less important than the myths embedded in the narratives.
"The battles in the puppet plays are metaphors," he said. "The Saracens play the role of the barbarian invaders. The paladins represent the way Sicilians see themselves in the ideal world: a free people who own their own land and are not forced to work as slaves. So the puppet theater became the place of people's dreams, where they could imagine themselves free from outside invaders and free from the feudal servitude of their past."
To avoid inflaming anti-Islamic prejudice arising in response to Sept. 11, Cuticchio has changed his repertory to play down the stereotypical villainy of the Muslim, or Saracen, characters, whose invasion of France is repelled by Orlando and the other leaders of Charlemagne's army. "The enemy is no longer represented as Saracens," he said, "but simply as scoundrels, infamous enemies of Charlemagne. And in the end, Orlando no longer says, 'Vengeance has been served.' He says, 'Justice has been served.'"
Cuticchio's vision of puppet theater as a source of moral questioning comes from his father, who treated his puppets as if they were his children, with all the frailties of human beings. The legacy of the family tradition is preserved in a renovated stone warehouse that has been converted into a miniature puppet theater on the edge of Palermo's ancient city walls. In a backstage storeroom behind the false proscenium, hundreds of wooden bodies hang limply, suspended on metal rods. Some are dressed in shiny metal armor with intricately sculptured helmets and shields. Others are clothed in finely tailored robes with lace trimming and feathered hats. One corner is reserved for supernatural figures: dragons, griffins, demons, mermaids and angels. Each puppet has its own vivid identity, but they share an intensity of gaze. Even when their bodies are motionless, rows and rows of puppet eyes stare forward with the illusion of watchfulness, as if they are ready to leap into action at the slightest provocation.
Cuticchio lifted one of the regally robed female puppets into his arms and tilted its head in the direction of a visitor. The eye contact created a startling sense of vitality. He introduced her as if she were someone who had just walked into the room. "This is Berta, the mother of Orlando," Cuticchio said. "Her eyes are made of porcelain. In the 19th century, when this was carved, only saints and puppets were given eyes of porcelain, because the passion and respect that people had for puppets then was equal to the devotion they had for saints."
Sicilian puppet theater no longer attracts the popular following it had from the 18th century until World War II, when dozens of traveling puppeteers (known as pupari) played to full houses around the island. But Cuticchio and his family keep the tradition alive by giving regular performances at their Palermo theater, organizing puppet festivals throughout Sicily and touring the world, from Paris and Berlin to Tokyo and Hanoi.
Cuticchio's father, Giacomo, made his living as an itinerant performer, setting up his puppet stage in rented warehouses that served as both a theater for his audiences and a home for his family. "We didn't have a house," Cuticchio recalled. "We lived in the theater. The women slept in the wings and the men slept on the stage. My mother gave birth to me behind the stage of a puppet theater in the town of Gela on Sicily's southern coast. I was born surrounded by puppets, so I guess I must have the spirit of a puppet in me."
"Our father taught us to treat the puppets with great respect," Cuticchio continued, pointing to a puppet with a gray beard and silver armor. "For example, we never said, 'Go get that old puppet.' That would be insulting. We would always call him by his name, Duke Namo of Bavario. Just like you wouldn't call your grandfather 'that old man.' He's your grandfather."
"Puppets are like people," Cuticchio said, surveying the army of figures arrayed around him. "Just like people wash their faces every morning, the puppets have to be polished every day. People cut their hair and get a shave. Puppets also have to be touched up, sewn, repainted and put in order. Otherwise, they are not working puppets that represent humans. They become antiquarian objects or relics of folklore, not living puppets of the theater."
As a child, Cuticchio said, he would wake up every morning to the voice of his father assigning his children chores involving the care of the puppets. "He would shout: 'Nino! Go polish Astolfo's sword! Theresa! Sew up the tear in Angelica's dress!' The names of the puppets and the names of the children were spoken so often in the same breath that they became part of the family. My father and mother had 700 puppets and seven children, so we were a family of 707. The only difference was that we kept getting taller but the puppets stayed the same size."
Cuticchio's lifelong intimacy with puppets is evident in the fluidity with which he manipulates them. Using metal rods and strings attached to each puppet's hands and torso, he moves their limbs as if they are extensions of his own body, coaxing the puppets into positions that express all the subtleties of human emotion.
In addition to maintaining the traditional Sicilian puppet repertory, Cuticchio experiments with innovations in the form. In January, he will tour Italy with a puppet production of "Macbeth," in which the three witches will be played by puppeteers, embodiments of fate manipulating the other characters in the play - portrayed by puppets. Nofrio, the puppet clown, will enact a role analogous to Shakespeare's drunken porter, with a twist. "In our version of 'Macbeth,' he won't be talking about Shakespeare's era," Cuticchio said, "he'll be talking about the evils of our own time."
In the puppet plays, Cuticchio gives voice to dozens of different characters, with a vocal range that stretches from the gravelly bass of the warriors to the falsetto of the heroines and the neighing of horses on a battlefield. To punctuate this orchestra of voices and give signals to the other puppet manipulators who do not speak, Cuticchio wears the traditional wooden sandal of the puparo, clacking it against the wooden floorboards of the puppet stage like a conductor providing a tempo for a symphony of sounds that includes a thunder machine, blaring trumpets and metal cylinders played on a hand-cranked music box.
Cuticchio said he hoped that his two children would eventually create "puppet plays full of love intrigues, trickery, duels, tournaments and battles."
"But," he added, "the battles are understood to be fictional. The puppets fight and kill each other, but they get up to fight again the next day on the stage. In real life, it would be better to coexist in peace, exchanging culture rather than blows."