General Administrator of Poème Harmonique from 2006 to 2015 The streets of Palermo are battered by torrential rain as Vincent Dumestre and I hurry through them one afternoon in September 2009. On Via Argenteria, the vendors of the Vucciaria cover their vegetable and fish stalls, while deeply lined old men move back a few metres and continue their game of dice with laughing kids – it’s probably been going on for twenty centuries. On Via Valverde, the same ragazzi appear frozen in the stucco of the fabulous Baroque oratories of Serpotta. And on Via Bara All’Olivella, we rush into the dry space of the little cellar of Mimmo Cuticchio’s Teatro dei Pupi Figli d’Arte. On stage, huge wooden marionettes encased in armour hurl themselves at each other with all the delicacy of a fight between Gauls and Romans in the Asterix comic strips – even the vividly coloured backgrounds are there. But in fact it is a scene from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, setting the Saracens against the Crusader knights. The audience, a mixture of Palermo families with young children and German retirees, is delighted. After the performance, we slip, a little overawed, into Mimmo Cuticchio’s workshop. Mimmo is the very embodiment of the fabled Gaulish – or rather Sicilian – village. The last one that continues stubbornly to resist. The broad shoulders of Obelix, the beard of Getafix and the twinkle in Asterix’s eye. At a time when everyone else has abandoned the ancestral technique of the pupi, those marionettes on iron rods of which it is whispered that certain replicas sold to tourists are actually imported from China, he still perpetuates the tradition of generations of travelling entertainers. He makes them, carving the wooden faces, bending the metal. He animates them with the strength of his arm (each of them weighs around ten kilos), tirelessly reviving the saga of the paladins in his puppet castle. ‘By the way, who paints the backcloths?’ asks Vincent. ‘My mother’, Mimmo replies. We are immediately seized by the vision of some female cousin of Geriatrix, working brush in hand by candlelight. But Mimmo Cuticchio is much more than a folk figure. So that this art will not disappear after him, he has founded an academy to pass it on to younger generations, where his nephews rub shoulders with students from Australia and Argentina. And far from taking refuge in the past, he constantly invents new universes for the pupi with which he travels the world, attracting the attention of composers like Salvatore Sciarrino and filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola. He will require daring to embark on the adventure we have come to propose to him. At first he listens to us distractedly as he polishes his wooden heads like some gruff Geppetto. Then, little by little, his gaze becomes more intense, extraordinarily attentive. 17
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CALIGULA BY Vincent Agrech