The oath

From the real story of Violette A. told in the book “L’homme Semence”

Written and directed by GAIA ADDUCCHIO
With CAMILLA DIANA

Light: MASSIMO POLO
Costume: VIRGINIA GENTILI
Translation into Italian: LAURA SCIVOLETTO
Photo of the flier: GAIA ADDUCCHIO
Promotional photos, videos and graphic design: PINA MASTROPIETRO
Promotion: TINDARO MANFRÈ

Production and organization: GRAZIA SGUEGLIA http://www.laspring.it/home

Winner of the artistic residence at the TEATRO STUDIO UNO Rome, Italy  2014/2015 edition
Partecipated to the Torino Fringe Festival 2016

Synopsis

Winter 1919 in a small village of the High Provence. The Great War has just finished and for the second time in less than 70 years the little town of Poil has no men left. The story is told by Violette, now an old woman, that with her memories goes back to her youth, when 1852, only 17 years old, she witnesses the deportation and killing by the troupes of the Emperor Napoleon III of all the men of her village. The women, left alone, seal an intractable pact: the first man who will turn up will become the partner of every one of them, the semen of the village.

Directors statement

There is something in the story of Violette and in the way, she tells it that overcomes all possible geographical, cultural and historical distance. There is a universal narration about love and loss, there is an incredibly new and actual definition of the feminine, of its needs, capacities and limits.
The women that are told by Violette and Violette herself want to become mothers, but are no objects of a patriarchal, masculine and chauvinist community; they want to be loved, but assume the political and social responsibility of their “love”, becoming this way active and aware agents of their sexuality. When finally, the man  does materialize himself though, they can’t disregard their natural longing for desire, pleasure and eventually love.
The world that is told by Violette, her definition of the female identity is not the one of passive and meek beings, but the one of women that are loud, angry and subversive. Hers is not just an adolescent approach to feminism, but the coming of age story of a woman in her growth until adulthood.  At the center of a simple stage with only little domestic objects typical of the end of the 19th century, Violette goes back at being an adolescent that gets loud, stumps her feet, changes her moods quickly, then grows, discovers love, becomes a mother and finally turns again into an old woman at the end of her life.
To bring her story and the one of her village on stage was due to our necessity of telling the female experience in her complexities, trying to show, as much as possible, the naturalness of its contradictions and the universality of its peculiarities.

Gaia Adducchio

Mise-en-scene:

May 2015 – won an artistic residence at the Teatro Studio 1 Roma, Rome, Italy
http://www.teatrostudiouno.com/
May 2016 – Torino Fringe Festival, Turin, Italy
http://www.tofringe.it/
May 2017 – Teatro Villa Corsini, Rome, Italy
http://www.teatriincomune.roma.it/teatro-villa-pamphilj/