WRONG SIDE OUT…

Smoky jazz club, while after a closing time. The man is sitting at the piano. When everyone leaves he begins to compose his song of memories of carefree childhood, picnics with his brothers, a loving mother, for which the family was everything. But mainly of his father. How everybody loved him, and how the crowd chanted his name. And how when his father talked all applauded and could not stop … no, they were afraid to stop… Memories of his seventh birthday when his father invited home a true clown to play with him. And of all those mistresses, how many of them a father had, and how they were able to sacrifice everything for him… And how mother screamed and cried … Memories of the rumours that they spread about him… Memories of hatred… of broken and shattered windows of their house… And how they try to escape… And how… how the same people who adored him, later said that he was a tyrant… How they lynched his body beyond recognition, and then hanged it on the frame of a gas station…
“Tonight, just for you … because everything you think you know about the history and about my father, you know only from books. And those were written by the winners”

INSPIRATION…

WRONG SIDE OUT is inspired by the life and memories of Italian jazz pianist who performed under the pseudonym Romano Full.

Romano was actually the fourth son of Benito Mussolini, Italian dictator from 1922 to 1945. Throughout his life Romano consistently avoided any answers to his father, family and his political beliefs. He devoted himself to painting and producing films, but especially play music. As a pianist, he performed with such greats former of world jazz like Dizzy Gillespie, Chat Baker and Duke Ellington. Only in the end of his life, in his 77 years (in 2004), he published a commemorative book entitled Il Duce, my father, in which he brought in an idealized way image of Duce as a perfect father, a loving husband and a wise statesman, and in which he defends many of his political attitudes and decision.

POLEMIC THROUGH THEATRE

The performance WRONG SIDE OUT is a theatrical polemic over the Romano’s text. In theatrical, visual and musical composition the performance confronts his memories with the reality of historical events, the testimony of eye witnesses of the mentioned situation and with historical documents and works of historians.

Though inspired by a particular history, the performance is not a historical document.

Surrealistic images are intertwined with live piano; human-size puppets come alive while burned-out clown pulls out of the body of a dead dictator intestine of recent history. Specific visual stylization is framing performance, running nearly wordless in furious tempo of the physical action, jazz and contemporary music, and images like from feverish dreams.