Pazi Snajper

Enzo Ferrari Auditorium, Via Nazionale 78 Maranello

As part of the Sport+ review

Free entry

A show from an idea by Roberta Biagiarelli

With Roberta Biagiarelli and Sandro Fabiani

Directed by Luca Bollero

Images Luigi Ottani | light design Andrea Violato | sounds and music Saverio Cigarini

Production assistant Barbara Pasquariello | technical care Alessandro Bigatti | costumes Oro Nero Creazioni

Research Kanita Ita Focak, Azra Nuhefendic, Nedim Arnautovic, Isabella Scaramuzzi

Thanks to Jovan Divjak, Gigi Riva, Paolo Rumiz, Mario Boccia, Luisa Morfini and Sabrina Morena

The interest of the author and interpreter with a Balkan vocation Roberta Biagiarelli has gone in recent years to focus on the role of the snipers who operated in the siege of Sarajevo. Men and women who decide to become one for a period of their life or who are, for work, within regular military corps. It is what moves around this deviated psychology that has attracted it as a subject of investigation that can be brought on stage. The sniper is the implacable protagonist who observes from the height of his position the life passing by in front of his eyes in the wounded city, it is a successful shot that gives him the joy of a job well done. He acts within a condition of waiting, just as his victims find themselves living within a suspended time, not by their own choice. He and she, left in the only apartment of an entire abandoned condominium in the Grbavica district in besieged Sarajevo, waiting for something to happen or for someone to come and change their condition. The sniper explores his victims, collects them, courts them, decides whether to hit to kill or injure, leave you disabled forever or frightened: a difficult “job” that requires precision and concentration, beyond the result it is a crime that leaves unpunished perpetrators.

The theatrical action is set in two parallel situations: the sniper’s position flooded by his inner flow and the home of a man and a woman who resist, witnesses consumed and gripped by cold, fear, hunger, who like Vladimir and Estragon in the famous work ‘Waiting for Godot’ by Samuel Beckett: they argue, make peace, think of separating, but in the end they remain tied to each other and spend their time inventing ways to survive.

There is the waiting condition of the sniper-executioner and there is that of his victims for two worlds destined to cross each other through a viewfinder. Beckett’s masterpiece pervades and inspires the unfolding of the show Pazi Snajper, paying homage to the resistant theater of the American writer and intellectual Susan Sontag who in the darkness of the war in Sarajevo decided to do something for the people locked in the grip of the besieged city with the actors of the Kamerni 55 staging ‘Waiting for Godot’ by Samuel Beckett. The rehearsals lasted months, suspended due to the bombs and resumed late at night, enormous difficulties faced by the small theater company grappling with the daily reality of a city without water, without light, without food and under fire from bombs and snipers.” “There is nothing we can do” thus begins the well-known play Beckett; however, the show debuted on August 18, 1993 at Kamerni Teatar 55. One of the actions of resistance to keep the spirit of the city alive. Susan Sontag called it one of the most important experiences of her life and this gesture became her contribution to the city symbol of war.

In the certainty that culture is a particular system that allows, in case of emergency, to keep all doors open.

“The many war witnesses I have known and who have given me their experience in these long years of crossing the Balkans, some of them even surviving the sniper’s telescopic sight, have always told me that even in conditions of maximum danger they went out to continue to live everyday life with dignity: “We just lived!”.

Today this statement acquires a further meaning, we understand that everyday life is not trivial and that in order to live it, one must take into account the possibility of losing it.” Roberta Biagiarelli