Dario Fo

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Dario Fo

Dario Luigi Angelo Fo [ˈdaːrjo ˈfɔ] (born March 24, 1926 in Sangiano ; † October 13, 2016 in Milan ) was an Italian playwright , director , set designer , composer , narrator , satirist and actor . He revitalized methods of the commedia dell'arte . In 1997 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature .

Dario Fo married the actress and later political activist Franca Rame (1929-2013) in 1954 , with whom he also worked closely as an artist.

Life

Fo's father was a station master, amateur actor and socialist. The family had to move frequently because he was often transferred. Young Dario learned storytelling from his maternal grandfather, a fisherman and glassblower.

In 1940 Dario Fo moved to Milan to study at the Brera Art School . The Second World War intervened. Fo's family was active in the anti-fascist resistance , and he helped his father smuggle refugees and deserters into Switzerland.

He could not avoid being recruited by the troops of Salò , so he became a member of the Azzuro battalion of paratroopers of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana . Participation in an "action" by this brigade in 1944 in Val Cannobina west of Lake Maggiore could not be proven in a court case in 1979.

After the war, Fo continued his studies of art and architecture at the University of Milan . Then he worked as an architect. In addition, he began to get involved in the movement of the piccoli teatri (small stages) and presented improvised one-person pieces to the audience . In 1950 he signed a contract with the Franco Parentis theater company and gave up his job as an architect.

Dario Fo with Franca Rame and Son (1962)

He met his future wife, Franca Rame, who came from a family of actors, in 1951 when they were working on the revue “Seven Days”. In the same year he was offered a show called Cocorico for the public national radio RAI to moderate . He wrote eighteen satirical monologues in which he politically interpreted biblical topics. Outraged superiors canceled the show. His next play was also a hit with the audience, but fell under censorship and experienced interventions on the part of the church and the state, so that venues were rare.

In 1954 he married Franca Rame. The two earned their living with the still popular Piccolo Teatro in Milan. The next year there was an opportunity at the film studios in Rome. Fo became a screenwriter and worked for numerous productions.

The son Jacopo was born in March 1955. Franca Rame worked for the Teatro Stabile in Bolzano . Fo and Rame had roles together in the film Lo svitato in 1956 , with more to follow.

The return to Milan in 1959 was connected with the establishment of her own ensemble. Fo wrote plays, acted, directed and designed costumes and sets. Rame took over the cash management and the "paperwork". The world premieres took place in the Piccolo Teatro, and they then went on tours throughout Italy every year .

The play Archangel don't play at the pinball machine (1960) received great national attention. Further stage successes followed. As early as 1961, Fos pieces were adapted and staged in Sweden and Poland.

For the 1962 RAI TV show Canzonissima , Fo was the author and director. He portrayed the lives of ordinary people there, which was very well received by the audience. An episode in which a journalist was murdered by the Mafia angered the politicians. Fo and Rame received death threats and were placed under police protection. Out of solidarity, the Italian actors' union pushed through its members that they were not available as a substitute for Fo / Rame. Both were banned from the RAI for fifteen years.

From 1968 to 1970 Fo headed the theater cooperative "Nuova Scena".

Dario Fo 1985 at the Venice Film Festival

Fo has worked as an opera director several times, for example in Amsterdam ( Il barbiere di Siviglia by Gioachino Rossini ) and at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro , for which he also designed the sets. Dario Fo was a prominent critic of media policy and media development in Italy. He judged it to be the "elimination of any critical culture" and accused Silvio Berlusconi of trying to control all communication channels.

Dario Fo in Cesena (2008)

Fo ran in 2006 within a center-left alliance in the mayoral election in Milan. He lost in the primaries but received 23.4% of the vote. He was a prominent and influential member of Beppe Grillo's MoVimento 5 Stelle .

Fo's play Picasso desnudo premiered in 2012. He himself modeled the pictures made for this as "Falso Picasso" from the Spanish painter, as the image rights for Pablo Picasso's paintings seemed too expensive to him. They were shown in a gallery in Stuttgart in November 2014 .

In autumn 2016 he was admitted to a Milan clinic with breathing problems, where he succumbed to his ailment after twelve days.

Awards

Quotes

  • When asked: there is no left or right satire?
“Satire is satire and has nothing to do with propaganda. Satire is the guilty conscience of power. Whoever rules, automatically becomes the target of satire. "
"I would put it soberly: A competition between two professional comedians ."
  • Dario Fo in his play "Accidental Death of an Anarchist":
“If there were no scandals , they would have to be invented because they are an indispensable means of maintaining the power of the powerful and misguiding the anger of the oppressed. [...] What matters is the scandal! [...] So that the Italian people will finally become social democratic, like the people of England, North America, Germany, etc. ... modern peoples! So that our fellow citizens can finally say proudly: "Yes, we are wading up to our necks in shit, but that's exactly why we carry our heads high!"
  • Dario Fo on the occasion of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm:
“Power, and indeed every power, fears nothing more than laughter, smile and ridicule. They are signs of critical mind, imagination, intelligence and the opposite of fanaticism. I didn't go to the theater with the idea of ​​playing Hamlet, but with the view that I was a clown, a buffoon. "
  • In the epilogue to "The devil with the tits":
“Of course any resemblance to current events is entirely unintentional; It is well known that the classics have always shamelessly copied the scandals and personalities of the chronicles of our day! "

Hidden theater

The idea of ​​the hidden theater is not to perform plays / situations in a designated theater on a stage , but without the knowledge of the audience in everyday places ( supermarket , bus stop , pedestrian zone , ...) in more or less public space . The aim is to break the artificial framework of the theater and bring the questions posed by the plays back into the reality from which they originate. Pieces by Dario Fo were often used because of their social criticism . He was arrested from the stage several times.

Works

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literature

  • Helga Jungblut: The Dario Fos political theater (= studies and documents on the history of Romance literatures , volume 2). Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1978, ISBN 3-261-02640-5 (Dissertation University of Marburg, Department of Modern Foreign Languages ​​and Literatures, 1977, 355 pages).
  • Paolo Puppa: Il teatro di Dario Fo , Marsilio, Venice 1978.
  • Ulrike Seidel: Dario Fo and the Italian comedy tradition . Tectum, Marburg 1995, ISBN 3-89608-802-5 .
  • Chiara Valentini: La storia di Dario Fo , Feltrinelli, Milano 1997, ISBN 88-07-81475-7 .
  • Antonio Scuderi: Dario Fo and Popular Performance , Legas 1998.
  • Henning Klüver : Dario Fo. Biography . Rotbuch, Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-88022-669-5 .
  • Tony Mitchell: Dario Fo. People's court jester , Methuen, London 1999, ISBN 0-413-73320-3 .
  • Birgid Gysi: Dario Fo - theater culture . Oberbaum, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-928254-95-2 .
  • Tom Behan: Dario Fo. Revolutionary Theater , Pluto Press, London 2000, ISBN 0-7453-1357-4 .
  • Joseph Farrell: Dario Fo & Franca Rame. Harlequins of the revolution , Methuen, London 2001, ISBN 0-413-70910-8 .
  • Concetta D'Angeli - Simone Soriani: Coppia d'arte - Dario Fo e Franca Rame , Edizioni Plus, Pisa 2006, ISBN 88-8492-338-7 .
  • Simone Soriani: Dario Fo. Dalla commedia al monologo (1959–1969) , Corazzano (PI), Titivillus, 2007.
  • Gabriele C. Pfeiffer: Come over! Free entry. I'll tell you the story of the Dario Fo theater in the working-class districts . Mandelbaum, Vienna 2009, ISBN 978-3-85476-300-0 .

Web links

Commons : Dario Fo  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dario Fo è morto, aveva 90 anni. Milano dà l'addio al premio Nobel per la Letteratura . Il Giorno , accessed October 13, 2016 (Italian).
  2. ↑ Dario Fo - Nobel Lecture: Against Jesters Who Defame and Insult . The Nobel Foundation, 2014, accessed October 13, 2016.
    Dario Fo: Banquet Speech . From: Tore Frängsmyr (Ed.): Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1997 . Nobel Foundation, Stockholm 1998, accessed October 13, 2016 (translation of the speech from Italian into English by Paul Claesson).
  3. ↑ Boris Sollazzo: “The emptiness of the left in terms of content is unbearable” . Interview with Dario Fo in der Junge Welt , September 5, 2009, accessed on October 13, 2016.
  4. ^ Literature award winner Dario Fo "forged" Picassos . dpa article on DerWesten.de , November 11, 2014, accessed on October 13, 2016.
  5. ^ Giuseppina Manin: è morto Dario Fo, il giullare sommo “Mistero Buffo” il suo capolavoro. Corriere della Sera , October 13, 2016, accessed October 13, 2016 (Italian).
  6. ^ Quote from Dario Fo at gutezitate.com, accessed on May 14, 2018.
  7. ^ Quote from Dario Fo at gutezitate.com, accessed on May 14, 2018.
  8. ^ Quote from Dario Fo at gutezitate.com, accessed on May 14, 2018.
  9. ↑ We are Flegel - Nobel Prize Laureate Dario Fo turns 90 at www.swissinfo.ch, accessed on May 14, 2018.
  10. ^ Quote from Dario Fo at gutezitate.com, accessed on May 14, 2018.
  11. ^ Publisher page
personal data
SURNAME Fo, Dario
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fo, Dario Luigi Angelo (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian satirical playwright, director, composer, storyteller and actor
DATE OF BIRTH March 24, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Sangiano
DATE OF DEATH October 13, 2016
Place of death Milan