Alfonsina vestita di mare
Music, poetry, life-tales of Alfonsina Storni
Cooproduction Notti di Luce 2006
Ticino Canton and Bergamo Chamber of Commerce
From an idea of Silli Togni
Silli Togni, Cristina Castrillo, Oreste Castagna, actors
Franco Ambrosetti, trumpet
Michael Zisman, bandoneon
Marco Esposito, bass
Paola Milzani, voice
Mauro Beggio, percussions
Claudio Angeleri, piano
Music by Franco Ambrosetti and Claudio Angeleri

Alfonsina Storni was born on 22th May,1892 in Sala Capriasca, Ticino, emigrating when she was just four years old to Argentina with his father, a little beer manufacturer and owner of a building company. Alfonsina was a woman of the people, an unmarried mother-teacher, a socialist, has become a star of Latin-American poetry, well-known also in Europe where she held lectures, translated in French and Italian, a public woman, a femminist who fought for the right of women, a radical-modern woman (as she liked to be called, choosing to live without balustrade and to die suicide in the sea). Alfonsina like all women (and men?) fell in love but never married, breaking the rules of a tightly patriarchal society, bringing up alone his only child, Alejandro, who was born when she was twenty years old.

In order not to die she began writing, about herself and about love, what she knew at her age. Later about life, her city and the world. Her book “Poemas de Amor” is still today a best seller of poetry although Alfonsina Storni was the first not to believe in this text of her, to which she premised: “These poems are simple expressions of love moments, written in a few days, a long time ago yet. Such a small book is neither a literature work nor claims to be like that… it just ventures to be one of the many tears dropped by human eyes”.

Taking on the stage three female voices, two actors, one Italian and one Spanish, and a singer, is like giving back, through her poetic texts, a soul to this poetress. The male voice is indeed committed to tell her vexed life through various testimonies, of her son, of the people that deeply loved her, of Jorge Luis Borges, her contemporary, that on the other hand, detested her. The image of Alfonsina Storni is pictured also in a beautiful song, “Alfonsina y el mar” that everyone, in Argentina, knows and sings as it was a national anthem.

The union of particular sounds with bandoneon, trumpet, singing and piano, inserted in an original music context elaborated four hands by Franco Ambrosetti and Claudio Angeleri, will wrap the onlooker in the magic and passion of the Argentinian land.