“Le scimmie verdi” (Green monkeys) is a small but important Italian performance for theatres and small audiences by writer and poet Hamid Barole Abdu and journalist Daniele Barbieri.
It is a very nice try to stress the emerging racism and difficult relations of the Italians with other cultures and people from different backgrounds.
Daniele Barbieri, a journalist, and Hamid Barole Abdu, writer and poet (his latest book is “Bury my skin in Africa”) they often meet in conventions, meetings and reunions.
One day they said to eachother: besides meeting the “experts” or moderators in educated debates, maybe we could invent another way to engage the persons in the arguments. Even with a small performance that concurs for greater freedom of expression and language, alternating struck to serious speeches, fiction to lived history.
On hot topics like racism, identity, migrations, the rising of new cultures… we transform into divers to go in the abysses of the unconscious.
This is how the performance “Le scimmie verdi” (Green monkeys) was born.
35 minutes (45 with music background and breaks) in which from the beginning Daniele and Hamid swap dresses – therefore the identities – to try understand if scratching Naomi Campbell’s back is possible or, if to dance down the roads is dangerous, if black people sell roses and the Chinese eat their dead men, if there is a wrong skin color, if you can spot prostitutes by their feet fingers and… what really are the green monkeys.
Up until today “the green monkeys” has turned many cities with good reactions: Carpi, Padova, Palermo’s social center Zeta-lab, twice in Parma, the meeting of Italian Ngo “Chama l’Africa” in Ancona, twice in Rovigo’s province, three times in Modena, Padova again in a library and two schools, Mandas (in Sardinia), L’Aquila, Rome, Sassuolo, Pescara (in a school and in a pub), in Ravenna, Imola, in Rome again, Fidenza, Pavullo, Avellino, Viterbo, Senigallia, Spilimberto, Reggio Emilia, Prato,….
Here you can download a word document with all details in Italian
Photos of the “Le scimmie verdi” ad Avellino
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