“Ettore Pensabene is no longer with us”, the memory

“Ettore Pensabene is no longer with us. Those were difficult and troubled days, time is now beginning to fulfill his inexorable duty: to soothe the pain.

Maritime poet who crossed the South Seas, the Indies, Japan and circumnavigated the Mediterranean, up to the Suez Canal, blocked by the 6-day war, Ettore stops on the Messina Strait by chance and necessity, after the meeting with Rosellina and the decision to start a family. Even earlier, at the tender age of 14, already fatherless, he was in Turin and Genoa to build bridges of the Northern motorways together with many other Calabrians in the first great post-war migration wave. Self-taught and without any possibility of completing his studies to the end, he founds theaters and directs companies, forming generations of actors; he plays twice alongside and for Gian Maria Volontè, he is awarded by Eugenio Barba, he meets extraordinary artists of our time such as Ignazio Buttitta, Rosa Balistreri, Renato Carosone, Carlo D’Apporto, Valeria Moriconi, Roberto Murolo, Franca Valeri, Carla Fracci, Gigi Proietti, Bernardo Bertolucci, Luigi Comencini… takes part in various radio broadcasts and Rai dramas. As a director he prefers Eduardo, Pirandello, Cechov, Garcia Lorca, Pasolini and Testori above all. As a painter he exhibited his works in many places and few galleries, in 2006 a large retrospective entitled “The sea inside, marine and rural landscape of the Strait” by the Anassilaos association at the National Museum of Magna Grecia in Reggio Calabria. His poems and plays are partly collected in Myths, Rites and Masks. 1985 – 2015 Selected works (2018, YCP editions) edited by Luciano Pensabene and Romina Cardìa, with a preface by Paola Radici Colace and Paolo Arecchi and a note by Walter Manfrè.

Ettore Pensabene approaches the Theater thanks to the experience, foundational for his territory, of the Calabria Theater directed by Rodolfo Chirico, thanks to which he meets his actor friend Stefano La Motta, with whom he will weave a professional and human relationship that will last a lifetime . Thanks to Chirico he refines his acting qualities and meets the great authors staged by the professor: Shakespeare, Brecht, Cechov, Pirandello and the same works by Chirico, who is a friend of Strehler, Guicciardini and many other great representatives of those years roaring members of the Italian Theater, as well as being the director of the prose section of the Cilea Theater. At that time Ettore also collaborated with the nascent Blu Sky cabaret, directed by Mimmo Raffa. Strengthened by this experience, he soon identified in his Catona a substratum of social, spiritual and cultural factors that first favored the birth of the 3 Valli Theater thanks to his friend Augusto Cama, staging as director and actor many texts by contemporary authors, from Vincenzo Zicarelli, Nino Pino and Aldo De Benedetti. In 1986, with the help of some members, he transformed the Polis Cultura cooperative to which he belongs, operating with great merit in the social sector with a well-defined political matrix (the activity revolves around the monthly The Press edited by the PCI sections of the 8th District), in a technical-organizational structure for cultural promotion that sees in the Theater a possibility to get out of the asphyxiated quagmire of those years. Shortly thereafter, thanks to his friend Osvaldo La Maestra, the decisive meeting with Lillo Chilà and the identification of an area among the most degraded of the extreme northern suburbs of Reggio Calabria, on which to build the idea, the I dream, in the manner of the ancient Greek colonists, to found a theater, a summer arena for theatrical performances. Thus was born the Catonese Estate and the National Dramatic Art Festival, supported by many friends and new members of the cooperative, with the first editions made possible thanks and above all to a door-to-door fundraiser. The event is a continuous crescendo and 1989 is the year of the meeting with a director already established at national level, Walter Manfrè, who had directed Ettore in The innkeeper of Goldoni and that Ettore himself takes to Catona to introduce him to the volcanic Lillo. From this meeting one of the decisive experiences for the development of the Theater was born South of those years, which will transform not only the cultural geography of a territory tormented by an incessant and bloody mafia war, but will also lead the city of Reggio Calabria to become an official center of live entertainment in Italy, always present in the tours of hundreds of national productions and artists: Catonateatro was born. From here on it is an incessant march of successes made of sacrifices, transformations, joys and pains that have seen this reality resist for 37 years (2022) under the careful and decisive guidance of Lillo Chilà. In the meantime Ettore began writing for the theater and together with Polis (which from now on also becomes a permanent company) some of the most beautiful productions are made, directed by Walter Manfrè with the technical-organizational direction of Lillo, in which Ettore is also an actor as well as an author: The amorous tale of Glauco and Scilla, Filomena and Colapesce, Di Pentidattilo stories and legends (by Beatrice Monroy), Scilla and Cariddi (in addition to an epic Liolà by Pirandello), are texts that dig into the deep roots of our land, making the Myths and legends of Magna Graecia re-emerge, thanks to a Newspeak that will be Ettore’s characteristic trait also in his poetic production (The Bay of DreamsIstar editions, Myths, Rites and Masks already cited). In 2015 the International Center of Writers of Calabria dedicated a day of studies to him, including theater, painting, poetry and cinema.

Someone has written in recent days that an era goes away with him, that of a generation that believed in culture as an authentic (and not bureaucratic) tool to free an extraordinary land like Calabria from the distress of the underworld, from provincialism, even from the defenseless acceptance of the status quo, from the ethical and aesthetic inadequacy that pervades his politics … Ettore was a son of the people and he dedicated all his research to the people, as a good follower of Gramsci, Mayakovskij and Pasolini, a meridionalist, he was convinced that the redemption of the masses had to pass through study, culture, civil and militant political commitment, guided as he was by a moral tension that never made him retreat a single step. He leaves a huge legacy and the many testimonies of these days, coming from all over, make us understand how much he was loved and how much passion he has transmitted to so many of us “.

Luciano Pensabene

Life is not a dream

it is a tragedy ‘ntica …

U dreamu is u so ‘bisognu

It is a Triatu of life.