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To read the “Book of the Dark” is not simply to read a book; it is a real and concrete experience which is almost a spiritual exercise. We feel that we are closed together with Salim in a cell that is too small for our body, that we eat dry bread and vegetables twice daily, that we are left in the pitch dark and freezing cold of a night that has lasted for eighteen years. Only a great writer can use the power of words to immerse us so completely in such a situation, to make us feel the desperation and physical suffering. A body that is deprived of everything, isolated, tortured by malnutrition, cold – every possible type of deprivation. What strikes me most forcefully is how Salim manages to save himself and re-emerge from the darkness. As a first step, he stops hating. In those cells, people died of hate, not of consumption. And later he stops “hoping”, in the sense of desiring things that he could never have. To do this, one can turn to prayer, naturally. But Salim has a powerful weapon: Culture, but with a capital “C”. The tales that he learned as a small boy, the books he loved throughout his life, the words he learned during his studies: these are his powerful allies in his fight against death and degradation, fragments of a beauty that is impartial and free and which, by itself, can save him and his cellmates.

Serena Sinigaglia

Serena Sinigaglia
graduated in 1996 in film direction at the “Paolo Grassi” School of Dramatic Art, and worked as assistant to directors Gabriele Vacis and Gigi Dall’Aglio. She later founded ATIR, a group formed to experiment ways of staging classical works and those of new dramatists, who describe her work and that of the Company as one of the most original and vibrant voices in the contemporary scene.  In 2007, for the Dedica festival, she coordinated the mise en espace of Nadine Gordimer’s L’aggancio and, in 2010, Il loro onore si chiama viltà by Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

Tindaro Granata
began his career in the theatre in 2002 with Massimo Ranieri in Pulcinella, directed by Maurizio Scaparro. Later, he worked with Roberto Guicciardini, Cristina Pezzoli and Carmelo Rifici.  In 2011, he wrote, directed and presented the monologue Antropolaroid for which he was awarded the Critics’ Prize by Italy’s National Association of Theatre Critics. In 2013 he staged Invidiatemi come io ho invidiato voi, which he wrote, directed and performed, and for which he received the Mariangela Melato Prize as “Best Emerging Actor”. At Dedica 2014, he will be directed for the first time by Serena Sinigaglia.