“Il
Ventre della Balena” is gradually filled with indications, traces,
humour, smells, sounds and expectations. Each actor skilfully manages
to focus his own personality in his own way but with a theatrical language
common to all: that uniqueness which has by now become the “stamp
of quality” of the Teatro dei Radici. (…) With “Il Ventre
della Balena” Cristina Castrillo puts her signature to one of her
most intense shows.
Corriere del Ticino
Five men
emerge from a mountain of jute sacks, which evoke the trenches of the
First World War and of other wars; sacks which then become the containers
of corpses. The actors are not telling a story, but each one is a character
involved in various situations of war, where the greatest evil is perhaps
the loss of memory: a collective performance not without humorous situations
and moments of authentic lyricism.
La Regione
Technique,
discipline, creativity. These must be the three elements which for decades
now have always determined the work of Cristina along her artistic path
at the guidance of her “Radici”. Beginning with that by now
far off and exemplary “Tracciato a matita” we have watched the
growth and the maturity of a rich, abrasive and surely original repertoire,
to which is now added “Il Ventre della Balena”. Cristina’s
latest creation, with the collaboration of Bruna Gusberti, takes us deeply
into a reflection on war and on human miseries, entrusting the interpretation
of the performance to the participation of five fine actors.
L’Azione
They express
with words and movements, individual and collective (the hands, the stamping
feet, the running), anger or control, rebellion or order (the calculated
geometry of the cemetery but also of the concentration camp); he who resigns
himself, he who wants to flee, he who doesn’t understand and is lost
in the crowd, the executor and the anarchist, the fragile youth and the
wise old man, the strength of the muscle and the purity of the heart.
(…) To see and to meditate upon.
Giornale del Popolo
“The space in the whale’s belly is a sphere for debating not only the solitude of the individual but rather the complexity of human and social relationships in the world we live in, and the most fundamental features of human behavior.”
Vivian Martínez Tabares / Cuba
“A visual show, sustained in the imagery, the physically expressive strength of the body and the combination of music and lights in a space which is constructed, destroyed and reconstructed to emulate the trenches of solitude.”
El foro de Occidente / Venezuela