Schwarzenbach – Le dolci vite

If something is in the structure, it is in the heads, in the bodies, in the thinking, in the language. "Foreign infiltration" was the warning sign of the late 1960s in Switzerland. The word was launched by the Swiss Carl Alfred Schmid and thus left his mark on thousands of workers: You are an infiltration of foreigners, you have to go! All this led to the well-known Schwarzenbach Initiative, which went to the ballot box in 1970 with a record-breaking voter turnout and was rejected by the voters – at that time exclusively men – by an astonishing margin. Actually a miracle. If it had been accepted, thousands of seasonal workers would have had to leave the country with their families, including half of the Pergoletti family from Basel, namely father Lodovico and six-year-old daughter Grazia, despite the Swiss mother. Because there was no money to apply for Swiss citizenship for Grazia. The family was in danger of being torn apart.

What would Grazia's life have been like if she had moved to her father's hometown of Assisi? What would life have looked like after this forced break in her biography? The protagonist is accompanied to Assisi, where she interviews very different women in order to construct various possible lives of her own from their stories. And again and again the question of belonging, identity and opportunities for development arises. The different versions of the same character "Graziella Pergolesi" are embodied by Vera von Gunten and Grazia Pergoletti. The fact that von Gunten and Pergoletti are visually and energetically similar in type makes it possible to play with confusion and duplication, sometimes they also appear as the same figure of different ages: fragmentary, shining directly into different phases of life, sometimes in detail and sometimes almost without words. The Schwarzenbach Initiative as the pivotal point in "Graziella Pergolesi's" life story gradually comes into play, and on stage a bridge to the present is built at the same time when the question is negotiated: Who are "those from Italy" today, and what challenges do they face? The audience is encouraged to think about self-determination and external determination as well as privileges. And they are invited to dance along with this dance of longings: the longing for a stable livelihood, for warmth and the knowledge of where they belong.

By and with: Grazia Pergoletti, Vera von Gunten, Marcel Schwald, Valerio Rodelli, Bernhard la Dous Production: Produktionsdock Basel
Language: German, Italian
From 12 years.