Schwarzenbach – Le dolci vite

Grazia Pergoletti, an Italian Swiss or a Swiss Italian, sets out to find out what her life would have been like if she had had to leave Basel at the age of six to live in Assisi. The result is an autofictional examination of a dark chapter in Swiss history, James Schwarzenbach's foreign infiltration initiative.

Grazia Pergoletti, una svizzero-italiana, si mette alla ricerca di come sarebbe stata la sua vita se avesse dovuto lasciare la sua città nativa, Basilea, all'éta di sei anni per vivere ad Assisi forzata dall' iniziativa di James Schwarzenbach contro gli immigranti stranieri. «Schwarzenbach - Le dolci vite» è uno spettacolo pieno di ricordi d'infanzia, di nostalgia, di musica, di biografie immaginate se la vita della protagonista, Grazia Pergoletti, avesse preso una strada diversa dalla vita in Svizzera.

"Foreign infiltration" was the threatening warning sign of the late 1960s in Switzerland and led to the well-known Schwarzenbach Initiative, which went to the ballot box with a record-breaking voter turnout and was unexpectedly narrowly rejected by the voters – at that time exclusively men. Actually a miracle. If it had been accepted, hundreds of 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 their Swiss mother. Because there was no money to apply for Swiss citizenship for the daughter. The family was in danger of being torn apart. In the end, Grazia is allowed to stay and now, decades later, wonders what would have happened if the Swiss voters had set the course differently back then? What would her life have been like if she had moved back to her father's hometown of Assisi? Grazia Pergoletti sets out on the trail of a life path that could once have become just as reality as her acting career in Switzerland.

The audience travels with the protagonist to Assisi, where she interviews different women in order to construct alternative lives from their humorous and painful stories. In the conversations, very different statements about family, religion, society, the living situation of women in Grazia Pergolettti's Italian hometown, Assisi, are discussed, and the question of identity and opportunities for development arises again and again. We get to know them in different versions, dance to the music of Raffaella Carrà and ask questions about belonging and privilege. These versions of a woman's life in Assisi are embodied by Vera von Gunten and Grazia Pergoletti: fragmentary and at the same time directly shining into different phases of life. And then again, the biographies of the performers are divided into those of the Swiss and those of the outside, accompanied by sounds and images that combine l'italianità and Swiss reality.

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.