Danilo Cremonte: trainer for Smascherati!

Hello!

I am Danilo Cremonte, from the Smascherati Cultural Association!

In the Crescendo project I take care of the more strictly theatrical part. In fact, I am an actor and director and have been leading the intercultural theatre workshop Human Beings for 30 years.

I am now in the magnificent medieval cloister of S. Anna, in Perugia, where our association is based. The trees behind me are suffering, suffering from the great heat and drought.

According to the European Union’s ‘Copernicus’ weather service, 2024 will be the hottest year since measurements began, snatching the sad record from 2023.

In the last 12 months, the average temperature on Earth has been 1 degree 64 above pre-industrial levels, thus above the 1 degree 5 limit set by the Paris Agreement and COP 26 in Glasgow. And what will the next few years be like?

The women and men who work in the world of agriculture are well aware of this situation and experience at first hand the disastrous effects of global warming, which puts the fruits of their labour at risk every year. Perhaps this is also why more and more farmers feel the need for a radical change in their work. They feel the need, also on a personal, existential level, to live and work with a different relationship with nature, based on respect and not on robbery.

What does the Crescendo project have to do with all this?

It has something to do with it, because the Crescendo project wants precisely to meet this desire for change, offering an opportunity to cultivate awareness of the importance of farmers’ work in countering the climate crisis. In short, it is important that those who work in the agricultural world believe in what they do for the environment, in what they can do for the care of the Earth.

Farmers need to gain self-confidence and develop their communication skills, improving their ability to engage with their stakeholders. This is how they can become real active agents of ecological transformation in rural areas.  And this is one of the main objectives of the Crescendo project.

I believe that theatre, or rather, the practice of the theatre workshop, is the right field to cultivate these ambitions. In the theatre workshop, participants live an experience that involves them, as they say, ‘body and soul’. We start with the body to get to the soul. Each meeting will be introduced by a short physical exercise for everyone. A series of exercises and games accompanied by voice, done laughing and joking, but also training imagination and fantasy together. 

We don’t do gymnastics!

Experience has taught me how important this moment is. I see people loosen up, that is, the physical tensions that are the expression of emotional tensions begin to melt away. Masks begin to fall and the armour with which we defend ourselves, armour that is made of fears, begins to break down.

In the collective bonding, relationships begin to form between people, people who do not even know each other. And these relationships are initially only made up of glances, perhaps smiles. In short, a positive atmosphere is created in which everyone feels at ease and can therefore open up and express themselves better, has more trust in others.

We try to train the body to be more sensitive and more responsive. A body that can perceive through our 5 senses the information coming to us from outside and can react with a renewed freshness. But a sensitive body can also better feel what we feel inside and thus give expression to our emotions. Giving body to emotions, fantasies, desires…

We will also play games to nurture trust in others and to gain others’ trust in us. Then we will devote part of the workshop to observing our behaviour when we interact with others, in everyday life.

How much information we send with our bodies, often without knowing it! How much more information we can receive if we train our gaze!

In everyday life, our bodies are always communicating and in order to create good relationships, it is important to be aware of this. We know, communication is not only made up of words. Gestures, body positions, proximity and distance to the interlocutor, voice, rhythm, tone of voice… in short, everything that is called ‘body language’ provides a range of information about the information we give with words. And it is this information that will ultimately give the true sense of what we are saying.

More importantly, ‘body language’ affects the interpersonal relationship, and if this is not good, there will be no good communication either. This analysis of our interpersonal behaviour, we will do with a comical approach, i.e. it will not be a theoretical lesson, but we will observe each other, a bit like guinea pigs. And so we will also be able to develop an ironic and self-mocking sensitivity that will allow us to look lightly at our flaws (or what we consider to be our flaws).  Then with some clown exercises we will try to play with these flaws and we will discover that accepting our fragility, without hiding it, can give us more self-confidence. After all, with the clown all we are doing is confronting our limits and accepting them.

Understanding the sense of limits is also fundamental in addressing the climate crisis, and this also in our individual relationship with the environment and nature.

So, to conclude, I would just like to remind you, and I think it is only right to do so in a project that is aimed at those who live and work in rural areas, to remember that the word ‘clown’ comes from the Latin word ‘colonus’, meaning ‘’farmer‘’, the one who cultivates the land. And so, thanks to the clown, we are back where I started.