1,000 people! ONE THOUSANDDDDDDD!!!

If yesterday was WOW, today was…today was a great success! The performance was wonderful, everyone acted well, Felix and I dismantled the whole structure but everything went well. Lots of people in the audience enjoyed themselves, you could feel, see, touch the energy.

Gosh, how can I describe the sensation? At a certain point we were all so involved with the story, the scenes were no longer theatre, they became real. Yes, for a few moments the theatre was so perfect that it mixed with reality.

And the audience laughed. This performance is funny in Italian, in Portuguese, in Swahili, we Italians don’t understand a word of Swahili but we laugh when they laugh. It’s magic, pure magic.

Second impeccable change of scenery, in addition to the assembly is the work that I have to do during the performance. The ropes are pulled by two people, I’m in the centre holding the backdrop and I have to flip it behind, making the second backdrop appear, the one showing the hospital room.

I’ve got less than a minute to do this, the time for a pair of lines from the narrator. Even this time it went. And there’s two!

To the eyes of the people from the villages of Mozambique, we must seem really strange. A theatre company where the whites have to change the scenery. I think it’s the first time…

The actors are all Mozambican, the technicians and video troupe are all white. And when the performance finishes the black people eat, the white people dismantle everything  and collect the paper. And they sweating a lot.

I honour the courage of Adelino Gonçalves, known as Cuba, who today carried the show with gestures, movements, even when he didn’t have any lines. When Adelino Cuba enters the stage, the performance takes off!

Tomorrow Quionga!

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In the photos and in the next pages of the diary, you can admire the actors on stage and the audience! See the colours?