I MALTAGLIATI / TO SING A LIFE / TEATRET OM

A woman. A radio. A pasta dish—and, first and foremost, singing.

An elderly woman stands in her kitchen cooking a pasta dish—I Maltagliati—for a guest. Over the course of a morning, she relives her life through songs. The performance is built around a series of powerful Italian folk songs and other songs that uniquely convey ordinary human feelings, desires, and dreams. The songs are the voice of ordinary people and cover all aspects of everyday life: working, loving, struggling, being born, and dying. The story unfolds in two different spaces: the physical space—the kitchen, where the woman makes pasta with only a radio for company—and a space of memories, where we see the woman’s life in flashbacks, open to the viewer’s own interpretation.