COLORBLIND DICTIONARY OF A DIVA
A –AHEAD FULL SPEED
So far you have followed me in more or less solitary adventures, and still I have many to tell you, but just allow me a choral parenthesis in which to introduce you other extraordinary travel companions, with whom I have really shared everything by land, air, sea, in the five continents, on stage, in the backstage, in hotel rooms or incredible residences, on super equipped multi-storey buses, old jeeps in the desert, and five-stars minivan in the Siberian steppe. I’m talking about the musical adventures of Incanto Quartet, an ensemble of voices, elegance and brains that still makes me proud of feeling like a Woman. We have grown together in the last ten years, and travel and meeting each other are for me, you know, two wonderful ways of evolving. But now I come to explain yet another funny title that I submit to you, and the way in which I intent to tell you in pills, our story (for further details you will be forced to attend some of our next concerts): the idea of the Colorblind Dictionary was born long time ago, when this seriously graphomaniac subject (that’s me) wandered around in airports with notebooks and moleskines in order to write down every memory. It has become a dictionary because I like to play with words and also because my colleagues/friends/stage sisters have always provided me with excellent material. As you travel a lot, knowing English is not enough to avoid “gaffes” during a conversation, and I must say that, getting lost into multilingual approaches, you can sometimes lose sight of your language too. Hence, at the dawn of an alarm clock, I can’t remember when or where, one of us (can you guess who?) after several linguistic problems, exclaims: “Excuse me, but this morning I’m a bit colorblind” (meaning “dyslexic” but getting the wrong word. And by revealing you that “Even divas are wrong” we have always worn sunglasses without ever denying our thousands of defects and imperfections, which we keep on exporting head-on around the world, sometimes becoming very funny, but always with italian class!
B – BARI, BITRITTO, BITONTO: FROM “THE SOUTHERN STARS” WE AIM HIGHER AND HIGHER
Our first experience, perhaps the only one that can be defined as a “mess tin” before a fast and incredible rise in prestigious international contexts, started in a cold and rainy winter, in Bari. My triumphant declaration at my very first interview was: “After Bari, we aim higher and higher!”, and the other girls still use to banter me for this. But one more memorable statement was sweet Laura’s one while she punished our clumsy tenant with a candid: “I bet you are from BiTONTO!”. With these premises our adventure begins and will be noted on my Carnet d’Alice, a delicious note book Laura brought me from Paris. Among wonderful and cold cathedrals, white-stone and trulli villages upon Puglia hills, trips by night on the Petruzzelli orchestra’s bus while watching the first funny movies by Checco Zalone, Christmas shopping in the center of Bari, the amazing Trani Abbey where we had to sing with coats and feathers on the head, and the grand finale at the Piccinni Theater, we will never forget our first goals and standing ovations.
C – CABIN CREW, WE HAVE A PROBLEM
Brazil: a world so far, we left with coats and landed at 40 degrees. We change like superman in an airport’s cabin (that perhaps was a toilet) and with our flower mini dresses we’re ready to conquer a new dimension, made of traffic, big noises, but also giant climbing orchids on the trees in every corner, and quarrelsome parrots, masters of the air. San Paolo is a huge metropolis, full of magic and strong contrasts, but the city experience and the big concert with Andrea Bocelli in front of an oceanic audience, is not the most amazing one we had during this journey. After this wonderful concert we leave again for an unknown destination somewhere in the wild area of the big lakes, between desert and forest. We’ve been seriously trained in order not to make many questions, and at the moment we just need to know we’re going to sing for one more oceanic audience, with shining dresses, wonderful smiles and musically super prepared. When we get there we have an amazing sight: they’re just ending building a huge theater tent in the middle of nowhere, complete with luxury equipped dressing rooms, fruit triumphs and white leather sofas. All around sand, dust, chariots, bicycles and obviously parrots. They get more and more quarrelsome when they start hearing our vocalizes and begin a sort of competition with our voices. After another successful performance (the huge audience appear and disappear we don’t know how and from where) the big tent theater is dismantled and disposed of , so that they can restore the pre-existing landscape perfectly intact and take us to the airport. An airport in the middle of nowhere too. During the flight, quite asleep, I can hear our brave- heart – Claudia (she’s not usually very happy on the plane) saying to Rossella with anxious voice: “They’ve just said in the cabin ‘Cabin crew, abbiamo un problema’”.
