KALS’ART, SUMMER IN PALERMO IN THE HEART OF THE OLD CITY CENTRE AMID MUSIC, THEATRE, GREAT EXHIBITIONS AND GUIDED VISITS

Fourteen music concerts of national and international importance, sixteen theatre performances featuring some of the leading figures on the Italian stage, three important contemporary art exhibitions, and five days devoted to the cinema, with French masterpieces of the 1920s, plus guided visits of monuments kept open in the old city centre and art illuminations in the street and lanes of the Kalsa, off limits to passing traffic.

Kals’Art, a festival of art and entertainment promoted by the Municipal Administration, this year once again presents a busy summer programme.

Until 10 September the various venues of Kals’art - Piazza Magione, Piazza Kalsa, lo Spasimo, the Old Railway Engine Depot at Sant’Erasmo, the Sant’Anna Complex, and the Galleria Expa - breathe anew an air that is laden with cultural allusions, many reaching far back to the most ancient of Palermo traditions.

The common theme of this year’s Kals’art takes its inspiration from the 350th anniversary of the birth of Giacomo Serpotta.

Music. The link with Serpotta can be sensed in the melodious notes of the lullabies in the music programme, which will present some of Sicily’s finest dialect singers. But the music of Kals’art also goes beyond island traditions, with a programme ranging from South American rhythm to the songs of Naples, from Hispanic sounds to the subtle nuances of soul music, from lounge music to jazz and electronics.

Theatre. The fascinating relationship between literature and the cinema is the underlying theme of the Kals’art 2006 theatre section, scheduled until 6 August in the baroque atrium of Palazzo Bonagia. This theatre festival completes the one started last year, when the leitmotiv was Theatre Narrated, and is entitled Great Novels from the Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century - Cinema, Cinema, Cinema!

Sixteen masterpieces of nineteenth-century literature will be presented on stage, all skilfully adapted by expert Italian writers and acted by leading figures of the Italian theatre scene, and all of which have had film adaptations of such brilliance as to earn their rightful place in the history of the cinema, such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme, and Armitage Trail’s more recent Scarface. All these works will be performed by celebrated actors, including Arnoldo Foà, Milena Vukotic, Manuela Mandracchia, Maria Paiato, and Valeria Valeri.

Exhibitions. The section dedicated to the visual arts also gives the city voice and soul. Three exhibitions make the Kalsa a centre of culture that brings to Palermo the language of contemporary art.

From 1 August to 15 September, the Sant’Anna la Misericordia Monumental Complex reopens to the general public with the exhibition Eretica, an exhibition prepared by Demetrio Paparoni and Gianni Mercurio and dedicated to theme of the body and its relationship with the transcendent. The works presented, by some forty celebrated artists (ranging from Maurizio Cattelan and Robert Mapplethorpe to Cindy Sherman and Vanessa Beecroft), deal with themes such as the conflict between good and evil, holiness, and the relationship between eroticism, sex, and death.

The other exhibition, XL Collage, by David Vecchiato, set up in the Galleria Expa in Via Alloro by Tiziano Di Cara and Giuseppe Romano, from 2 August to 4 September presents the original sketches of the collages that this eclectic young artist from Rome has produced for XL, the monthly issue of the daily paper La Repubblica, since September 2005 up to the present day.

A look from the outside world will be presented by ten young Italian artists - not connected in any way with Palermo - who will tell their tale of the city, each one of them portraying its characteristic features in his or her own way. Each of them has made a video about the city, and their work is the object of Girato a Palermo (Filmed in Palermo), an exhibition in the Old Railway Depot at Sant’Erasmo prepared by Marcello Faletra and Ida Parlavecchio. This is open all through Kals’art, from 3 August to 10 September.

Cinema. Five days of the most sophisticated of films, from 25 to 29 August, are at the centre of a filmfest that unites cinema and music. Title: Musica per gli occhi (Music for the Eyes), prepared by Mario Bellone, Eric Biagi, and Franco Marineo. Nine masterpieces dating from the cinema’s earliest days, in particular of surrealist and Dadaist cinema of the 1920s, will be shown, accompanied by original music specially composed for the occasion and performed live by four Sicilian musicians.

Art Lights. The backdrop to these places where music and theatre throughout the summer will pass each other the baton will once again this year be the streets in the heart of Palermo, which will be closed to traffic on weekend evenings and decorated with “art lights” designed by five celebrated architects and designers: Mario Bellini, Pierluigi Cerri, Michele De Lucchi, Italo Lupi, and Paolo Rizzatto.

Churches and Serpotti oratories open. Until 9 September fourteen churches, museums, historic palaces, and oratories in the Kalsa will be open to the public every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 9 to 12 p.m. This initiative will be organized by the association “Amici dei Musei siciliani”.