Translator: Roberto Minelli Reviewer: Michele Gianella
My name is Arturo Brachetti and I'm a quick-change artist.
A profession that is quite hard to define,
People stop me on the street,
and say: "Hey, you are the transformer from TV!"
or worse "Ha, there he is, the swapper from the Internet!"
One day, a woman in Naples stopped me
and said: "Hey Brachetti, stage a transfiguration for us."
Wonderful!
Long story short, in my job
I play dozens, hundreds of different characters,
while obviously sticking true to myself.
I could be somewhat of
a parable, the theatrical metaphor of equal / unequal.
Set in an environment of wonder and surprise, of course.
When I was 11, I was a very shy child, above all different from any other.
My parents sent me to a boarding school run by Salesian monks, a seminary,
hoping I could become like the other children.
But nothing really changed for me,
because I kept being bullied.
I ended up, as usual, in the rubbish bin.
An empty one: that was a seminary, not the Bronx - lucky me.
But that's when I got to know a priest who did magic tricks,
and I ended up learning magic from this priest-magician.
I was still hopeless at P.E. and football
but when I took a card and it happened to be a three of spades -
Wow! How did you do that? It is amazing!
And so I figured out I had a sort of superpower:
the power to create wonder.
I continued this journey of mine,
trying for years to come up
with all sorts of different ways
to change costumes, to transform myself.
And so, with only a small six characters repertoire
I went to Paris in 1979 for an audition.
They took me in a snap:
not because I was the fastest in Paris,
but because right there in Paris, back in 1979, I was told
I was the only person in the world to put on such a show.
That made me so proud - I was "The king of metamorphoses" -
but didn't really change my life: I realised I was surrounded
by extraordinary colleagues,
people that in their everyday life perhaps were ordinary individuals
were extraordinary on a stage.
Just think that Caryatis was performing in my same show.
She was a trapeze artist who flew "en grand balant"
high above the heads of the spectators
hanging only by her ankles,
no safety rope or net,
a world first,
It was a really tense performance,
not only for her, but also for the spectators underneath her,
to be honest with you.
In Paris , I met a journalist called Jacques Bessis,
who happened to be an expert
in the most bizarre characters of showbiz.
And so, leafing through his book of memoirs and theatre memorabilia,
I came across a character who had received loud applause
for performing an absolutely normal,
almost coarse act.
I'm talking about Joseph Pujol, a flatulist known as "Le Pétomane."
It all started in 1870 in Marseilles.
Grannies had taken their grandson to the seaside.
He was blissfully swimming in the sea
when, all of a sudden, he felt an icy cold in his belly.
So he ran ashore
and realised he had, say, "inhaled,"
of course not from his mouth
a large amount of water.
He immediately expelled it.
It was clean water, but he still got very scared.
Anyway, he learned to live with this special problem.
He went on with his life and became quite popular.
While in the army, everyone wanted him to make water balloons.
But one day, a fellow soldier said to him:
"Why don't you suck in air, instead of water?"
He thought about it. Why not?
He gave it a try, and created a sort of air chamber,
a small compressed air bagpipe
that, duly modulated,
was able to reproduce musical farts
that were odourless and perfectly tuned.
He thought, maybe that was a form of talent!
And so it started practising.
In 1890 he showed up in Paris, at a Moulin Rouge.
Zidler, the Director, told him:
"Well, are you here for an audition?" - "Mais oui."
"I've been told you are a musician:
did you bring your instrument?" - "I carry it with me all the time."
"He came to attention, and played La Marseillaise.
With his bottom, needless to say.
Zidler was obviously shocked and said:
"I've never seen anything like this. You are one of a kind!
I'll put it in the show."
That same evening, he was introduced as "Le Pétomane."
Monsieur Pujol showed up in a red tie,
an immaculately waxed handlebar moustache,
and in his perfect French said: Bonsoir, messieurs-dames!
Tonight, you will be attending a farting session.
You see, inside my body is an entire orchestra
of musical instruments.
Wind instruments, of course.
This is the tenor -
this is the baritone -
and this is the bass -
With each instrument he struck a note,
you can imagine how.
Spectators were petrified for a few seconds, I'll have to admit.
However , he went on: "Here's the lion's roar -
my mother-in-law getting mad -
a young girl sighing on her first night of marriage -
the cannonball fired at Waterloo -
In the space of a few minutes,
the entire Moulin Rouge had turned into Dante's circle of giggles.
People were splitting their sides.
A few days later, nurses were called in to stand in the corridors
because the ladies of the Parisian aristocracy,
forced in their corsets, would pass out from laughing.
It was an outstanding success.
He thus became the highest paid showman in Paris,
even more than the diva and great actress Sarah Bernhardt.
He spent his whole life going from one success to another,
and happily died after accomplishing his mission.
Why did I end up talking about Joseph Pujol in the first place?
Because, in my opinion, he managed to publicly turn
an everyday, banal habit that we all have,
and often causes embarrassment,
into some sort of superpower.
He would enact a cathartic ritual
that gave glory and interest
back to a banality, a weakness we all have,
from the farmer to the king, from the lorry-driver to the Pope.
True, a person like Joseph Pujol only turns up once every 100 years.
So, what about the other myriad of superheroes
who populate our story:
intellectuals, musicians, scientists, sportspeople?
I don't really know how to talk about them,
so I'll talk about people in showbiz.
Why not move on to the trial by fire
with the "fireproof woman"?
I've met her.
No, it's not Madame Girarli
who used to be put in a wood oven with a pizza back in the 1700s,
only to emerge unharmed when the pizza was cooked.
She wasn't Madame Margherita, either.
No, no, no, I'm talking about an artist I've worked with,
called Kira von Biron,
"The fireproof woman."
In 1981 I used to present her like this:
"Meine Damen und Herren! Und jetzt, Kira von Biron!
When the lights went down,
out of bluish fog came this Felliniesque woman,
wrapped in a super shiny cloak made of razor blades,
wearing welder goggles decorated with rhinestones
and a turban on her head.
She turned around, and her cloak blew up.
Boom!
All the front rows felt this warmth
that left them both surprised and scared.
Then she took off her cloak and remained half-naked,
with a trinket wrought-iron bikini.
The people there had no idea her entire body was covered
with a flesh-coloured gauze made of guncotton:
a highly flammable material and, of course, illegal.
At that point, touching secret components,
she could set her right arm on fire - boom!
Or her left arm - boom!
Not to mention the armoury she was hiding in her turban,
an explosive concoction
made of lycopodium, magnesium, gunpowder and nitrocellulose.
Obviously,
the safety standards of those days had nothing to do with today's,
Her husband, with a flamethrower, shot a fireball through her knees.
At some stage, her entire body turned into a human torch,
eventually reaching her turban.
A triumph of fireworks, sparks and lapis lazuli.
She'd take off her goggles, take the applause
and that was it.
I remember asking her behind the scenes: "Aren't you afraid of fire?"
She obviously answered:
"No, I'm not!
Remember: you shouldn't be afraid of fire.
It's fire that must be scared of you"
"If you say so, Kira."
These superpowers are worthy of a big round of applause,
of the Guinness Book of Records, aren't they?
However, in our everyday life,
we are surrounded by people who have superpowers.
Take teachers, for example.
People who save lives, doctors, nurses.
Craftsmen who create objects
with details and secrets handed down over millennia.
They deserve to be called superheroes.
Sure, not always do we have the superpower we wish we had.
For instance, if I asked you: "What is Uri Geller's superpower?"
You would reply: "Bending teaspoons and keys with his mind."
No, that is a hoax.
Uri Geller's real superpower
is communication and marketing.
He admitted it himself, the rest is smokescreen.
Therefore, superpowers are humbler, more routine.
Knowing how to cook, how to raise children well,
to take care of others, to speak, to be able to listen.
That's it, know how to listen.
It is an incredibly communicative superpower.
You know, I found out from a Quebecois comedy
that in the culture of Québec there is a character
named Mary of the Dead.
It is a lady
villagers would call
whenever someone was about to pass away.
The relatives would call Mary and leave the house.
She would then be alone with this poor creature
who opened up to her.
People would tell her the worst things of their life:
desires, sins, jealousies, requited or unrequited loves.
Mary would then leave,
look for a field, dig a hole in the ground,
speak to it, deposit there all these secrets,
spitting out all these words, and then cover them with soil.
At that point, the old person could die peacefully, gracefully.
Maybe she was just a peasant or a washerwoman living in the village.
Don't tell me this isn't some kind of superpower, right?
So tonight I want to share with you some thoughts of mine
that make me, and everyone, feel good:
all of us, one way or another, in our own small way,
in our families, in our blocks of flats,
in our regional world, even on Wikipedia,
we all are superheroes.
Being one is not an exception, being one is the norm.
And by the way, being all superheroes, we are all equal in being so.
I'd like to introduce you to the last character, before leaving,
one I played in one of my shows many years ago:
"The Elephant Man."
The Elephant Man lived in the London of the 1800s.
The poor man was known for having severe deformities,
presented at freak show exhibitions and markets,
studied by the science.
And also cuddled and pampered by the aristocracy.
In my dreamlike version,
the Elephant Man was brought on stage by his father and master,
a tamer, a torturer
who forced him to perform tricks almost like a circus animal.
Suddenly, the music changed
and pieces of paper would fall through his hands.
Immediately, the tamer, the evil guy, would pick them up,
and bellow them out:
"Poetry, you? Poetry? Are you serious? Ah ha ha! "
He would ball them up, shove them in my mouth
and leave me, humiliated, pale and wan, on the ground.
At that point,
I would spit out these writings, these manuscripts,
and read them out loud.
The text sounded something along the lines of:
"What is
our deepest need?
What has always been our deepest desire?
Among so many wonders,
being ourselves is a wonder.
Because no one
is identical to someone else.
We need wonder.
The wonder of being invisible.
The wonder of beauty.
The wonder of being loved.
The wonder of being able to fly.
The wonder of being forever free."
At that point, out of the Elephant Man's chrysalis.
a light soul was born, draped in white veils,
who took to flying through a starry sky among notes sung by a boy soprano,
while the audience in the stalls were holding hands, visibly moved.
That's it, friends.
I would like to conclude by saying that all of us, each and every one of us,
are all equal, in our being a unique wonder.
(Applause)