
Elvira of Flavia Amabile
13 October 2025
EVA’s Buvette at the San Ferdinando Theater in Naples. The work that demonstrates how violence can be overcome
13 October 2025THE STORY IS THIS. THE JOAN OF ARC TRIAL
Three authoritative and original voices from the contemporary cultural panorama meet in an unprecedented theatrical project: Teresa Cremisi and Chiara Valerio sign the writing of a show that bears the directorial signature of Liv Ferracchiati. Giovanna is alone on the scene at the moment of the accusation and at the moment of the conviction, close to her an Anonymous Chronicler who tells her story.
Almost a shadow that embodies the voice of the people, the same people who raised it and now abandon it, implacable in judging its defeat. Giovanna’s charisma and command are perishable because the logic of power is simple, staying away from any form of defeat. All around, in a liminal area, between light and shadow, inside and outside her head, are the imperious, ironic and ambiguous voices of the saints who have accompanied her since childhood. There is also the most pressing, masculine and material voice of the Judge. A faceless man, inevitable as always is power, whose body exists only in the violence of condemnation.
The Judge represents political power disguised as religious power, perhaps, even earlier, and more or less consciously, he acts to assert his own order against the order of others, friends or enemies, that is, disorder. A disorder that Joan embodies as a woman who manages to lead the armies of the Dauphin of France, she who barely knows how to write her name but has on her side the certainty of being right, and the few words learned from the prayers with which she defends himself before the court. At first, Giovanna’s charisma means that she is believed, loved and followed, that power allows her to be a girl in arms, that her body is carried in triumph. At a later time, when defeat comes, Giovanna’s body can only be annihilated. And those same weapons, those same clothes, change from glory to accusation.
The overthrow, as Bakhtin explains much better, is necessary to free the community from fear, but it is a temporary, limited process and must necessarily be reabsorbed by power to re-establish and strengthen itself.