Away from there. Stories of the gypsy boxer

Via da lì. Storie del pugile zingaro (Away from there. Stories of the gypsy boxer)

project and performance by Walter Maconi
direction and dramaturgy Lucio Guarinoni and Walter Maconi
set and costume design Emanuela Palazzi

lighting design, animation and video programming Massimiliano Giavazzi

Johann Trollmann, detto Rukeli, has a dream: he wants to become a boxe champion.

He was the German middleweight champion in the 1930s. Born in Hannover, Rukeli was sinti, what we would still call a gypsy today.

It was precisely this diversity that made him an innovator: he was the first professional boxer to introduce the 'footwork'.

Like all innovators, Johann Trollmann did not have an easy life: in Nazi Germany, where the 'real boxer' was someone who stood in the middle of the ring and threw punches, basing his style solely on strength and virility, the gypsy dancer could certainly not be the champion and was condemned to a relentless decline.

His boxing licence was revoked, and finally he was one of the estimated more than 500,000 victims of the Porrajmos ("Great Devouring or Devastation"), the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti people.

Via da lì is a story about how sport can make us grow and change, about what it means to live with one's own identity and diversity, about how a dream can challenge prejudice.

It is also suitable for an audience of children over 11 years old, as it was initially conceived for them and built on the thread of irony and lightness in dealing with a human story that interweaves the great History, in the darkest years of the twentieth century.