The sirens are back at the Scala in Milan. The perfect myth for today’s fluidity

Andersen and Disney, Tomasi di Lampedusa and “Rusalka”, Rowling and Caesar. Emma Dante brings millennial coexistence to the theater with the representation of uncertainty that we have never fully realized

Before meeting Emma Dante, who from June 6 will perform the debut of Antonin Dvorak’s “Rusalka” at the Teatro alla Scala – who would have thought that in the one hundred and twenty-two years since its first performance, no one has ever thought of that parable on the fickle condition of women in the city that counts more associations in defense of women – I went to look up economic data on women’s employment in 1993 in the United States. The two things don’t seem consequential, so here’s the explanation. 1993 is the year of release of the Disney “Little Mermaid” which owes a lot to Dvorak, and of “Boxing Helena”, debut film by Jennifer Lynch, daughter of David, one of those hallucinated journeys into the human psyche in which the family has specialized and which in this case were the basis of a perverse dream of mutilation that it is found quite often in underground literature and pornography. She told of a strong-willed manager who, out of love, agreed to have her boyfriend mutilate one limb after another by her jealous and possessive boyfriend to the point of wanting her to live in a box. “Doll’s house” to the extremes, in short. After the end of filming, Sherilyn Fenn, father Lynch’s fetish actress who had made her the seducer of the unmissable serial of those years, “Twin Peaks”, told reporters that despite the special effects and all the reassurances, staying in a box pretending he no longer had legs and arms had been really disturbing. The movie was horrible, it doesn’t even get aired on the fourth-rate networks at three in the morning and rightly so, no one in their right mind would ever see it again.