Little Mermaid awakes

Written and interpreted by
Véronique Nah

Artistic assistance
Alessandro Libertini, Stefania Scarinzi

Sound project
Véronique Nah

Graphics
Studio Quartopiano

Still photography
Dario Lasagni

Production
Piccoli Principi Company, Scandicci Cultura, Istituzione Servizi Culturali, City of Scandicci, with the support of Regione Toscana, City of Sevran Festival des rêveurs éveillés.


Starting with Andersen
Véronique Nah

The first thing that struck me when I read “The Little Mermaid” was the beauty of Andersen’s writing - and not only the way he tells the heart – rending story of a young mermaid in the throes of a doomed love, but also the way he describes the fascinating worlds, both marine and terrestrial, in which the action unfolds. I thus found myself in complete agreement with one of Andersen’s translators, who had characterized the author as an impressionist: “everything, and consequently nature itself, appears for the fascination it arouses as a spectacle of the imagination and for the ideas it suggests; ideas not as expressions of logical thought, but as vibrant representations of the most subtle relationships between realia and fantasy.” As an impressionist, Andersen invites us to share in a genuine emotion, that of the process whereby objects become perceived phenomena. In the spontaneous abandon of the senses to reality, the simple observation of a person or of an object becomes a revelation: the unusual spectacle of a black shadow cast on the seabottom at the passing of a ship is an ill omen which will prove dead right as the story progresses. The little mermaid, too, is “phenomenal”. In the course of the tale the mind’s eye is trained upon her radical physical and psychological otherness: her extraordinary beauty; the fish’s tail that proves so repugnant to humans; her fearless determination; her immense shyness; her boundless capacity for suffering. Incurable otherness is in fact the central theme of “The Little Mermaid”, and I very much admired the author’s serious and absolutely direct approach to such dramatic existential problems even though he was clearly writing for children. Rather than pose an obstacle, this relationship with young readers seems to widen his freedom of expression; he indeed confessed that he had never been so deeply moved while writing. Andersen actually creates the contemporary fairy tale, something which never existed before him: a fairytale born from the head-on confrontation between a writer, his world and childhood.

Andersen, children and I
The performance has been freely adapted from Andersen’s story specifically for nursery-school children. Andersen’s impressionism seems to me especially appropriate to children of this age-group, who interpret the world around them deploying highly developed powers of observation and are more than willing to be touched emotionally by this encounter with reality. Similarly, I think that the themes of otherness and of suffering so prominent in Andersen’s stories are a part of children’s day-to-day experience. Consider, for example, the painful integration of certain children into the schoolroom, and the difficulties some face in trying to express themselves or in coordinating their bodily movements. The play thus represents an attempt to develop a form of communication with children on these issues by trying to imitate and pass on all of the delicacy of feeling Andersen reveals in his extraordinary story.