Between the waves of radio frequencies and the abyssal signals of whales, a form of revenge against the culture of death unfolds— a poetic manifesto that begins from Under Milk Wood, a vocal work celebrating life, innocence, plurality, and the childhood of the world in the seaside village invented for radio by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, which the rock radio DJ and “beautiful loser” Renato Striglia wanted to realize but never did.
The fifteen unreleased songs written by Vinicio Capossela, along with the characters, voices, and obsessions, populate the solitude of a man lying in an empty bathtub, who is at once Renato, Captain Cat, and Dylan Thomas himself—“Noah of the bay in his patched-up ark.”
The show is a radio musical immersed in darkness, where the voices reaching us from the milk of the wood are the voices of our shared humanity. It is a sanctuary of innocence besieged by the world of law, power, and order—an uprising against docility that celebrates the subversive force of being oneself, despite everything… even death.
Vinicio Capossela (Hanover, 1965) is a singer-songwriter, writer, and musician whose thirty-year career is marked by an unrelenting exploration across all artistic fields: poetic composition, arrangements, the blending of musical genres and styles, scenography, and performance structure. Over the past twenty years, each tour has become an opportunity to reinvent a poetic and phantasmagorical world, strongly defined in theatrical terms: the world of ruins and myth in Ovunque Proteggi (2006), Michelangelo’s sonnets (2007), Solo Show (inspired by side shows, created with punk burlesque magician Christopher Wonder in 2009), Marinai, profeti e balene, where songs resonated within the ribs of a whale (2011), Ombre nell’inverno (2016–2017), a work that also involved shadow theatre based on the album Canzoni della Cupa, and finally the medieval iconography of Ballate per uomini e bestie (2019).
Beyond music, Capossela has also developed a relationship with the radio medium. His first radio tale dates back to 2001 with Il Canto di Natale, followed by I cerini di Santo Nicola (2002), Radiocapitolazioni (2004), the fairy tale Il gigante e il mago (2009), Ombre radio (2016), and the podcast Conciati per le feste (2024). His poetics are constantly oriented toward the human condition, exploring every corner of vital movements and emotional extremes, in a continuous intertwining of past and present, myth and reality, rhetoric and physical presence. His interest in forms of community and collective experience led him in 2013 to create the Sponz Fest. In a rural area of southern Italy, this festival becomes a “country opera” where different artistic expressions—music, literature, cinema, visual arts, and theatre—intersect in resonance with the territory and its inhabitants.
Vinicio Capossela has released 14 albums, written 5 books, made 4 films, received numerous awards, and performed hundreds of concerts nationally and internationally.
Vinicio Capossela
And Death Shall Have No Dominion
ballad opera
with Vinicio Capossela and Pierpaolo Capovilla
Based on an idea by: Renato Striglia
Principal Performers: Vinicio Capossela, Pierpaolo Capovilla
Texts / dramaturgy: Vinicio Capossela
Direction: La Cùpa collective
Music: Vinicio Capossela
Artistic cast: Vincenzo Vasi, Luca Giovacchini, Raffaele Tiseo, Riccardo Loda, Elvis Zini, Irene Sciacovelli, Gaia Barco
Set design: Giuliano Spinelli
Costume design and production: Sartoria Teatro Due
Lighting design: Loïc Hamelin
Assistant director: Gaia Barco
Mask design and production: Margherita Pillon, Sabrina Schievano
Technical director: Andrea Ricci
Production assistants: Morgana Marchesi and Donatello Racina
Sound engineers: Gianluca Cavallini, Paolo Marani
Lighting technician: Daniele Serra
Production: IMARTS, Fondazione Teatro Due Parma, La Cùpa
Executive production and booking: International Music and Arts srl, Francesco Cattini, Serena Sgarbi
Project coordination: Luca Bernini
Press office: GDG press – Giulia Di Giovanni and Giulia Zanichelli
Social media manager: David Ardito
Photo © Nicol Vizioli
