La Medium

La Medium tells the true story of Hersilie Rouy, born in Milan and daughter of the 19th-century illusionist Charles Rouy, famous for his “Invisible Woman” act. Many of the acts that have made the history of magic reproduce a sexist script: men who, in order to demonstrate their power, use a woman’s body as a tool, making her disappear, either whole or in pieces.
La Medium is inspired by Incantagioni by Mariano Tomatis and seeks to offer those invisible women, who have too often been made to disappear, new bodies in which to materialise. Hersilie Rouy is one of them: an independent woman, composer and music teacher, she would eventually “disappear” in real life. She would, in fact, be unjustly confined to a psychiatric hospital under the pretext of her interest in sleepwalking and animal magnetism.
During fourteen years of confinement, Hersilie documented the abuses she suffered by writing, in her own blood, a diary of denunciation. In order to survive, she transformed the techniques of illusionism she had inherited from her father into tools of resistance: secret messages, fictitious identities, theatrical stratagems. She signed herself with symbolic names — including “Madame Pulcinella” — becoming a guide and a voice for the other inmates inside the Salpêtrière psychiatric hospital, the cradle of studies on female hysteria.
Hersilie Rouy was a pioneer in the critique of the psychiatric asylum system. Her story comes back to life on stage as a metaphor for extraordinary resistance: a woman who never stopped claiming her identity and her freedom, eventually securing, after her release, an amendment to the 1838 French law on psychiatric confinement.
Just over forty years after the Basaglia reform, which led to the closure of psychiatric hospitals in Italy, the performance seeks to bring back to light the story of a woman who, remarkably ahead of her time, denounced the abuses perpetrated within psychiatric institutions. It is a story in which magic is not used to amaze, but to survive, told through a performance that combines the craftsmanship of object theatre with technological research.
Between illusionism, séances and popular traditions such as Neapolitan guarattelle, La Medium reveals the relationship between the female body and patriarchal power, transforming theatre into a device for symbolic liberation.

Following the performance of 28 October, a conversation with Marta Cuscunà will take place on the occasion of the Italian premiere of La Medium. Uno spettacolo di mentalismo femminista ispirato alla storia vera di Hersilie Rouy, as part of Romaeuropa Festival’s series of encounters between artists and audiences, in collaboration with Rai Radio 3 and curated by Lorenzo Pavolini.
An opportunity to delve into the heart of the performance, explore its creative processes and meet its creator in person. Moderated by Lisa Roscioni.