Cagliari, farewell to Gianni Dettori: the art of change while remaining true to yourself.
One of the most original faces of the city scene has passed away: "Yannino" disappeared after more than forty years spent on the stage
Gianni Dettori (L'Unione Sarda)
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Nine seconds. That was all it took for Gianni Dettori to change clothes, face, and character. Monica Vitti could give way to Sandra Mondaini, Giorgio Gaber to Ettore Petrolini. All it took was a costume, a wig, a gesture, a song. Then Yannino would go back to being Yannino. Or perhaps he had never stopped being Yannino.
Cagliari bids farewell to Gianni Dettori, actor, mime, and quick-change artist, one of the city's most original figures, who passed away after more than forty years on stage. And if quick-change is the art of continually becoming someone else, his small paradox was managing to do so while remaining recognizable.
In the 1980s, Dettori founded the comedy duo Giancarlotta and also landed on RAI, experiencing that era in entertainment when cabaret, television, theatre, and clubs communicated much more freely than they would in subsequent years.
Since 1997, he's been touring Italy with the Gianni Dettori Show, built around the extraordinary theatrical machine that was his body. His influences included Lindsay Kemp and, above all, Paolo Poli, but his repertoire encompassed Gaber and Petrolini, Mina and Édith Piaf, Lola Falana and Monica Vitti. High and popular culture blurred boundaries and converged on the same stage.
Theater, cabaret, mime, en travesti, revue: Dettori mixed languages without worrying too much about labels.
But telling the story of Gianni Dettori also means telling the story of Cagliari, especially the Cagliari of the 1980s and 1990s, a city thronged with musicians, actors, performers, clubs, and tribes who met and mingled. A Cagliari less polished than today's, perhaps more provincial, yet surprisingly freer.
It's no coincidence that this dual story—that of a man and that of his city—became the heart of Kasteddu Free Night, the documentary film that director Giovanni Coda dedicated to him, which premiered just a few months ago at Exma. Archive materials, music, performances, and testimonials tell the story of Dettori, but through him, forty years of cultural transformation in Cagliari. " Giovanni has always managed to capture that part of me that I thought was invisible," Dettori said of the director.
His last public appearance was on June 27th at the Sardinia Pride parade, where he was invited to recount the Cagliari of the 1980s as the protagonist of Francesco Abate's novel "Gli indegni." On that occasion, two choirs joined together to sing some iconic songs from those years for him, drawing the city gathered at the Parco della Musica into their emotional embrace.
