Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas | |
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Written by | Dario Fo |
Original language | Italian |
Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas is a one-man play by Dario Fo, recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is narrated by Johan Padan, a fugitive from the Spanish Inquisition who accompanies Christopher Columbus on his fourth voyage to the New World.
Fo's response to the 1992 quincentennial celebrations of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus to the Americas, the title character is a Venetian fugitive who escapes from the Spanish Inquisition by joining the explorer and coloniser's fourth voyage. Forced to tend the animals on board, a storm casts him adrift in the ocean on the back of a pig until he reaches the coast and is rescued by the indigenous peoples of the Americas. [1] A video recording of Fo's performance exists. [2]
Fo tells the story of being invited to Seville in 1991 to discuss his earlier play, Isabella, Three Tall Ships, and a Con Man , recounting the hostile reception it received in Rome in 1963, and how under the regime of Francisco Franco a Spanish theatre troupe was arrested for attempting to stage that play. Sensing that his Seville audience was hostile as well, Fo improvised a story that would eventually serve as the basis of Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas.
Johan Padan flees Venice after his lover is arrested by the Inquisition and accused of witchcraft. After several episodes in which he witnesses violent antisemitism in the form of auto da fe and financial fraud committed against Jews who flee such violence, Johan is conscripted as part of Christopher Columbus's crew, where tends the livestock in the ship's hold.
Upon arriving in the Americas Johan is entranced by the natives and subsequently horrified by the violence committed against them by his fellow Europeans. When the ship he is on is wrecked, he and his fellow animal keepers, survive by floating ashore on the backs of pigs and after many misunderstandings, joins a Caribbean tribe, using his skills of basic surgery, fireworks, and horse training to become the holy man of the tribe.
Johan leads the tribe on a journey around the Americas, having comical encounters with other Native American cultures. He teaches his tribe how to tame and ride horses. Finally, in Florida when they come upon a Spanish colony, Johan realizes that the only way to protect his tribe from being enslaved is to convert them to Christianity. He teaches them heretical versions of stories from the Bible and Gospels. When that fails, he uses sabotage, and his expertise with fireworks to drive the Spaniards away.
Fo researched the journals of a number of European explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and wrote the play in a dialect that drew upon the Lombardian, Venetian, Catalanian, Castilian, Provençal, Portuguese and Arabic. His wife, the actor Franca Rame, translated it into modern Italian. Fo also composed a book of illustrations that he uses to prompt himself when he performs the play on stage.
When performed by Dario Fo, the play is often improvised, using a book of illustrations as a prompt. He uses mime and grammelot and onomatopoeia to represent the action. It is considered to belong to the genre of Teatro di narrazione , which is generally said to have begun with Fo's own Mistero Buffo .
American actor Thomas Derrah is also noted for performing an English language version, translated by Ron Jenkins.
The character of Johan Padan is inspired by both the commedia dell'arte characters of Zanni and Harlequin (characters whom Fo frequently draws upon) and by such historical figures as Cabeza de Vaca, Hans Staten, Gonzalo Guerrico and Michele da Cuneo, early European sailors and explorers of the Americas who came to sympathize with the native peoples and often aided them in resisting Europeans.
Ed Emery has carried out an English translation. [3]
In 2002, the play was adapted into an animation film directed by Giulio Cingoli, Venetian Rascal Goes to America (Italian: Johan Padan e la descoverta de le Americhe). Rosario Fiorello and the same Fo did the voice work for the title character. [4]
Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian explorer and navigator from the Republic of Florence for whom "America" is named.
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Year 1492 (MCDXCII) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Julian calendar.
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Between 1492 and 1504, the Italian navigator and explorer Christopher Columbus led four transatlantic maritime expeditions in the name of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain to the Caribbean and to Central and South America. These voyages led to the widespread knowledge of the New World. This breakthrough inaugurated the period known as the Age of Discovery, which saw the colonization of the Americas, a related biological exchange, and trans-Atlantic trade. These events, the effects and consequences of which persist to the present, are often cited as the beginning of the modern era.
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Luis de Santángel was a third-generation converso in Spain during the late fifteenth century. Santángel worked as escribano de ración to King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I of Spain which left him in charge of the Royal finance. Santángel played an instrumental role in Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1492, for he managed to convince the Catholic monarchs to fund Columbus's expedition and provided a large sum of the money himself.
A letter written by Christopher Columbus on February 15, 1493, is the first known document announcing the completion of his first voyage across the Atlantic, which set out in 1492 and reached the Americas. The letter was ostensibly written by Columbus himself, aboard the caravel Niña, on the return leg of his voyage. A postscript was added upon his arrival in Lisbon on March 4, 1493, and it was probably from there that Columbus dispatched two copies of his letter to the Spanish court.
Isabella, Three Sailing Ships and a Con Man is a 1963 two-act play by Italian playwright Dario Fo. The play was controversial at its time for its political content, which caused massive outrage amongst far-right supporters in Italy; Fo received threatening letters, was assaulted in Rome by fascist groups, while another performance was disrupted by a bomb scare. He recounted this event in the prologue of Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas.
Diego de Arana was governor of the first documented Spanish settlement in the New World, at La Navidad.
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Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer and navigator who completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean, opening the way for European exploration and colonization of the Americas. His expeditions, sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, were the first European contact with the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. He has been represented in many fictional and semi-fictional works, including plays, operas, films and TV, as well as literary works.
Christopher Columbus's journal (Diario) is a diary and logbook written by Christopher Columbus about his first voyage. The journal covers events from 3 August 1492, when Columbus departed from Palos de la Frontera, to 15 March 1493 and includes a prologue addressing the sovereigns. Several contemporary references confirm Columbus kept a journal of his voyage as a daily record of events and as evidence for the Catholic Monarchs. Upon his return to Spain in the spring of 1493, Columbus presented the journal to Isabella I of Castile. She had it copied, retained the original, and gave the copy to Columbus before his second voyage. The whereabouts of the original have been unknown since 1504. The copy descended to Columbus's grandson, Luis, who is thought to have sold it in order to fund his dissipated lifestyle. It too is now lost.
Amerigo Vespucci's Letter from Seville, written to his patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, describes experiences on Alonso de Ojeda's May 1499 voyage. Vespucci's findings during the Age of Discovery led Spain people to believe that North and South America were not connected to Asia, which was a common belief at the time and was even held by Vespucci himself. Despite the surrounding controversy among many historians about which Vespucci letters were real, and which ones were forged, this particular letter of Vespucci's is notable for its detailed description of the Brazilian coast and its inhabitants.
Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries is a scholarly work by Meyer Kayserling, translated into English and published in 1894. In it, Keyserling reports on an extensive search of Spanish archives including those at Alcalá de Henares, Barcelona, Madrid, and Seville. His research showed that marranos, who attempted to shield themselves and their families from the antisemitic violence of the Spanish Inquisition by outwardly professing Christianity, were an integral part of the European colonization of the Americas. Keyserling's discovery of evidence that Luis de Torres, who sailed with Columbus in 1492, was a marrano is memorialized in the naming of Luis de Torres Synagogue in the Bahamas.