by Elvira Serra
She is 34 years old and was hired by the Teatro Massimo in Palermo. An extraordinary achievement. He wears special prostheses (“Like under water”) and dreams of dancing with Bolle. “The worst moment during the pandemic: I couldn’t read my choreographer’s lips with the mask on”
The most difficult moment was that of the pandemic. «We all had to wear masks while we danced and at that point it was very difficult for me to hear the choreographer’s corrections, especially since I couldn’t read them from my lips. It was inevitable to lose some nuances». Now that we’re back to (almost) normalcy, Carmen Diodato, 34, originally from Cosentino and, to use her words, “deeply deaf on both sides”, manages the “gaps” with her colleagues in the usual way to bridge: to commit through the triple. “When I have to prepare solos, I spend the afternoon rehearsing them at home, listening to the music over and over again until I hear it perfectly,” he says over Skype from a room at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, where he is Part of the team is corps de ballet. Next to her is her boyfriend Mirko Lo Coco, singer and student at the Academy of Artists in Rome, whom she met here three years ago.
The Former “Lazy Girl”
Carmen hears differently through her prostheses than with us, which she tries to explain as follows: “The sound is muffled, I could say like under water”. But she is very good at lip reading (we did the interview with a video call to make it easier for her). Speak by “inflating” the letters a little. And break down some prejudices that are still fighting back. “Fortunately nobody uses the word deaf and dumb anymore because we are not dumb. Thanks to the exercises with the speech therapist, we can speak». She started doing this when she was two years old when her parents realized something was wrong. The pediatrician insisted that she was a “lazy” child. Then one day a very heavy object fell and blew up the whole family except for Carmen, who had continued playing calmly.
The intuition of the speech therapist
“I owe my love for dance to my speech therapist. It was she who suggested to my mother that I enroll in a dance school because music could help me: it was the Vesuvian Academy of Dance, my family had moved to Campania to follow my carabiniere father. I felt the vibrations through the floor. At that time I started wearing the first external prostheses, which ended my isolation. Today I can’t hear anything without a prosthesis, neither tones nor noises. When I wear them I feel my way, not like you hearing people because I can’t cover the full range of it. I listen to the same music my way, just a part. That’s why I practice a lot at home to keep up with the others.”
The dream of dancing with Bolle
His myth is the Argentine dancer Marianela Núñez. Although he always dreams of being able to perform alongside Roberto Bolle one day: “Once I saw him up close at La Scala. It would be nice to take a contemporary neoclassical step together, dedicated precisely to deafness». Carmen Diodato has been dancing since she was four years old. At 12, she auditioned for the San Carlo dance school in Naples, where she entered and only stayed a year. She says: «The following year the director said I didn’t have the same potential as the others because of my hearing. He had suggested to my parents that they give me a cochlear implant, which involves a delicate operation. We consulted a specialist in Piacenza with my parents, but they advised us against it. But I didn’t give up and enrolled at the private school Percorsi di Danza in Somma Vesuviana, which I graduated with honors in 2007». After that there were many specialization courses, even at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome. And finally, he has taken part in important productions at the Arena di Verona for operas such as La Traviata and Aida, and for some years at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, where he is part of the corps de ballet (there was also a passage on Italia’s Got Talent eleven years ago) .
The passion of your life
Carmen is very relaxed and smiles a lot: “My passion has always been dancing and dancing has stayed with me. Finally, my dream came true: I wanted to be in the corps de ballet of a theater and finally made it. Now I want to create a thematic ballet that makes sense to my deafness as a professional dancer. I think I’m the only professional in the world in the corps de ballet of a theater: in Italy definitely and in other countries we still don’t have any feedback». For the rest, his life is like that of others, only with a few tweaks: «I always hear my parents and my brother on a video call. And with Mirko we have to face each other when we argue. But now he’s used to it. And I have to say, we understand each other immediately!».
January 20, 2023 (Change January 20, 2023 | 13:00)
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