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Alessandro Fersen

*1911 PO

A.k.a. Alessandro Fajrajzen Ofir

Alessandro Fajrajzen (stage name Fersen) was born in 1911 in Lodz, Poland, to a Jewish family. In 1913 the family moved to Genoa, Italy, where Alessandro attended primary school, high school and university. In 1934 he graduated in philosophy, presenting a thesis published in Italy with the title "The universe as a game" (Guanda, Modena, 1936). After graduating he spent a short time working for the Genoese daily newspaper "Il Lavoro", and having moved to Paris he later became close to the intellectual circles and in particular to the directors of the "cartel". From Paris he moved to Warsaw and then to Byelorussia, miraculously managing to return just as the borders were about to be closed due to the imminent war. News of his daughter's birth brought him back to Genoa in 1939, where he also met up again with his beloved Maestro, the philosopher Giuseppe Rensi and also often saw the poet Camillo Sbarbaro. The period of the anti-Nazi battle started and the "Rensi group" carried out its activities with Alessandro Fersen acting as a contact. At the beginning of 1943 he became a member of the resistance movement and during the second half of that same year he was obliged to take refuge in Switzerland with his wife. In their wanderings from one refugee camp to another, they arrived near Lausanne where Emanuele Luzzati, who Fersen had met in Genoa, studied at the time. His encounter with Luzzati was decisive; they started to dream of "working in the theatre" together after the war. Another very important encounter for Alessandro Fersen was that with the philosopher Giorgio Colli, in the Trevano camp (Lugano). The understanding and friendship with Giorgio Colli was to last throughout their lives. At the beginning of May 1945 he returned to Italy. Sandro Pertini proposed him as the CLN secretary for Genoa and the Liguria Region; Alessandro Fersen accepted and simultaneously worked for the newspaper "Corriere del Popolo", but by then the theatre was his main interest. In 1947 a production of Lea Lebowitz, a rewrite of a Chassidic legend he himself had rewritten, with set design and costumes by Emanuele Luzzati, marked the debut of his intense activity as a theatre director and a cooperation and understanding with Luzzati that lasted many decades. After 1947 he spent over ten years working for the Genoa Repertory Theatre. In 1949 he organized the "Mediterranean Season of Art and Culture" in Nervi, Genoa. Together with Emanuele Luzzati, in 1950 he opened in Rome "I Nottambuli", a cabaret-theatre in the legendary Via Veneto. That same year he published a number of articles for "Sipario", a paper described at the time as avant-garde compared to Italian current theatrical customs. In 1957 he opened the Fersen Studio of Scenic Arts, where he devoted himself to experimentation, dramaturgical research and to creative techniques, among them the famous Mnemodramma, a psycho-theatrical technique of anthropological origin addressed at self-awareness and at expressing one's own profound identity. He also worked for the cinema as a screen-scripter, scriptwriter and actor between 1947 and 1954 (The Walls of Malapaga directed by René Clement, Il grido della Terra directed by Coletti, Gelosia directed by Germi, Musoduro directed by Bennati, Giacomo Puccini directed by Gallone). He also work a great deal for the radio and directed for television a number of "commedie dell'arte" such as Le avventure di Arlecchino (1957), Pierrot alla conquista della luna (1958), Sganarello e la figlia del re (1960). Between 1975 and 1978 he managed the Repertory Theatre in Bolzano. In 1980 he published articles for "Il teatro, dopo" in which he expressed his theoretical thoughts about the theatre.

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