Mimmo Cuticchio | The Narrator
Mimmo Cuticchio, born in Gela in Sicily in 1948, is the most well-known puppeteer and ballad singer of our times, heir and innovator of the Sicilian tradition of the Marionnette Theatre of the Opera dei Pupi. Son of the puppeteer Giacomo, right from the age of a child he worked in the theatre of the family and went through all the habitual stages of apprenticeship.
The generational conflict was further aggravated by a growing impatience with his father’s disciplinary attitude and in 1970 Mimmo felt the urgency to follow another master, the puppeteer and ballad singer Peppino Celano, who gave him new and effective instruments with which to reach his own personal awareness and expressive maturity. At the death of this maestro, Cuticchio devoted himself to his own theatre which he opened in 1973.
In 1997 he founded the first school for puppeteers and ballad singers/storytellers in Palermo in which he directed workshops on the art of narration and on marionette theatre.
The exchange with various different expressions of the contemporary scene was fundamental for Cuticchio, as became evident from his complex and assiduous relations with the cinema (Coppola, Tornatore, Turturro, Ciprì and Maresco, Crialese), photography, radio, modern art (Mimmo Paladino), and some pop music artists (Lucio Dalla, Loreena McKennith).
