7.
Daniel Caspar is famous as a performer for a number of things:
1. For the fact that he always hoes to the cultural rows laid down in Bologna, always obeying the rule obliging guest artists to pay homage to the enormous stone monument to the anti-Fascist partisans before every performance. 2. For using in his festivals authentic old folk of the city, the so-called umarells, as non-paying audience. The umarells keep interrupting the performances of international artists with insults redolent of primitive mayhem. Pandemonium is the order of the day, the lights induce nausea and the youthful public emits malodorous smells. This is what Caspar calls a real success.
3. For being the co-founder of Xing, a cultural group famous “for doing things that no longer exist”, like carrying an embalmed peasant in procession among Bologna’s small factories. Caspar’s got a still from Fitzcarraldo in his hands.
Note the group of Machaguenga Indios of whom Caspar is a descendant.
Caspar has sworn that he’s going to slit Werner Herzog’s throat for all his malevolence on the set.
Dressed up like a pirate, he once dived into the Cavaticcio Canal with its dangerous little whirlpools and cross-currents, his intention being to swim it “feeling like a duckling”.