After cycles of research on Desire and Memory as formative and expressive vehicles, a new chapter entitled The Theatre of Seduction begins. Attention turns, first and foremost, to the study of Contemporary Tragedy as a language of Seduction, as a mechanism of (self)knowledge, of creation and identification of a collective consciousness. The work is a parallel path of training and production.
In this fragmentary, disjointed, precarious journey, theatre becomes the space in which the individual and the community confront each other.
For this to happen, for theatre to go beyond the anthropophagic act of consumption, it is necessary for the performer to truly question themselves, to get their hands dirty, to become personally entangled in languor, in memory, in laughter. The body is in the foreground: without sentimentality, without affectation, without mimicry. For this to happen, the performer-creator must unlearn what is taken for granted, verify it on their own skin and seek first and foremost within themselves the mechanisms of comedy and the sense of tragedy, the empty space of desire and the crowded space of memory. The act of becoming the spokesperson for the laughter, anger, fears and phobias of a community: it is an epidermal exchange, a blood transfer between spectator and actor. A seduction.
But who makes up the community? Whose theatre is it in 1999 and for whom? Being aware of and valuing ever-increasing social diversity and growing multiculturalism is a pressing need for artists in constant flux with reality. Investing in young people, in the community, in schools, in new ethnic realities and presences means investing in individuals, in citizens and in the present and future public. The work that is done encourages and often catalyses esteem, respect for oneself and others, and confidence in one’s abilities: this type of training is not (only) vocational, it does not (only) serve as a tool for work. It is not only useful for those who think, want or dream of doing theatre. It is useful for everyone: if it is true that only a few will become actors, it is also true that everyone will find themselves, sooner or later, spectators and/or participants. The effects of this investment are profound and lasting; they often have a unifying, catalysing force and, for some, even a cathartic power.
The work programme is therefore intended as a platform, forum and meeting point for different realities. If the future holds (everywhere, not only in Italy) migration, coexistence, integration and the networking of cultures, it is necessary to find a space that unites without abolishing cultural diversity. In this programme, performance becomes the framework, the adventure, the place of seduction, the laboratory in which to address social divisions and contradictions: the starting point and the meeting point. Content and form take on the same narrative power; the subject matter is both particular and universal. Interpretation and meaning, as in poetry and the visual arts, are multiple.
The other aspect of the journey is that of production, of creating the event, of the forge, of the aesthetic mixture within a figure understood here as a multipurpose structure. The creations planned in this work programme remain linked to the expressive research of performance (rather than theatre), to a way of telling and presenting that is very different from the representative and descriptive type of theatre left behind by naturalism. The type of performative dramaturgy, which has now become the international trademark of firenza guidi and the elan company, blends text and sound, body and filmic image, movement and gestures, music and visual arts within the narrative fabric. In this vision, there is no representation, no copying, no miming or imitation of life. It does not propose synthesis. The performance space is a dialectical and exploratory space in which performers and artistic vision are presented in the very act of being produced.
So in this work, we intervene, fragment, sculpt, explode, problematise, raise questions, offer an open structure and get the audience to work. The relationship between spectator/consumer and show/product must be reinvented each time through performances that geographically and physically problematise the actor-audience relationship crystallised by proscenium theatre and naturalism. To do this, theatre must leave the theatre. It must get dusty, descend into the arenas, enter the ravines, the urban folds, the historical and venerated spaces and the decrepit, disused, abandoned and distanced ones, symbols of decline or even degradation. It is a theatre in exile, vagabond, extra-community, pilgrim, foreigner, emigrant, a little parasitic, a little agitator, with a perception of its own fluid identity that changes mood depending on the gaze in which it is reflected, depending on the interlocutor, the place, the temperature. Depending on its hunger. It is a theatre that enters homes, makes noise, clings to balconies and windows: a theatre that can seduce and fascinate even if it is not immediately understood. A theatre that does not give itself totally, that does not offer itself as a mirror of reality, that does not tell everything, but maintains, even in poverty, its integrity and its secrets.