New Theatre in Italy

1963–2013

Valentina Valentini, Thomas Haskell Simpson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351267267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Drama
• Index: Literature

New Theatre in Italy 1963-2013 makes the case for the centrality of late-millennium Italian avant-garde theatre in the development of the new forms of performance that have emerged in the 21st Century. Starting in the Sixties, young artists and militants in Italy reacted to the violence in their streets and ruptures in the family unit that are now recognized as having been harbingers of the end of the global post-war system. As traditional rituals of State and Church faltered, a new generation of cultural operators, largely untrained and driven away from political activism, formed collectives to explore new ways of speaking theatrically, new ways to create and experience performance, and new relationships between performer and spectator. Although the vast majority of the works created were transient, like all performance, their aesthetic and social effects continue to surface today across media on a global scale, affecting visual art, cinema, television and the behavioural aesthetics of social networks.

1 The Sixties

Theatre – literature – music: manifestos, Querelles, intermedia: 1963–67

1.1 Fact and atmosphere

At the end of the Fifties, there was still a vital element in Italian culture that had succeeded in not being crushed by the reigning ideological populism, nor had it fallen into the abyss of existentialist subjectivism. This element in Italian society faced head-on the advent of a mass culture in which consumerism constituted the prime mover of social unification. Fundamental changes were underway that would explode at the end of the next decade.

The year 1963 witnessed the launch of the first center-left government in Italian history, which would last until 1968.

In October, 1960, the publishing house Mondadori – in its “Medusa” series, directed by Elio Vittorini – released the Italian translation, by Guido de Angelis, of Joyce’s Ulysses, the fruit of long years of study and labor. Italian translations of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer), the work of Mayakovski, Brecht, and Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus were already in circulation.

The most salient political events between 1963 and 1967 were the assassination of President Kennedy, the war in Vietnam, the military coup in Greece, the Soviet repression of the Prague Spring, and the growing student revolt, bringing with it the utopian dream of revolution achievable in the short term.

In 1963, Gruppo ’63 was founded by a group of writers, poets and critics who maintained an unprecedented open-mindedness toward the visual arts, music, and theater, drawing inspiration and ideas from forms of art traditionally disdained by much of the Italian intellectual class. The fact that the group’s first formal meeting took place in Palermo as part of the fourth International New Music Week is testimony of their unique and characteristic interdisciplinary spirit.

“The Sixties in Italy”, Albert Asor Rosa tells us, “were characterized by great economic and social dynamism, marked by substantial and effervescent cultural and literary production”.¹ New periodicals came to life, such as Marcatré, Menabò, Quindici, and Grammatica. Familiar magazines, such as Sipario (under new editor Franco Quadri) and Teatro (under Giuseppe Bartolucci), redefined their editorial line.² Marxism and the radical labor movement – to become important in the next decade – found new expression from the mid-Sixties on in journals such as Quaderni Rossi and Quaderni Piacentini, the last of which was particularly open to cultural issues, featuring writing by Franco Fortini, Giovanni Raboni, Alberto Asor Rosa, and Goffredo Fofi.

The Living Theatre landed in Italy in 1965, performed The Brig at the Venice Biennale, and settled in Rome, presenting Mysteries and Smaller Pieces and Frankenstein. Eugenio Barba, student and collaborator with Jerzy Grotowski, published In Search of Lost Theater, including a text by Grotowski entitled “Performance as an Act of Social Psychotherapy”, a radical denunciation of consumer society, the obsession with image, and technological media. The Drama Review, directed by Richard Schechner, dedicated an issue to “The New Theater”, with articles on the concerts of John Cage, Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg’s Happenings, and new dance by Anna Halprin and Yvonne Rainer. Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media in 1964. Jean-Jacques Lebel presented happenings at the Festival of Free Expression in Paris. In New York, Nam June Paik used funds from a Rockefeller grant to purchase his first video camera.

In Italy as elsewhere throughout the world, new musical experiments explored electronic technology and absorbed other realms of art production. In 1955 Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna had founded the Musical Phonology Lab at the RAI headquarters in Milan, where they created electro-acoustic music.³ In 1961 Berio presented Visage, a voice work with singer Cathy Berberian, while at the International Festival of Contemporary Music in Venice, composer Luigi Nono presented Intolleranza 60, a collaboration with visual artist Emilio Vedova, Slavic Studies scholar Angelo Maria Ripellino, and the Lanterna Magika of legendary Czech set designer Josef Svoboda.⁴

In 1965 the Feltrinelli bookstore in Rome hosted a Happening by Giuseppe Chiari called La strada, during which Chiari distorted television signals, a technique also used by Gianni Colombo in his Segnali Vobbulati. Two years earlier, working on John Cage’s model of the “prepared piano”, Nam June Paik had presented 13 Distorted TV Sets during the Music-Electronic Television Exhibition at the Galleria Parnasse in Wuppertal, Germany.⁵

In September, 1965, in a moment when the avant-garde Gruppo ’63 was formulating their concept of the experimental novel, Silvano Bussotti presented Passion selon Sade (with Cathy Berberian, the Bruno Canino/Antonio Ballista duo, Max Neuhaus, Salvatore Sciarrino, and the composer herself) at the Teatro Biondo in Palermo, as part of the Festival della Nuova Musica. The performance consisted of a series of tableau vivants animated by bands of light and slide projections of the spectacle itself, the author, performers, and people who had nothing to do with it.⁶

In September 1966, musician Giuseppe Chiari presented What is a Happening? at the Philharmonic Academy in Rome, in which he provided the answer that a happening, “considers a habitual, everyday action as a meaningful action”.⁷ In June 1967 Chiari debuted The Solitary Crowd at the Cultural Union in Turin, a musical theater work involving a pianist, 16 actors, a painter, and a camera operator. Chiari’s activity demonstrates the way music was opening up toward the visual arts, along lines indicated by the Fluxus group. Just as the visual arts were adopting modes of theater, music adopted visual modes, with scores that called on musicians to translate acoustically the graphic signs written on score sheets, or images projected onto screens, or to follow a sequence of instructions.

The brainchild of Antonino Titone, International New Music Week in Palermo ran from 1960–68. Titone also created Collage, a magazine dedicated to new music and the visual arts, which survived from 1963–70. The first issues were “spoken”; that is, communicated orally rather than through print. Titone justified this mode of production by listing the following factors:

the vertiginous progression of the insufficiency of writing, in direct proportion to the increasing density of interweaving threads in intermedial space; the movement of poets and writers toward new projects based on the contamination of systems; the use of new media (radio, television) and recording techniques that lead to a re-evaluation of vocal production, generating a ‘new orality’’ (‘sound poetry’ and ‘Audioriviste’); all of which demonstrate the inadequacy of traditional paper-based magazines.⁸

“At the beginning of the Sixties”, Asor Rosa observed, “Writers began to recognize that Italian society was changing – its customs, social atmosphere, and people. Writers organized into groups to toss everything up into the air: language, institutions, social practices, family relations”.⁹ The so-called “economic boom”, with the waves of industrialization that extended into the cultural realm, brought mass media to the forefront, especially television, but intellectuals were slow to recognize its importance, at least until the student revolts of 1968, when they finally began to accept new modes of cultural production. After the 1964 Venice Biennale, the United States invaded Europe with Pop Art, plunging Italy into a crisis over control of the national cultural tradition. Although La Tartaruga, the legendary, influential gallery he founded in 1954 was among the first to show contemporary American art, and became a furnace of cultural ferment, Plinio De Martiis later remembered the period vividly but with bitterness. He described the Fifties as:

a frenetic decade, a long, miserable, ragged post-war, but so rich and dense with creativity and genius. Just four names would be enough: Rossellini, De Sica, Fontana and Burri […]. Unfortunately, in the Sixties (but even more in the Seventies) this originality began to pollute itself, muddied and corroded by that irreversible process of Americanization, from Pop to Op, Land and Body, Conceptual and Minimal, that colonized and barbarized us, flattening us to the level of a diligent province. More American than the Americans themselves.¹⁰

The encounter with Marxism, political militancy, and ideological clashes are traits that characterize intellectual and artistic practice in Italy until the Eighties.¹¹ In this arc of time, intellectuals and artists debated political commitment, linguistic experimentation, and the search for new artistic models. What had become of the novel, poetry, theater? What was the role of the writer and art in politics, society, and ideology?

Answers to these questions can be found in the work of Mario Schifano, whose subjects and compositional methods were mediated and transposed by television. Schifano created films and multimedia spectacles inspired by the multimedia psychedelia of Warhol’s Factory, especially the Exploding Plastic Inevitable of 1966. At the Piper discotheque [CONTEXTS ’60], temple of hip Roman youth, he presented Grande angolo, sogni e le stelle [Big Angle, Dreams and Stars, December 28, 1967] with live music performed by the band Le Stelle, strobe lights, loudspeakers, and projections of an original film on four panoramic screens.¹² During these years, the music of the Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd, and imagery from television and cinema fertilized the imagination of artists.¹³ Italian pop art – according to Tano Festa, who developed it along with Schifano, Mimmo Rotella, Francesco Lo Savio, and Franco Angeli – lifted its icons from the Italian art tradition, such as Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, rather than from consumer society, as was taking place in the United States. The October 1966 issue of the art journal Il Verri, edited by Gillo Dorfles, was dedicated to “Arte Programmata” (a concept and term coined by Umberto Eco), covering work produced by Gruppo T with Miriorama, Gruppo MID, and Gruppo N. Also called “arte cinetica” (Kinetic Art), the principal objective was to stimulate the perceptual activity of spectators.

Poetry too attempted to interact with the social changes wrought by mass media, becoming visual poetry, written and disseminated not through books, but with the same instruments used by advertising, like neon and highway signs.¹⁴

Within the Architecture Department of the University of Florence, a radical movement contested the contents, methods, and objectives of their profession. The Archizoom group was founded in 1966, followed a year later by UFO, which staged urban and environmental “guerrilla actions”. In 1968, Riccardo Dalisi in Naples had architecture students carry out group projects in marginal neighborhoods, creating design objects with recycled and natural materials. This movement sought to overcome the traditional separation of architecture from life, reconceiving it as a creative space for confrontation with social reality.

As for cinema in the Sixties, Gian Piero Brunetta has written:

For cinema, the Sixties were shot through by a quantity of stimuli, and the work, neglected by critics of the era, vibrates with a shared anxiety and transmits information about deluded hopes, unfulfilled political promises, the breakdown of institutions, and the growing difficulty of interpersonal communication, but also about enthusiasm and the discovery of new horizons, the collapse of many taboos, the need to renovate the basic cultural panorama, the discovery of Brecht and Artaud […] No other country in the world registers – in both quantity and quality – an analogous flowering of talents in such a concentrated period of time.¹⁵

In fact, between 1965 and 1970 there were as many as 400 production houses in operation in Italy, thanks in part to a 1965 law, n. 1213, that provided incentives for the creation and diffusion of film. Documentary and investigative film became powerful anthropological and sociological instruments in the hands of committed cineastes: Vittorio De Seta made Banditi a Orgosolo (Brigands in Orgosolo) in 1961, the same year as Le italiane e L’amore (Italian Women and Love), one of the first themati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Sixties: theatre – literature – music: manifestos, Querelles, intermedia: 1963–67
• 2 The Seventies: setting out: 1968–77
• 3 The Eighties: between death and rebirth: 1978–88
• 4 The Nineties: ideology, a vice to flee: 1989–99
• 5 Liveness – play – frontality: 1999–2013
• 6 Dramaturgies of the spectacle and the literary text
• 7 The dramaturgy of space
• 8 The plural modes of the actor