Prelude
It will seem an exaggeration, and certainly it is, but for a good cause. One exaggerates in order to explain more clearly a fact that is otherwise not evident and not easy to detect, hidden as it is behind apparent and trumpeted self-glorifications and self-satisfaction. The exaggeration lies in the following statement: the “schools of theatre” (a reversal that is not merely syntactic of “theatre in the school”) are a little like the last waltz of a school, of every order and grade, which, like an old suburban dance hall, is about to close its doors in sorrow.
Let me proceed in order. Having moved beyond its pioneering phase, theatrical work in the school, wherever it has taken root and become structured, wherever it has found a proper “conflictual integration” with the curriculum, wherever it has been carried out with rigour and passion, leaving behind the slapdash approach of animation, of socialising ambitions and of supposed creative freedom, has itself become school: first a school of theatre and then school tout court, that is, a process of forming the person, naturally in the best and most advanced experiences.
It is plain for all to see that, over the last few decades, the school has been losing its course, its navigation and its compass, submerged by the disinformative, de/formative, transformative clamour of other, more powerful agencies of instruction, first among them the television media and, secondarily, the internet galaxy with its myriad of constellation-networks.
This is not a matter of a failure to modernise, that is, of the school lagging in its adaptation to the new technologies, of an inability to keep up with the times, but of the opposite: of the loss of the solidity of its being – compared with the new media – a “lukewarm” medium, or better still hot and cold at the same time. In other words the school has not known how, or has not wished, or has not been able to preserve its “seniority”, renewing itself, to be sure, but from within, along “organic” paths, and not artificially in the impracticable projection towards “rich” formative/informative models, those, that is, endowed with the most refined and advanced technological instruments.

To resist, to be complementary, to strive towards the “poverty” that values the essential and the inter-human relationship: this ought to have been the school’s course in the third millennium, like an old centuries-old tree in the contemporary forest of iPhones, iPads, eBooks, of emails, etc.
Much as happened to theatre, to the finest theatre of the last stretch of the past century… what comes to mind is the never-dated manifesto of the poor theatre of Jerzy Grotowski: that definition of theatre by way of the negative, which stripped away the superfluous in order to recover the essence in the warm and sensitive relationship between actor and spectator, which at school becomes the master/pupil relationship.
This, precisely, is the happiest and most fertile union between school and theatre: the one between a theatre and a school that have put in first place the human being, humanity, the human relationship in the transmission both of knowledge and of information.
I write, then, from this vantage point, uncomfortable (because it runs against the current) and at the same time privileged (because free of false problems); the angle of vision and the perspective of one who, over the span of three decades, mindful of the Grotowskian lesson, has attempted, adapting it to circumstances and interlocutors of course, perhaps altering its form and appearance, but seeking never to betray its substance and its essence, to inflect it with coherence, with rigour, but also with that unbearable “lightness” needed to bring it into contact with adolescents.

First Movement
This vantage point, however, is not always shared, nor is it the majority view; the field must therefore be cleared of misunderstandings.
Theatre as a supplement to the school timetable to make the passing of teaching time more pleasant, as an afternoon interval between the morning routine and the late-afternoon homework at home (but does that still exist?), theatre as a gymnasium of free creativity, an awakening of who knows what improbable dormant inner riches, theatre as socialisation (an old passe-partout word that no longer means anything), in short as divertissement, as entertainment, as a way of being together merrily, etc.: all misunderstandings that probably make up the greater part of the theatrical undertakings now under way in Italian schools, the fruit of the encounter between the amateurism and the lack of theatrical and didactic-cultural preparation of the practitioners and the distracted, generic demand of the school.
At the opposite pole, the “theatre workshop”, in the encounter between teachers aware of the present difficulties of their craft and in search of fresh sap and wider horizons, and theatre-makers trained not only “theatrically” but also pedagogically, constitutes an “institute” of permanent research in which to experiment with new and different models of transmitting knowledge and to open up unaccustomed “paths of knowledge”. To mobilise the student along the road of self-redemption, of the conquest of a desire and a pleasure in knowing, of a cognitive autonomy, joining science and a process of liberation, is certainly an ambitious goal, yet an indispensable one for anyone who understands the gravity of the present cultural condition of the younger generations. And for anyone with a little experience and memory, it is a goal that calls to mind distant utopias (Don Milani and the school of Barbiana, or the Capitinian promptings and suggestions) which, once past the early phase of egalitarian demand, return as relational models and pedagogical content; it is a goal that takes up again the thread of a 1968 (scandalous to say) misunderstood (read: the delegated decrees, etc.), misconstrued (read: a compulsory pass mark for all) or not understood at all, in any case removed prematurely because held responsible for that boastful permissiveness and that suspension of all meritocracy which are to be ascribed rather to the consequences of the discotheque, advertising and hedonistic evolution inaugurated with the end of the 1970s, continued in the 1980s of the past century, and within which, albeit in a critical conjuncture, we still move.
The 1968 written of here is certainly not that of journalistic received wisdom, but the one implicit in the texts of Marcuse, the one (albeit dated 1971) of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, the one of Apocalypsis cum figuris, the last production of Jerzy Grotowski’s theatre laboratory, that not exactly aligned 1968 in which, at the crossroads between antipsychiatry, the new psychopedagogy and the artistic post-avant-gardes, “theatre” in its workshop form takes shape as a metaphor for expounding a new project of knowledge of oneself, of relationship with others, of dialectic with the world.

Interlude
This theatre-workshop, in the best and most fortunate cases, produces a deep fascination, in the sense that, beyond the easy attraction of an exhibitionistic-narcissistic stamp, it captures the most intimate and authentic drives of the adolescent and offers a road towards finding practical answers to those essential questions about life that one asks oneself only at that age (as the young Shakespearean heroes teach us), when one is not already wholly drunk on consumerism. In this sense the theatrical experience, if well guided, if beyond the spectacular finalisation, the success and the gratifications that may be drawn from it, beyond the specific scholastic competences that follow from it, aims at the human being, works on subjectivity, draws upon the most authentic encounter between individuals, well then, represents an exceptional event in the squalid panorama of what present-day societies set aside and offer to adolescents and to the younger generations.
An exception and at the same time an antidote against the consumerist poisons (in truth sweet, seductive and honeyed) that every day, by digital and analogue routes, by satellite and terrestrial ones, through the thousand technological appendages and prostheses at their disposal, are breathed and injected into the defenceless and unwary bodies of the young adolescents, the essential target today for the survival of the markets and of the very global economic system that governs the world.
A system that, in order to guarantee itself, must form individuals (in this way the “school” either becomes its handmaid or is destined to disappear) for an obedient consumption of the goods it produces, confusing minds with a precocious philosophical-existential reversal of the being/having relationship: I consume-possess, therefore I am.
Thus, while the real world is more and more populated with “fictions”, conforming to the model of a television “fiction” and perhaps passing itself off as a permanent “reality show”, eager to show itself and to be filmed and watched (from Big Brother to the various internet “books of faces”: a rampant exhibitionary continuum), the theatrical experience, mindful of its roots, which make of “fiction” its principal and conscious weapon, becomes the ferry (or, to put it with Grotowski) the lift, towards an authentic knowledge of oneself and of others, more real than reality.
One pretends, within a circle protected by convention, one puts on a mask, one takes on the role of a dramatis persona, but in the end one is a little more authentically oneself, finding a more direct contact with one’s own energy and an unmediated (read also: not “conditioned”) perception of the world.

Second Movement
As a metaphor for something else, theatre in its workshop form presents itself in the school as a knowledge that interweaves theory and practice, as an active culture, that is, a culture in action, which, while it is being made, changes those who make it. This specificity frees theatrical action from the narrow confines of an additional school subject, or of an artistic genre, or of a mere time-space delegated to creativity, and makes of it a method and at the same time an instrument (in the anthropological sense) of knowledge.
The theatrical “workshop” becomes the spatio-temporal container of a different studium and presents itself as experience.
One goes on studying, but by other means and instruments, rediscovering perhaps a dormant passion for knowing that ought to be innate in every human being, but which, on the one hand the routine and on the other the obligation, not only economic but even ethical, to escapist consumption help to turn into a rare commodity, if not a vanished one. One studies by making concrete experience, putting into play – for a limited time, of course, and within the protected circle of “fiction” – oneself, one’s own life.
In the theatre workshop the body and the mind work together, the one lives in the other, there is no separation: the man-actor studies, learns and expresses himself in the here and now, there is no deferral. What one understands (learns, comes to know) is at the same time what one is and what one communicates. In a certain sense, even while pretending (acting), one does not lie.
In the theatre workshop the process precedes the product, and the theme, the subject matter, the topic of the studium are not matters of indifference. Not to think about the result (the performance) but to concentrate on the process (every single stage of the workshop) in order to develop the theme with rigour, to study the topic with passion, to interpenetrate deeply with the subject matter: this is the key to truly making of a workshop a place of research and of living experience.
It takes years of taking root for this idea of the theatre workshop to establish itself, and every year, in a certain sense, one begins again, since the groups of participants are constantly renewed.
Every year it is necessary, with gentleness and without arrogance, to persuade the seafarers to stop up their ears so as not to let themselves be seduced by the song of the thousand disturbing sirens that people the surrounding sea; every year – overcoming the deafening babble and chatter that inhabit the heart and mind of each one – it is necessary to recover the magic of silence, of concentration and of inner and reciprocal listening. And when this happens, behold, the miracle occurs, and the theatre workshop, from a metaphor, becomes the living (exemplary) incarnation of what the school ought to be. It often becomes the last school possible, that which the school can no longer manage to be.

Finale
The last for real, because, cut after cut to the funds of the local authorities and of the school, the theatre workshop too has begun its last waltz.
The Last Waltz, a 1978 film by Scorsese celebrating the farewell to the stage of the legendary band that had accompanied Bob Dylan since the end of the 1960s and that, inexorably in decline, decided to disband, going into concert one last time with a large group of guest stars. It was the end of an era: rock, which had accompanied the younger generations in the 1960s and 1970s, was giving way, besieged on the right by disco and on the left (or the other way round, if you prefer) by punk.

It may be a coincidence, but it is the same era as the spread of the theatre-school relationship: first theatrical animation in primary schools and in lower-middle school, and then theatre workshops in upper-secondary schools. The relationship between theatre and school has lasted longer, it continues still, but in the ongoing absence of stable foundations (in terms of structures, funding, organisational models and operational methodologies), lived for decades in precariousness and permanent transition, entrusted to “genius and dissipation” and also to the approximation and superficiality of the theatre-makers, without institutional recognition, it risks foundering together with the school. We are at the last waltz, in short, which may well last a long while, the last waltz of any project of education and instruction, of every course of knowledge. The last waltz of school tout court, in which theatre, as in Scorsese’s film, is merely the guest star.

Francesco Torchia lives and works in Perugia. A director, actor and theatre pedagogue, he is the founder and artistic director of LIMINALIA, a workshop of theatrical culture. For more than two decades he has led theatre workshops in upper-secondary schools.