In 1994 an adventure began in Perugia, one that continues to this day and has involved more than three thousand people from every part of the world. It is the intercultural theatre workshop Human Beings, conceived by the association Smascherati! to bring together the many souls of a traditionally multicultural Perugia: the aim was to create a space where people and cultures could draw near to one another and mingle, playing together in the circle of the theatre. The experience, directed by the (adoptive) Perugian director and actor Danilo Cremonte, has become an established and important practice for Perugia and the life that inhabits it. The workshop, currently housed in the Bernardino di Betto school, enrols many participants each year (148 for the year 2014-2015) and usually presents, at the end of each workshop cycle, a performance woven out of the improvisations produced over the course of the year. Improvisation is indeed one of the workshop's fundamental pillars, reached through work on the body, on space and on contact with others. Danilo Cremonte's theatrical influences – Jerzy Grotowsky, Tadeusz Kantor, Peter Brook, Pierre Byland, Pina Bausch, Bertold Brecht and others – permeate the atmosphere of the workshop, which becomes a dimension suspended between everyday life and dream, inner search, the need for new and interpenetrating horizons. The year is divided into three parts, each of which tries to address a particular aspect of the theatre. Work on the body and on contact with others, playing with oneself and with the sense of the ridiculous, improvisation, the staging of the performance: these are all grounds that the participants in the Human Beings workshop cross along the unfolding of a path that little by little makes them more aware of themselves and of the doors the theatre is able to open.
It is extremely difficult to write about an intercultural theatre workshop like Human Beings. I tried when I decided to make an ethnography of this strange Perugian workshop for my degree thesis, following the activity of Human Beings throughout the year 2014-2015 and taking part in the creation of the performances Babel, Nel Caso Cosa Cade (staged at the end of the year) and The Bay of Dreams (mounted on 8 November in the belly of the Rocca Paolina). Despite the enormous wealth of stimuli and reflections I was given along the way, the result was inevitably (and predictably) unsatisfying, incomplete. This is because writing serves to give structure to the world, to halt the flow of life in a form that is durable and easily intelligible, but which, precisely in order to be durable, must give up being complete. Human Beings, on the contrary, places itself within the flow of a life that transforms itself tirelessly, and accepts living in a dimension that is always precarious and almost impossible to narrate, where there are above all (and first of all) people who meet and a theatre that is made well before it can be thought, defined, placed.
During the workshop year in which I took part, I tried to understand what dynamics made Human Beings such an extraordinary institution in our area. It is worth noting, in fact, how this workshop has managed to become a point of reference for many young people, pensioners, workers, students, immigrants, people very different from one another – some of them theatre students, alongside people who had not yet encountered the theatre – who have found in Human Beings a welcoming, habitable dimension that somehow improved their lives. As for the foreigners (who make up the majority of those enrolled), while in past years they were mostly students of the Università degli Stranieri and workers, for some years now there have also been growing numbers of asylum seekers and refugees, mainly from Sahelian Africa and Pakistan, who find Human Beings within the first months of their arrival and make it a favoured centre for socialising and for drawing up a first “map” of the territory.
The success of Danilo Cremonte's intercultural theatre lies in its not being a theatre “of foreigners” or “for foreigners” but a “theatre of human beings and for human beings”; it succeeds, that is, in what often proves the most critical step for integration policies: going beyond the very categories of “foreigner” and “Italian”, reaching a space where people can truly meet, engaging with the Other on the far side and the near side of the Otherness attributed to them. Steering clear of the folkloric drift that can befall a theatre attended by foreigners, at Human Beings one avoids working on people as if they were embodiments of hypothetical cultures (crystallised, immobile, defined above all by the imagination of the onlooker) and concentrates, on the contrary, on everything that really belongs to people, as bodies dense with life and crowded souls that have much to say, about themselves and about the world. The interculturality that is part of the workshop's path is silent and practical; it shapes the group through shared moments and the fact of being all embarked together on the experience of the theatre.
The basic conviction, which founds the workshop and is silently impressed on everything that is born and grows from it, is that even a fleeting, even an ephemeral encounter (provided it is authentic) between human beings improves the world and society. The theatre of Human Beings is a theatre of the human, very close to the traces left by the revolutionaries of twentieth-century theatre, who from Jerzy Grotowsky onwards sought to reconnect theatre with rite, with the sacred and with the tireless search for man, the true port of departure and destination of every theatrical voyage of exploration. Within this group of people who decide to be part of a theatre workshop, a sense of community is often created, renewed year after year, which makes the participants “citizens” of Human Beings and “family” to one another. This acquired citizenship, this sense of family founded on sharing, remain important even when the workshop ends and the group disbands so that each can go their own way: in fact, the ephemeral but intense experience of the theatre remains recorded in people's memory and identity, and they will often return to the workshop as one returns to visit one of the “special places” of one's life and formation. Many of those who stay in Perugia, on the other hand, decide to take up the workshop again the following year, because in the ceaseless flow of people arriving and leaving they have found something worth staying for.

Human Beings is, for its participants, a place of encounter and of refuge. Probably all theatre is too, or at least that part of theatre most clearly lit by a social and sociopolitical vocation. The kind of refuge Human Beings manages to offer is that of a relatively protected space from which it is possible to set out on a voyage of exploration into oneself and toward the Other. In this sense, it is not a refuge made for hiding, for escaping the threat of the world (as air-raid shelters or refugee camps are, created to gather people in danger who must be protected from the outside environment), but a place where it is possible to learn new things, to imagine, to learn to “feel differently”, to meet other people and form bonds: a refuge, in short, which though separate from everyday life (in the times and space of the workshop) is open and closely connected to it.
The theatre workshop directed by Danilo Cremonte is also a form of “school of attention”, a space in which movement, gesture, word, object and space can take on new intensity because the work is directed at the most essential questions, the ones there is no reason to pay attention to in everyday life: Where does the energy of a gesture start from? What could it be, this jumper, if we did not know it was a jumper? What would happen if another person wanted to explain to us how a jumper works, but we did not agree?
Everything at Human Beings, from laughter to the way of shaking a hand, up to the creation of the improvisations that distinguish the workshop, is based on the constant attempt to lose, at least temporarily and at least in part, the automatisms of body and mind that allow us to face daily life but at the same time prevent us from understanding many of its aspects. The workshop invites people to explore themselves within, taking themselves lightly and instead taking very seriously the game of the theatre, which by pretending to be pretence helps to produce new realities and to inquire deeply into the condition of human beings who seek each other, find each other, lose each other, fall in love, quarrel, play, reconcile, save one another.

After a year spent at the workshop, it became clear to me that at Human Beings one inhabited a frontier zone, where space and time were liminal. What the theatre workshop tries to do is to loosen the watch kept over the borders of our identity (not only personal but also cultural) to allow a fuller and more relational experience of what one is. Human Beings does not collect differences in order to preserve them, maintain them, underline them or showcase them in their presumed authenticity (as often happens in theatre workshops where the difference brought by the participants is conceived above all in an aesthetic sense and is spent on the creation of a “mosaic” of cultures that coexist without interpenetrating). Rather, Human Beings gathers diversity into itself and makes it part of its own substance; without trying to crystallise it as difference and without attempting to force it into the more rigid classifications that the logic of identity provides. The theatre workshop prefers to dwell in suspension and in the frontier space which by definition is “no man's land” and can therefore, potentially, host everyone. Inside/outside, citizen/foreigner, false/authentic, mine/yours are all dichotomies that are seriously called into question in a frontier place like the theatre workshop.
The responsibilities one accepts in seeking to become a meeting point between people and cultures are great, and the task can be carried out only by constantly bearing in mind that one is “theatre”, that is, a frontier space that does not necessarily seek a definition, but feeds on the coexistence of different meanings and definitions. Human Beings is absolutely unique in the social reality of Umbria (and not only Umbria) precisely because it is able to become a point of connection for very different people, who are looking for very different things and who in most cases end up finding far more than they were looking for. Above all, the theatre workshop is a place that takes in uprootedness and foreignness and gives them citizenship.

Moira De Grisogono, born in 1991, grew up in Umbria, where she recently completed her studies in Social Work and International Relations. She has always been interested in the world and its endless, complex nuances, and it is partly for this reason that she has developed a particular attention to immigration policies and the intercultural reality of the territory she belongs to. She believes in literature, in humour, in music and in the encounter between people.