While theatre seasons follow one upon another with canonical regularity, displaying their commodity-shows indifferent to the passing of the years and the changing of tastes, the “season” of theatre[1], that spring prolonged over a few decades (from the Sixties well into the Eighties), has long since ended, carrying off with it every flowering and turning into a still life hung in the book of Memory. The dead season has carried off the “theatre”[2] too, and what has remained is spectacle emptied of all depth, stripped of any vertical tension.
Better still, the theatre that counts has filled up with presences that know nothing of the ancient craft, nor of the passion and vocation that have only just faded. It is not that venerable traces of what once was, whether traditional or experimental, no longer survive, but that what makes noise and draws attention, decking itself out with the name of theatre, are other enterprises, other figures.
The stages are overrun by journalists, intellectuals, philosophers and psychoanalysts with monologues or readings stuffed with images and video, broken up by musical interludes, with a minimal décor: an armchair, a chair, a sort of writing desk and little else. “Actors” wholly innocent of “theatre”, endowed at most with a personal verve. A wave that is pouring onto the stage, unlawfully appropriating an art that not so many years ago aspired to present itself as “total” (the art of all the arts)[3].
At the opposite end, at the grassroots of “doing theatre”, we are witnessing a proliferation in schools of self-produced initiatives generically called “theatre”, which have nothing to do with the traditional theatre workshops that have been running now for several decades.

In both cases, which, though not yet dominant, nonetheless mark a worrying tendency now under way, a brutal act is being carried out: the reduction of theatre (and consequently of theatricality) to a mere container, on a par with any other space, chosen by virtue of its noble vestiges, of that “aura” which, though extinguished for more than a century, can still be breathed in worldly pour parler. This promiscuity (the coexistence of what is still – timidly – theatre and what merely bears its name) contaminates, just as a trend, once stamped upon it by a dominant cultural movement, spreads from a mere minority tendency to the point of imposing itself as a standardising model; and so, before it is too late, before the season we are living through establishes itself as the last season of theatre, it is necessary to begin a reflection, to field (for those who have the strength and the need to do so) a resistance, to renew the statute of theatre, not in order to go back, but to take stock of what its spring once was and to move forward.

THE NEW SHOWMEN

Not content with the media platform already amply at their disposal, for some years now, and ever more frequently, celebrated journalists and intellectuals have taken to treading the boards, passing off as theatrical performances their earnest monologues – furnished with projections and perhaps accompanied by some live musician – which until yesterday we would simply have called lectures or public addresses, in some cases political rallies. What has happened to theatre for this to be possible, without a single professional in the field stirring to flag this arrogant overflowing beyond the boundaries assigned to each, this invasion that impoverishes the art of theatre and, at a single stroke, wipes out a century and more of research and of artistic and personal travail aimed at wresting theatre from the mangling vortex of mass cultural consumption?
And what has made journalists and intellectuals of every sort so bold as to believe they can embrace an art with impunity, turn it to their own ends, knowing neither its theory nor its practice, blithely passing over their own ignorance of a craft that most people learn only through toil and dedication, in years of study and sacrifice?

For more than a decade a process has taken hold that is the reverse of the one in vogue in the closing years of the last century, when it was actors who laid claim to a social role, who imposed their law and their technical competence as the basis for speaking with authority, for being heard even in contexts other than their own, for being consulted, on a par with philosophers and sociologists, on the affairs of the world. Now there seem to return that interdiction and that marginalisation – though not explicit ones – which stood at the origin of the actor’s trade: the jester who cheers the “sovereign” of the day, the tumbler who enlivens high-society banquets (is this perhaps why the only category of actors with any residual charisma are the comedians?). Meanwhile the more serious matters, the weightier messages, the reflections worth hearing, the auctoritas by which an élite is recognised, are entrusted to a new category of “showmen” transferred straight from their desks, along with their tablets, onto the boards of the stage, there to pronounce and to disseminate, to instruct and to unveil hidden truths.
It is the triumph of the Logos over the body and over bodies, of a minimal, egocentric logos that presumes once again to grant to the word, to abstract reason, to frontal discursive exposition the privilege of making itself the principal vehicle of all communication, against the teaching of the Masters of the stage and of theatre [4] who, throughout the short century, laboured to create a pedagogy founded on the primacy of the actor’s body, on the truth of the psychophysical drives.
It is not the debatability of the arguments and assertions contained in the shows of the new showmen that is the stumbling block; that is a given, and would make no noise if it remained anchored to the pages of a newspaper or the armchairs of a television talk show; it is rather the choice of the theatrical “medium” that is the blasphemy which gives offence.
Here the old, well-proven axiom is overturned, and it is now “the message that makes the medium”, reducing it to the barest terms, stripping it of its stratifications and complexities, flattening it into the single dimension of a mere “means” of horizontal communication: from the stage to the stalls, in a straight line, with no flights into the heavens, nor any descents into the underworld.

THE SCHOOL THAT TURNS ITSELF INTO THEATRE

Theatre workshops in schools are nothing new, but the legacy of a past rich in experiences that were, in some cases, important and significant for both school and theatre. Yet what is increasingly gaining ground today is a parallel phenomenon which, while feeding on the by-products of the season of workshops led directly by theatre people, breaks free of it, taking the theatrical metaphor into its own hands and dressing up in theatre every initiative, whether inside or outside the school. The question is: in such self-production of events labelled, with superficial lightness, as theatre, what is there that is truly, radically theatrical?
The suspicion is that in all these cases, mostly thrown together in haste and entrusted to the willing but, in most cases, incompetent efforts of students and teachers who set themselves up as amateur players, theatre serves as a mere form, resorted to in order to make more accessible contents that would otherwise be difficult to assimilate. A noble, vaguely artistic veneer, adopted in its most obvious and banal forms, just as the pop vulgate hands it down: a mixture of emphatic acting and a few touches of colour: a stage costume, a light, gestures or stage movements that are for the most part expository, meant to “illustrate” the text.
Nor, for that matter, should we be surprised: in a society in which merit and competence, study and research are no longer in fashion, anyone can improvise theatre; it is enough to have glimpsed it, or heard tell of it, perhaps skimmed something theatrical, and the thing is done.
Faced with the scholastic theatricalisation just described, one begins to doubt the effectiveness and the radicalism of the experiences conducted by the so-called experts over decades of experimentation. Is it possible that they have left, and continue to leave, so vague and approximate an idea of theatre? Is it perhaps because those experiences were never institutionalised? Because of a rigour that remained ephemeral, passing, forced to propose itself anew year after year as though it were always the first time? Or is it the fruit of a “wild colonisation”, unregulated, without selection, one that has confused professionalism and dilettantism (in the worst sense of the word), method and approximation, processes of knowledge-and-creation and mere supplementary-recreational activities?
Having set out with the intention of changing the school, theatre[5] has ended up being changed by the school, or rather brought back into line, that is, to how it was before the great revolutions of the Sixties and Seventies: an empty container, a rhetorical device fit for conveying, while embellishing it (so to speak), a message that remains, once again, the vehicle of a logos (lower-case, always) to which every primacy belongs, subjugating the body, turning it into a habit that not only does not make the monk, but does not even prompt any ascetic-cognitive impulse.

THE VERTICALITY OF THEATRE

Art, theatrical art included, has its own specificity, its own peculiarity: it is vertical. It is a vehicle that moves along a vertical axis, sinking its roots into the body and radiating them, once they have been made subtle, into the heavens of knowledge.
The body-mind unity (the central axis of reformed-revolutionised theatre[6]) sustains any “artistic” act: this is what ought to be reflected in every theatrical performance and to shape every pedagogy. Stripped of every outward attribute (be it costume, lighting, make-up, décor, character, even the text), theatre, in its Franciscan poverty, is a path of knowledge, of authentic relation between human beings, anything but a horizontal communication. A path steep and hard to travel, which climbs and descends and climbs again, a vertical line precisely, one that demands discipline and rigour, endurance and stubbornness in order to reach the goal.
Unfortunately the present panorama shows nothing of all this: crowded with neo-showman presences, with repetitive seasons split between revisited classics and embalmed novelties, with rare and isolated “experimental” ventures that never manage to form an archipelago, with theatres in and for the schools and schools that dress themselves up as theatre, the art of theatre languishes, is dying out, dwindling on the one hand into a live appendix of the television medium, and on the other into an illustrated, animated projection of the Book.
And so the present one risks being the last season of theatre, or at least a terminus (a final station) with no fresh departure.

Notes

[1] Season not in the meteorological or astronomical sense, nor in the narrow, transient sense tied to the annual opening period of the theatres, but in the almost etymological sense of a pause, a halt (even a long one), epochal and temporal.

[2] Understood etymologically as the privileged place of “seeing” and of “being seen”, of the “living and palpable” relation between actor and spectator.

[3] An ambition that ran through the whole of the twentieth century: from the posthumous developments of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, the ideal of a theatre in which music, dramaturgy, dance, poetry and the figurative arts converge in order to achieve a perfect sum of the several arts, to the architectural projects of Walter Gropius, to Piscator’s experiments, to Kandinsky’s ultra-pictorial visions, right up to the elaboration, in the second part of the last century, of an “art of performance” that traverses and stages all the arts.

[4] The reference is both to the reformers of the early twentieth century: Stanislavski, Craig, Copeau, Artaud, Brecht…, and to the experimenters of the late twentieth century: Brook, Beck and Malina, Grotowski, Barba, Kantor…

[5] One need only recall the theorisations and initiatives of the first “theatre animateurs” in and around the school: Franco Passatore, Loredana Perissinotto, Giuliano Scabia, etc.

[6] One experience above all: the rigorous trajectory of Jerzy Grotowski: from poor theatre, from the holy actor, to Art as vehicle, to the art of the Performer. At every stage of the research, a step forward in the body-mind unity.

This article previously appeared on the Zerostelle blog (www.zerostelle.it), on 16 February 2019, as the third part of an essay by Francesco Torchia, whom we thank for granting us permission to reproduce it.

Francesco Torchia lives and works in Perugia. A director, actor and theatre pedagogue, he was the founder and artistic director of LIMINALIA, a laboratory of theatre culture. For more than two decades he led theatre workshops in upper secondary schools. His first work of fiction was recently published, Delle incerte passioni (Giulio Perrone Editore, Rome, 2019).