Young people and the theater: far or near?
Hello, I'm Roberto Biselli director of Teatro Di Sacco of Perugia, Umbria, Italy, a new member of the group, and I want to open a debate on some considerations and evaluation born from my thirty years of experience in my work area, the middle Italy, area of great history and lower middle economic well-being, but with some strong closures socio - cultural.
To assess properly from my point of view - I am a director, actor and theatre educator in public and private schools, community centres and social - relation between the young people today to the theatre, you should consider the issue from two different points of view, distinguishing the theatre saw the show from that practiced by the practice or laboratory.
In this dual perspective of a hypothetical census data would emerge an interesting anomaly compared to traditional types of consumption play in Italy
To be sure, even in the absence of statistics, just a quick look on the long duration of adolescence. From the early years of high school to university students of the average audience settles down for a long time of very low percentages, almost exclusively concerned for poor attendance and little knowledge of drama and opera, theatrical genres in which the emotional impact of immediate Musical - that genre in Italy is a product of low consumption, very "Americanized" but in the negative, the cabaret or comedy, the latter are seen mostly as mere appendages 'live' television broadcasts.
On the side of the scene is rather easy to see the affirmation of the opposite process, with demand growing by the boys, 'in theatre'. A need that only the minority of cases is related with a passion gained on the chairs of the audience or for the sake of directors and playwrights, who often do not even enrolled in a general professional investment horizon, with the possible exception of the musical, where, however, Unfortunately a major impact on the illusory bleak fascination and media model 'tissue' and “pseudoscuole” style cultural transmission of very little profile friends such as AMICI , a format brought to the Italian commercial television by a demon of communication as Maria De Filippi, known presenter gossip TV programs.
Most seek the theater or whatever beyond the theater, giving the name to that area really versatile expressiveness and creativity, interpersonal communication and teamwork that has its roots in some of the most fruitful experiences and prolific Italian and European avant-garde of the seventies, the “parateatro” actions of decentralization and participation, from theater to theater therapeutic anthropology, from animation to drama of the party.
Incursions into the territories of the theater of the human sciences, whose results, related to today's more mature forms of social or community theater, have been acquired, compared to the parallel development of art and entertainment stage, autonomy theoretical, methodological, and even aesthetic that it obscures the new generations the original matrix common. In the eyes of young theater does not therefore appear as a unitary phenomenon, organic and cohesive, but as a kind of creature split, closer to the likeness of Janus that of Dionysus.
The face turned to the audience reveals, apart from the musical comedy and television, an indecipherable gaze, a face and pompous anachronism, at best tied to the events and expressive forms of art and culture, but also to the grotesque ceremonial first and the ladies in fur coats, to the busy schedule of shows without a soul that Peter Brook has called 'fatal', but always well-packaged like themselves, or expressions of the vanguard of research and too closed, coded, sometimes self-referential, for be made accessible to an audience of mostly occasional.
A mask on the whole dull and unattractive, made even more oppressive, despite the reduction policies implemented recently in many theaters, the high cost of tickets, a deterrent for those who want to actually conceal a substantial indifference.
The face turned to the actors on the contrary it shows willing to listen to the life, open space and viable performance and the laboratory. And 'This is the face uncovered and desired by young people: the theater and ritual of the game, to give shape and substance to the emotions and feelings, and needs to translate into action their unvoiced questions, stories and visions, to create and practice possible worlds, the theater of the body, freed from the constraints and the automatic instrument of listening and meeting with themselves and with others; the theater for connection, trust and deep intimacy of dialogue, the scene of the identity, the opportunity to experiment and to recognize themselves in different roles, the theater group, seen as the central focus of every internal process of sharing, but also creative subject, the bearer of instances that demand to be recognized in the broader context of the community, the theater of party, the celebration of new projects of citizenship and social life.
The two eyes of Janus thus generate in young people today so different as to appear irreconcilable perspectives, as if the theater, and forced under an apparent identity concealed in reality two independent souls, among them indifferent. Only a substantial and mutual estrangement can justify the enthusiasm with which so many teenagers choose to remember to do theater without having seen the show a memorable one, or explain the crisis of the young audience in the face of success and now widespread dissemination of stage , theater workshops and training courses.
However, just as two-faced god Janus is above the door, called to guard the threshold, making it easy steps without creating barriers. The task that the theater, liminal art par excellence, knows well. It is not the first time that the identity of its delicate border post between life and art, between reality and representation, including ordinary and extra-ordinary is questioned by instances that are difficult to recognize themselves as participants in the same matrix founding, the same interest in the man in action and in relationship.
The distinction between vision and practice of theater, from this perspective offers an example of intense and often heated, vitality dialectic. In moments of deep understanding, marked by mutual recognition to be achieved so aware, the season of the show Party of Renaissance and Baroque, a sort of interchange ability of roles between actor and spectator, and are flanked by interspersed episodes of apparent distance and alienation: think the same position of the Catholic Church in general, or Christian in the theater, again and distrustful critical stage art professionals and potential fascinatici aroused by the sight of the shows, but at the same time focus on enhancing, outside the official circuits spectacular, the role of actors as a faithful representation of the liturgy, making even the Jesuit College Theatre, one of the first examples of modern pedagogical theater, or, in some respects, the relationship between stage and audience in the nineteenth century, with the attention of addressed the audience as self-representation, the game looks of the boxes in the hive, which staged the play, and even the first season of the masters of the twentieth century avant-garde and European, all geared to the theater dramatize again out of theaters, in “encounter with life”, to find, in the zero degree of performance, attended the event, the actor understood as a person, the roots to the advent of a new show needed.
In such a horizon of reconciliation, new reciprocity and harmony of looks between theater and theater as practiced by the young, some evidence of activity, despite the cold climate of still dominant, at times seems to pulsate in the folds of indifference. Fertile interstices can be found for example in Italy, in the progress of the latest drama auteur, able not only to restore life to a repertoire frozen in the fifties, but above all to return to the contemporary and new generations of characters, situations and dialogues that, even in the uniqueness and aesthetic distance of artistic creation, is the mouthpiece for emergencies expressive and deeply shared horizons of expectation.
Similarly no longer generating opportunities for involvement and continuous intersections between production, reception and even theatrical training, the well-established genre of storytelling, in Italy
In terms of the encounter between art and life, interest in the person, understood in its ability to communicate, but also more limited in his humanity and hurt, he moves with a large following of fans Pippo Delbono, but also with the actors Armando Punzo Volterra prison inmates.
Equally vital, always in Italy
Finally, efforts to reconnect young people to the theater have also taken by the same institutions, public and private, not only with economic concessions and more or less spot on projects of 'education' and 'orientation' of the public, but also by the grant of initiatives designed to promote the new theater and dialogue between training and production.
I conclude my first speech presented in summary my idea of theatrical practice within the high school students, the methodology that has applied these years of work and continue to refine.
Theater workshop in school - cross over cultural idea of the Teatro di Sacco
Theatre workshop at school as a cross-over culture, understood in a “crossing of cultures and educational practices, educational and relational”. In particular: multifunctional responses to the universes of the school in search of new languages, or rather that appropriate to dialogue with the aspirations of students and provide them with elements of comparison with their present and their future.
Theatre school, so, as cross-over of generations, where the word "high" when confronted with the sense of not belonging to the latest generations of its existence, where the body rediscovers its function as a container instinctual, emotional, physiological, is meets with other contents of the curriculum, bringing the experience of the living theater workshop of his own newspaper, then innervate strong cultural reflections, transited through there, the discovery with its own set of ideas and strong relationship "educated" can declare, without fear of seeming doctoral or academic.
Political participation, clarifying that the project does not form school-theater actors, but it gives young participants a trial for his self-conscious and self-knowledge, and between being "put on stage" with respect to whether and to others, such as socialization high-level intellectual and psychological, in the formation of self-conscious of the future "man" with appropriate critical equipment on the surrounding reality (both as a spectator and as a citizen). Theatre-school as a cross-over of the melting pot that awaits us in the immediate present: races, thoughts, cultures, different words that will merge in a joint report, in the expectation - but difficult - tolerant of differences, and the ' inevitable merging of applications and requirements varied, both in social as in preparing a 'proper skills for the future confrontation with the world of work. (or unemployment ...)
Physical and vocal training, games expressive relationship, discovering one's communicative potential, as a body-word speech, text and concepts that are enhanced by the acquisition of new individual and collective awareness, school time, which is enriched with functional elements of learning and training for a 'contemporary education and effective relationship between local authority areas, and training for an integrated system between institutions and private sector professionals in short, all this should generate a chain cross-over function for effective training and meaningful student of our immediate, today.
The theatrical activity, in the Laboratory School, which can have lasting up to several months - depending on the needs of the various schools involved - with one or two weekly sessions of two or three hours, will start on being able to keep the educational goal in balance with the theatrical and artistic. And 'I think the emphasis on fundamental existential aspect, stimulating students' pursuit of their original specification, is to activate a sort of soul searching, through the "game stage" and the fun, unique features of a theater workshop in school.
Students should not learn to gesture, say the "jokes" or interpret the characters, even worse, become "teach monkeys", but must learn to perform a task far more significant, as it will start working on the deeper meaning of the communicative relation, discovering first one with yourself, and then one in relation to others.
Elements, the latter, if unresolved, potential bases of diseases through the practice of theater workshop can be identified and placed at suitable reported to the school, teachers, families, a soft, non-traumatic.
Objectives for a theatre laboratory inside the institutes of secondary education
1. self-awareness and self-knowledge as correspondence between inner and conventional cultural habitus and theatrical expression, between being and the "stages" in relation to themselves and others;
strong socialization and group and emotional sharing a meaningful experience
2. elements of grammar and syntax of some theatrical codes - vocal, gestural, iconic, proxemics, kinesic and space;
3. aware of the experimental word. acted, written and pronounced than that;
4. relationship between school culture and drama, between tradition "cultured" in a text and its "here and now" dramatic;
5. comparison between literary and linguistic codes, in general, including common-¬ tion and literary and dramatic, with particular attention it to the symbolism of the gesture, movement, space, compared to the vocal writing and the different rhetorical functions of language;
6. exportability of 'cultural operation as a total integration ¬ motivating teaching it, as intellectual and social psychologists par excellence, as the work of the High Level Group, as Action in place Semiology because the sign of the relationship-testing concrete sense, the base of each language education, as an exercise in reading "open" politics and active reality.
Roberto Biselli
theater director, creator of cultural events, performances, actor,
educator and social theater and theater community
Director of "Teatro di Sacco."
Perugia, Umbria, Italy
