Valentina Valentini - New Theatre in Italy: 1963–2013

This is a much-needed volume that helps to fill in a neglected Italian theatre history in contemporary scholarship. The authors offer wide-ranging discussions of many prominent groups, actors, writers, and events within the context of Italian society and culture from the post-war period to the present. Important manifestoes, theories, singular works, and shape-shifting ideas define this survey of Italian theatre through the many trajectories of the avant-garde, the changing role of the actor, group collaboration, the interplay of text and voice, and the turn from the human to the digital image.

Bonnie Marranca, Editor and Publisher, PAJ Publications

New Theatre in Italy: 19632013 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 twenty-first 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 postwar 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 behavioral aesthetics of social networks.

Valentina Valentini teaches performing arts and new media at the University of Rome La Sapienza. Her research interests focus on performance in the twentieth century, especially the relationship between theatre, art and new technologies. She is a leading authority on performance and multimedia events, and the author of several theoretical and historical studies devoted to twentieth century theatre.

www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-TheatrePerformance-Studies/book-series/RATPS

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Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater

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New Theatre in Italy

19632013

Valentina Valentini

Translated by Thomas Haskell Simpson

Translated by Thomas Haskell Simpson

First published 2018

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2018 Valentina Valentini. Translated by Thomas Haskell Simpson.

The right of Valentina Valentini to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Italian by Bulzoni Editore, 2015, Roma.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Valentini, Valentina author. | Simpson, Thomas (Thomas Haskell), 1953 translator.

Title: New theatre in Italy, 19632013 / Valentina Valentini ; translated by Thomas Haskell Simpson.

Other titles: Nuovo teatro made in Italy, 19632013. English

Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge advances in theatre and performance studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017043376 | ISBN 9781138577251 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351267281 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: TheaterItalyHistory20th century. | TheaterItalyHistory21st century.

Classification: LCC PN2684 .V3313 2018 | DDC 792.0945/ 0904dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043376

ISBN: 978-1-138-57725-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-26728-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

New Theatre in Italy: 19632013, is driven by the conviction that this dynamic and still vital phenomenon has produced aesthetically significant results that have radically transformed thought and practice not only about theater, but throughout contemporary art. Its achievements are lasting and fully equal to achievements in theater elsewhere in the world. In the period under review, Italy has served as the laboratory, audience, and site of many of what are considered the most important developments in new theater internationally. To name only a few, the Living Theater, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, and Robert Wilson all have a long history in Italy, having produced there some of their most influential work.

The richness of thought, complex experimentation, radical creation, degree of existential risk, and uncompromising challenge to established forms, together with its impact on practices in visual art, music, dance, literature, and cinema, make Italian New Theater worthy, first, of being known to emerging generations, and second, of being re-evaluated from a perspective that measures its true dimensions and implications. It is not a matter of picking out this or that specific artistic innovation (although these have succeeded continuously one upon the other) but of reconstructing the variegated braid of relations that have made Italian theater, over the last half-century, into an intensely expressive cultural crossroads, and of rereading the second half of the Italian twentieth century in this light. The study reconsiders the entire New Theater phenomenon by lifting it momentarily out of its ongoing currency as a process in fieri (with all the militant posturing, taking of sides, clashes, and ideological positioning that characterize it), while also resisting the temptation to categorize and catalogue phenomena into a summary historical judgment.