Marco de Marinis The Actor is Dead, Long Live the Actors! Current ...

Sanzio) often skip the actor as a creative subject and expressive presence, dividing themselves to twoopposed typologies of production: performances-images and performances-installations on the one hand,i.e. purely visual and multi-media creations in which the actor, if he survives, is simply reduced to an image,an icon, body-soma, and, on the other hand, concerts in which the actor is essentially a voice.A young Italian critic, looking back at episode IX (Marseille, 2004) of the cycle Tragedia Endogonidaperformed by Societas Raffaello Sanzio, correctly spoke about the border experience against the traditionof the actor in the 20 th century. [...] The process [which] ultimately discharges the actor of the urgent andnecessary status in favour of rhythmic modulation [baluginio] of lights and sounds. 9More recently, Silvia Mei, another representative of the young critique, referring to the groups of thelast generation (Muta Imago, Orthographe, Città di Ebla, Santasangre, Zaches Teatro, Teatro Persona,Anagoor etc.) wrote: These young groups have openly asked questions against theatre, because theybelong to the areas of visual and fine arts, video technologies. The notion of the actor has experienced atransformation in order to define itself in the light of philosophical terms Figure, Simulacrum, Soma. Thetraditional performance frame has experienced a rupture due to the suggestion of new strategiesconcerning action and non-action by establishing a dispositive harmonised with vision rather than look. Weare witnessing the doubling of figurative and visual power of stage, which is becoming a hyperstage, thanksto the support of technologies and/or developped skills. Through the actor or in spite of the actor, thishyperstage multiplies itself, moves and transforms. 10Starting from the examples of this type (which can be compared, I think, to the rest of the world),there is a great temptation (which I could not resist a few years ago) 11 to speak about a trueepistemological cut in the way in which the last generations are thinking and dealing with theare. In thiscut, an important role was played by technological innovation, from multi-media to hyper-media, with anirruption of new media and the digital. Still, its foundation plunges into the mentality or, in this case, intoculture and the imaginary of the young theatre generation. This rupture enables us to use again an almostforgotten term, which fell into disrepute, and that is “representation,” by giving it new semantics, originalin relationship to the past, thanks to the erasure of this lexeme from almost the entiredramatic/fictional/expressive and its anchoring in the essentially artistic/visual problems, with crucial termssuch as “image” or “figure,” as we have already seen.Still, one should not generalise too much. What I have just said concern only one area of the new arttheatre, the one in which the rupture and discontinuity between the 20 th and the 21 st century is clearer. But9F. Acca, L'attore e il suo dopo, “Culture Teatrali”, 13, cit., p. 34.10S. Mei, “La nouvelle vague du théâtre italien: le dernier défi pour un théâtre iconographique,“ presented atthe International Conference “Surmarionnettes et mannequins: Craig, Kantor et leurs héritages contemporains”(Charleville-Mézières, 15-17 mars 2012), the collection is currently in print.11M. De Marinis, Dopo l'età d'oro..., quoted, pp. 16 and the following.

etween writing and speaking. The actor soloist is still usually a textual actor (actor-who-reads or actorwho-recites-a-text).Quite differently, the actor storyteller works on oral skills, improvisation, even when hebases himself on the pre-existing text. Moreover, he usually “exposes his unchangeable identity on thestage 13 “, i.e. he does not act, he does not become a character, perhaps only rarely and temporarily, heactually tells a story. In Italy, the names are those of Moni Ovadia, Marco Paolini, Marco Baliani, AscanioCelestini, Davide Enia, Mario Perrotta, Mimmo Cuticchio and many others.Social actor (or actor of diversity). Under the term social actor of actor of diversity, I mean the onewho acts in the so-called social theatres, i.e. theatres that deal with the domain of uneasiness (physical andmental) and marginalisation. Here I am thinking both about non-actors, i.e. prisoners, the handicapped,immigrants, political refugees, etc. And professional theatre workers, actors, directors, authors etc. whochoose to work in difficult situations, showing how social effectiveness (even therapeutic sometimes) andartistic quality are tightly connected, help and support each other. It is sufficient to mention Pippo Delbonoand his true star Bobo, who belong to the troupe Compagnia della Fortezza (comprised from the detaineesof the prison Volterre in Tuscany, guided by Armando Punzo), or in Europe La Compagnie de l'OiseauMouche and Candoco Dance Company.The social actor as a form of transformation of the contemporary actor reminds us, on the one hand,of an incredible social/anthropological effectiveness of theatrical techniques (or rather of primary theatre),but it enables us, on the other hand, to discover new and unthinkable forms of art and beauty: even better,it forces us to notice and recognise them when laziness, conformity and fear are thwarting us: in thediverse, the other, elsewhere. By doing this, the social actor carries out an unedited revival of theatreconceived as practice of alterity.Mixed Actor. I prefer to talk about a mixed actor than to use other terms used more often, like amulti-ethnic of inter-cultural actor, because this term – mixed – allows me to better condense the featurescharacteristic for this form of the post-20 th century actor.In fact, the mixed actor is neither exclusively nor principally the actor who works in multi-ethnic andinter-cultural environments, i.e. with actors and viewers who belong to different cultures, languagecommunities, civilisations (as in the case of the pioneer and now classic troupe of Peter Brook and Bouffesdu Nord and Théâtre du Soleil by Ariane Mnouchkine in Paris, or, in Italy, Teatro delle Albe de Ravenna withits mixture between actors from the region Romagna and young immigrants from Senegal).In my meaning of the term, the mixed actor is the one who artistically and dramatically works onhis/her own intercultural/multiethnic elements, i.e. on multi-layered identities and internal cultural13G. Guccini, “Teatro e narrazione: nuova frontiera del dramma,“ in Il Novecento: Un secolo di cultura: Italia eUngheria, eds. I. Fried and E. Baratono, Budapest, ELTE TKF, 2002, p. 219.

Since the ’80s, Grotowski speaks about “performer” instead of “actor”, in order to refer to the workof the actor outside, after, without the performance, in essence to the work on oneself and the effects heproduces on those who guide him, in terms of energetic transformations or, according to preferences, ofchanges to the states of consciousness or modes of perception.It is a complex and and fascinating subject Grotowski developed after 1986, under the title “Art asVehicle” by creating Workcenter de Pentedera, with the perfection of the exercise Motions and above all afew performances under the title “Action”, the work continued after the work of the Polish master in 1999by Thomas Richards and Mario Biagini: Downstairs Action, Action, An Action in Creation, The Letter.The recent results of the work of Workcenter de Pontedera, above all the ones started in 2008 withthe birth of two different teams lead by Richards and Biagini, show how misleading the impressions causedby the final separation of Art as Vehicle from theatre were, and thus the performer from the actor: DiesIrae, The Letter, but mostly The Living Room created by Richard’s team, and I am America after Ginsberg,created in Biagini’s team, do not represent at all a pure and simple return to performance in the sense ofdirection change or even rejection. On the contrary, they represent a very interesting example of post-20 th -century transformation of theatrical performance and identity/function of the actor, an example turned tofuture that will be analysed for a long time.Instead of using the term performer in its generic and weak sense, or, on the contrary, to risk andproduce a precise type of actor (of anti-actor, in fact), we should rather, according to my opinion, recognisethe significance of the performative dimension in contemporary theatre and in the manner in whichdifferent aspects of actorial transformation I talked about function.I am not even sure one should even speak about the “performance theatre” as Josette Féral does,but on the contemporary stage the dialectic between theatralicality and performance, which the Canadianresearcher has come up with is very important. For decades we have been witnessing the phenomenon onecould call performativisation of theatre, which dismembers theatre into several levels, from dramaturgy todirecting, acting. In that sense, we can distinguish at least three principal processes:1) (variable) prevalence of the dimension of presence, self-reflexive exposition, self-significantmateriality, return to the self, respect for the dimension of representation, fiction, narration,return to the other than one self;2) Tendency toward deconstruction (to a variable extent) of the drama form and the directing form,through the use of dispositives which are, in the end, the same as Lehmann defined the postdramatic:parataxis, simultaneity, play with the density of signs, music directing, visual

dramaturgy, corporality, irruption of reality, event/situation; but also: fragmentation,incompleteness, discontinuity.3) Rethinking of the theatrical peformance no longer in terms of work/product, but in terms ofevent and relation, characterised by physical co-presence of the actor and spectator and byenergetic exchange between the two, and therefore by corporality as an essential dimension forone or the other.In connection to this, and to conclude, the definition of performance proposed by Marina Abramovićwould perhaps be interesting:“The decisive aspect of performance is the direct relationship to the audience, the transmission ofenergy between the audience and the performer. What is performance? It is a kind of physical and mentalconstruction with which the artist faces the audience. [...] Performance is a direct transmission ofenergy 19 .“19M. Abramovič, Body Art, in Marina Abramovič, Milano, Edizioni Charta, 2002, p. 13.