Story of the story
Editorial for Stormi. Traiettorie sulla Stagione, issue 4, 2023
Issued by Piccolo Teatro di Milano
‘There is properly no history; only biography.’
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
When we try to put a face to the struggles against racial segregation in 1950s America, many of us likely picture Rosa Parks seated on a bus, calmly and with dignity refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. When we think of the birth of the LGBTQ+ liberation movement, the image of drag queen Sylvia Rivera appears, rebelling against the New York police in June 1969 outside the Stonewall Inn. And when we recall the struggle of the families of mafia victims, the broken voice of Rosaria Costa echoes. Widowed at twenty-two after the murder of her husband, police officer Vito Schifani, in the Capaci bombing of 1992, she addresses the mafia members directly, asking them to kneel. These are fragments of life, apparently individual shards, yet they succeed in imprinting themselves on the collective memory.
Translating social issues or political claims into the everyday lives of individuals shifts the focus from History to microhistory, while simultaneously charging the latter with a political weight of plural significance. It creates a short circuit in which the individual and the collective merge, each recognised as a symptom of the other. It is precisely this reciprocal mirroring within injustice that animated, for example, the feminist movements in Italy during the 1970s. As Stefania Voli, a scholar of feminism and gender studies, recalled in a conversation held alongside the making of this issue of Stormi, issues previously confined to the private sphere acquired collective political value through the experience of being shared. Abortion, divorce, gender-based violence, and the very definition of relationships became incandescent sources of debate, no longer relegated to domestic walls or cloaked in bourgeois shame. For feminists, these thematic nuclei marked the recognition of their newly acknowledged political weight, later translated into new legislation and, ultimately, into a renewed cultural sensitivity.
This is only one among many possible examples of how subjective action can prompt society to reflect on the entire socio-economic system, and of how such actions shape the history of everyone. Individual gestures and lived experiences become testimony. They transform our relationship with reality and act upon it. They function as virtuous examples to which one might refer, or they help identify the adversaries from whom distance must be taken.
What happens, however, when it is art that brings biographical experience and politics into relation? How does aesthetics redefine the content it seeks to convey? This question becomes evident when considering narrative theatre which, since the 1990s, has placed pivotal events in the country’s collective history at the centre of the stage, returning them through an intimate and personal lens. Within this framework, Marco Paolini’s Il racconto del Vajont can be seen as a manifesto-performance, also thanks to the success of its television broadcast in 1997.
An interesting problematisation of the relationship between aesthetics and political content can be found in David Shields’s Reality Hunger (2010, Fazi Editore). The American writer lucidly observed how the progressive intrusion of reality into the novelistic scene undermines artistic mediation, relegating the writer to the subordinate role of witness or chronicler. In line with this evolution towards a realist tension in literary content, one can identify in the performing arts a move beyond the performative dimension and towards the construction of an ‘ostensive-presentational’ one, as theorised by Marco De Marinis in Semiotica del teatro. The pact with the spectator is reconfigured. Dramaturgy shifts from the dimension of the ‘as if’ to that of the ‘as is’.
From the 1970s onwards, especially through the contribution of the performing arts, artists increasingly assumed responsibility for recounting reality not through the mere chronicle of events, which was rather the aim of documentary theatre, but through the intimate relationship between the self and the experiences being narrated. Audiences thus witness the presentation of a subjective form of knowledge that aspires to satisfy our need for authenticity.
Ho paura torero, the novel by Pedro Lemebel currently on stage at Teatro Grassi under the direction of Claudio Longhi, exemplifies this artistic reflection on history understood in its dual meaning of ‘history’ and ‘story’. That is, an inquiry into the macrostructures that define a period, the brief lives that pass through it, and the reciprocal resonances between them. Everything rests on a play of correspondences between the intimate and the public, between private feeling and politics, between interiors and exteriors. A heterodox love blossoms within the Chilean context of Pinochet’s dictatorship and the resistance to it. Political awareness and the awareness of one’s own identity unfold together, in a complex interweaving in which it becomes difficult to distinguish between private and public spheres, each permeated by the other.
This interlacing likely informs the directorial choice to have the vigilant eyes of nameless passers-by wander across the stage and then through the stalls and galleries. They represent the community within which this forbidden love takes root, the broader context against which the individual case unfolds. And while the love story is the product of Lemebel’s literary imagination, its political charge is legitimised by the authenticity of its historical setting.
Authenticity, after all, is a crucial knot in the tension generated by bringing reality, biography, and art into relation. How does an artist confront the responsibility of staging a story that is not their own? How can one engage with and bring to the stage historical and social contexts to which one does not belong? Two associated artists of the Piccolo Teatro offer responses to this dilemma, each through different solutions and approaches. On one side stands the work of Swedish artist Marcus Lindeen, on the other that of Palermo-born Davide Enia.
In his films and performances, Lindeen intercepts and faithfully reproduces real testimonies in order to disarticulate and interrogate issues of gender identity. Actors on stage listen, through earpieces, to interviews recounting the lives of these, to use the Rimini Protokoll’s term, ‘experts of the everyday’, and are tasked with reproducing their tones, pauses, rhythms, inflections, and stutters. Enia, by contrast, in L’abisso, reconstructs the reality of landings on Lampedusa by adopting the perspective of the island’s inhabitants, whom he met, came to know, and spent time with personally. Here the artist puts his own identity at stake, returning his experience of those places and thus seeking to legitimise the emotional and political weight of the narrative.
If we extend the question beyond the boundaries of theatre, we might then ask what we mean by ‘political’ today, in a world where intimacy is increasingly shared, and where the conceptual assonance between ‘social’ and ‘social media’ lifts the ceilings of private homes, drawing everyday life into the communal sphere. It would seem that this unfiltered exposure of feelings attributes political value to them. The sharing of pain, and more broadly the testimony of feeling, relentlessly seeks space in the public dimension and forces us to redraw the boundaries between the two realms.
One proposal in this direction emerges from the work of Giuliana Musso, a researcher, author, and performer of a profoundly reality-based theatre. In defining the experience of Dentro. Una storia vera, se volete, on stage at Teatro Grassi from 14 February, the Vicenza-born artist refers to an ongoing subjective investigation that reveals new fragments of awareness with each performance. In addressing domestic violence, the work probes the echoes of feeling on individual action and assigns new meanings to the wounds one is forced to live with.
Whether it takes the form of a collective act of civic theatre, the staging of a novel, or the intimate sharing of subjective experiences, what makes a work of art compelling is its ability to carry individual perception onto a collective level. It tells the shadows around the cone of light and attends to those silences no one listens to, taking responsibility for what has been repressed. What could be more political than this?
Ivan Colombo, Alessandro Stracuzzi [originally written in Italian]
