theater

For a stable theater in jail
by Lucio Varriale
photos by Stefano Vajao

Longstanding experience, prospects and projects within the prison system of Volterra.

Etymologically - but not only - "Prison" is a place where to be contained close to repress, force, force (similar to coerceo, coercion). Usually the imagination ranges from dark and damp dungeons seen in films set in the Middle Ages, until technological architecture par excellence, able to classify and re-shape the minds of individuals defective machine supermodern akin to Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, which with its structure constrictive but transparent, perfectly ordered and hierarchical ("organizable and 'tree'," as they say in computer science) was a metaphor for Michel Foucault's example of modernity. The architecture of the fortress of Volterra, as well as other Italian prisons, combines these two images into one impressive. The actual operation of that prison, tax forms to the life that flowed there, were among the most frightening of Italy: in prison in Italy on major survey curated by Aldo Ricci and Giulio Salierno in 1971 it was portrayed as a place of torture not unlike the classic image of hell. Twenty-three years this model has been inexorably eroded by the laboratory of drama within the fortress: a work which, if it looks good, has begun to corrode the architecture, where the bars were sawn to open doors and gates.
But what has been done this year has even more the flavor of the extraordinary. The organizers of Volterrateatro, both to respond to economic shocks cuts, following a precise and poetic, they carried the full traditional theater festival in late July in prison. Besides the meeting with the staging of the work of the Society - which this year was called Mercutio does not want to die - inside the prison in three days took place (if I counted them all) 19 different performances, installations and lectures plus some . If the prison can not be open to the city, therefore, has managed to bring here - literally - in the city jail. And the setting in prison has enriched the shows presented. Instead of being just a place to hide, to remove the eye, all that is revealed as human material can be transformed into wealth. The crowd outside was assigned to a course, paid a voluntary quota for the organization (no ticket was not paid in), and then the front door of the prison all began, with the call of music and entertainment company. Inside were ten theatrical spaces (three inside, the other made in sections separated by a courtyard cages) to host the performances, some of which took place in parallel and between which the public were sorted from three to nine in the evening. Bleachers, chairs, stage, wireless microphones, mixers, sound systems, lighting, accessories, voice, movement and music filled the spaces.
For years, critics, commentators, spectators, with people who have not even seen the shows, dispute about the value or lack thereof, of the work of Armando Punzo and his company. On the one hand, the supporters, who seek to understand the show and the theater (including those with less support also work). On the other detractors, who accuse (or at least suspect) the director to take advantage of a situation of "easy" (as the term seems strange) media coverage to impose on others their own aesthetics and make it the key to its success and its histrionics. Perhaps, at this point, it would be fair to overcome the limited aesthetic disputes, including those who are fascinated by these shows unusual ability and who not to attend staged often not available to the public to speak out occasionally, and tell a story ordered with a beginning, a middle and an end. Instead of judging a show based on his adherence to our aesthetic, I think that it is time to try to look a little 'further, pointing out that the theater is not limited to the show for the public, and even (the one in jail ) can only be "re-education".

Difficult shows

Would be the time that commentators asked how would the jail of Volterra if the theater had never been. The answer seems obvious: it would be a prison like everyone else, maybe a little 'worse. And then you should shop around and ask this prison as it is now, now that is the theater. It is a prison, while remaining prison - and to the extent that this is a collection of forms and practices of violence, aimed at isolating and making communication impossible, and therefore the life and change - has managed to transform itself to three days in a space that can accommodate the movement and freedom necessary for the unfolding of a theater festival, with about three hundred visitors per day from outside, in addition to the organizers, members and technicians of other companies.
At the end of the performance of the Company, Armando makes a speech to explain to viewers what is the meaning, direction, the goal of what they just saw. It does not define this year's production a "show", but reduces it to "sketch". For three years the "show", understood as a linear narrative enjoyable front by a privileged point of view (just the much-disputed "Italian theater"), is not allowed in public view within the prison. Not that this is something that is not reflected or by chance: the content is there and as deep as ever. The Mercutio does not want to die reinterprets Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet by focusing not on the love of two teenagers, but on another kind of love that commonly goes by the name of poetry. The first is a love that obscures the view, and that generates death (one of the two protagonists and many other unfortunate), the second is an aspiration generative never completed, which here becomes an allegory of the relationship between the city of Volterra and poetry Theatre Company.
Not easy, but less than usual initiatory and more enjoyable for those not familiar, the work of this year keeps the form it had taken the previous two years: how to Hamlice, the core of the drama is brought into fragmented into the building and rooms in which words and actions take place in a contemporary Cubist, so occasionally the viewer is forced to choose a point of view through which to assist only a small part of total events. This year, it insists on the need to find a lightness, a Juliet played by a young dancer who cites the sequence of the paper flower Pasolini, a prisoner-Chinese actor who sings Eastern melodies with up face framed in a balcony in Verona, the balloons Those taking the flight and depart scattered over the sky of the Fortress, maybe even the ship that sails on the waves painted in the theater. And most of all, children who welcomed the audience out of the prison playing, dancing and setting in motion a word of mouth. Children whose weight is negated in prison, as becomes clear in the finale of the show when each brings to the stage held the cardboard cutout of a child holding a balloon to the wire: the children here can not enter, and all that they are and represent, is excluded from this world.

In any case, it is difficult performances, and not everything is staged so as to be understood by those who simply watch the show. This is not an error, but a choice. Can understand something of what has happened to those who can not imagine that there is no more, can not see if there was? The renunciation of narrative, the show front, is the waiver order things for the consumption of those who was not there, who is now arrived when (forgive dall'Hamlice another quote) "It's late." - Do you really want to hear more of the same old story? - (Or something) this year asked the recorded voice of a child. What I was told, has already been said. Repeat, it would only let a cage - in those cages can be made of gold - in the roles that built the structure can not be touched. Even if the public would like another good show that calms the conscience - seem to feel - we are not able to give it, no need to say more. "We do not make that theater becomes another prison to prison," Armando reflected in its short and densely packed at the conference "A closed scenes," held at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence in November 2008. Perhaps the most sincere critical article on the phenomenon of theater wrote in prison, having also lived near and inside, in 1998 Adriano Sofri "Panorama": This evening we recite a subject. I quote a fragment, but it would be worth re-reading in full: "The prisoners have no rights and no voice in any chapter, so why cry when they are closed, like animals in a zoo at sunset. In the theater can say everything is [...] Subversive theater and reassuring, because the subversion of the play takes time. It's called the show on stage, you do it roar, then the reference should be made in a cage and take the applause. [...] The inmates themselves, perhaps, did not remember more than half an hour later. You do not remember most of those lives possible parts'.

The courtyard becomes the square

It seems to me significant that the most important theater company in prison in Italy, in the years that now the phenomenon has exploded the prison-scene, you can not (or refuses) a package normal "performance" - at least not within the prison - where he summed up his experience to use and occasional use of the viewer. But instead of stopping, surrender or give up, unable to continue at the same time to revive the sense of what to make of this "theater".
Starting from a reflection on the relationship between the experience of the Company and Fortress of Volterra, the initial idea had been to a show that should take place not only inside the prison, but also with various groups outside the city : the elderly, children, ordinary citizens could cooperate in staging the show. It was not possible, primarily for reasons relating to permits, create a vision that involved a very dynamic relationship between inside and out. So was the jail to become a city. Gates and doors opening and closing continuously, previously unknown persons entering and coming out with tools and materials for all theatrical productions. A company goes through the gates of the courtyard and greeted Armando, another company of five actors Congolese passes and goes to settle in another area of the courtyard, some held them looks surprised and then greets them. Rhythms of djembe and other drums, and screaming voices recite songs. Walls of the trenches on a group of percussionists (and then trumpet) plays under the eyes (suspiciously? Surprised? Curious?) Stewards. And the public in the afternoon, the courtyard becomes a square, the poems recited in front of the fountain, the theatrical spaces that come alive, groups of people swarming.

In his speech at the end of Mercutio does not want to die, Armando declares that he needs a permanent theater right there, to tell all this experience and what it means. To tell what he and all the "friends" (in the order: participants and non-participating inmates, prison staff and agents, employees, citizens, supporters) have discovered in these years of work. Remember that it is absurd to give up dreams, without which no reality can be transformed. But perhaps they have to say something more detailed, something that has to do with the structure of the prison and its negation. The key lies in the subtitle dell'Hamlice, "essay on the end of a civilization", the show brought civilization to which an alternative. I like to read this "end of civilization" as the failure of the modern dream of progress based on a Reason (reductionist) which operates by excluding what is different (and therefore dangerous, as hostile to his project), in order to make more perfect the world through his arbitrary simplification. One reason that in the course of history was not suitable for their operation. But in the show there was no apocalyptic tone, because the end of that reason was a prelude to the blossoming of another directive, based on the difficulty and complexity rather than exclusion: the one that was in was called "the logic of the theater. "
The idea that Reason has assumed in modern form of "discipline" that Foucault had developed forty years ago, continues to be revealing. Modern civilization, instead of girding their city with walls and exiled out of the different (ringing lepers sent to wander in the countryside), has learned to lock people into a dangerous and rigorous taxonomic structure within the city itself, so to be able to manage and control your own extension also excluded: in the modern plague and madness fight with immobilization and rigor. The architecture of the fortress, built in different times for different purposes in part, has adapted to those of segregation. Huge walls that prevent every horizon, and hide inside and also deletes the sky, air and light. Tiny windows. A courtyard divided into cages of innumerable gates. And cameras everywhere.
The theater - and imagine all his doing, not just the show - is a practice that can say something, make it visible. And here, what does? The stuff of which dreams are made (the same one, incidentally, of fantasy and hope), may be able to scratch and to turn - more of the institutionalized and structured re-education projects - as terrible as the prison architecture. Architecture, never tires of repeating Armando, who is not only out there, but that is inside the man who has imagined and then built. Is inside the '"man" means being within ourselves, which willy-nilly "men" are. As within all of us is the possibility of change.

Lucio Varriale