Performing Democracy. Site-Specific and Forum Theatre in Spin Time, Rome
Περίληψη
In this paper, I describe a theatre project that took place for several months in 2019 in Spin Time, a nine-storey occupied building on via Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in the Esquilino quarter at the centre of Rome, that has housed more than 450 people and 25 different ethnic groups since 2013. I outline the creative process of a collective emotional and intellectual development journey of a large group of people, starting from the Theatre of the Oppressed, critical ethnography and critical pedagogy, passing through ethnodrama, documentary theatre, site-specific performance, delving into the theatricality of popular assemblies. “Can theatre serve as a reflection tool of political imaginary for the members of a multicultural community by facilitating the process of continuous reinstitution?” was one of our research questions. Driven by the tangible needs of participants, we arrived at devising a hybrid theatre, suspended between reality and potentiality, between heteronomy and autonomy, which attempts to examine and reinvent the rituals of democracy within specific performance spaces appropriately designed.
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