DOCTORAL THESIS What Was Before isn’t Anymore Image, Theatre and the Italian New Spectacularity 1978-1984 Pitrolo, Flora Award date: 2014 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 28. Sep. 2021 ! ! ! What Was Before isn’t Anymore: Image, Theatre and the Italian New Spectacularity 1978-1984 by Flora Pitrolo, MA, MPhil A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance University of Roehampton, London 2014 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !1 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !2 ! ! ! Abstract ! This thesis is an investigation into Italian experimental theatre practices in the late 1970s and early 1980s commonly referred to as ‘New Spectacularity’, of which it considers the socio-cultural background, the philosophical perspectives and the aesthetic contribution. Conscious of traversing rarely trodden ground, this research takes as its subject the New Spectacularity per se while also considering questions regarding its memory and its theorisation. As such, alongside a careful analysis – in some cases the first – of the theatre it takes as its subject of inquiry, this work is invested in drawing up methods and ways of thinking able to do justice to the complex panorama the work exists within. These concern the study of spectatorship in the historical and of the atmospherical quotient of visual theatres, the investigation of the circulation of images as an intermittent movement, and the consideration of affective stances from which the works of art of an era may be crafted in the past as well as reflected upon in the present. These methods and ways of thinking are formulated alongside a study of the Neo-Spectacular stage in an aim to not only shed light on a neglected yet pivotal moment in Italian theatre, but to also be of use to wider discussions concerning performance in its complex and intertwined travelling alongside postmodern philosophy and culture. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !3 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !4 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !5 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !6 ! ! ! Contents ! Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………..…… 9 Note to the Reader ………………………………………………………….….……… 11 ! Part One: A Grammar of the Present A Panorama ……………………………………….……………………….…….……. 19 Twelve Flashes in the Foreground ….….….…..……….….……………….….…..…. 23 Twelve Flashes in the Background ….…….…….…….……………………..….…… 24 Everything that Italy was Becoming: Towards an Affective Historiography .….…..…. 25 Interlude: Everything that Italy –……………………….……………………….…..… 55 Was Becoming, Almost Became, Didn’t Become: some Observations on the Unhappened as Historiographical Category…….…….….. 65 This Message was Recorded Before your Departure: Paraphrasis of Crollo Nervoso… 85 ! Part Two: Metropolitan Landscapes I Ragazzi di Città: some Preliminary Considerations on the Metropolitan.…….….… 119 To the Rooftops, to the Beach: the Inhabitable Image ….….……………….…..……. 134 Dark in the Piazza ….…….…….…….…….…….…………….…..……….….…….. 153 Two Panoramas ….….….……………………………………………….…….……… 165 Towards the Banal: Pasolini, Mendini and the Fireflies……….…..…………………. 167 America! America! #1: Antonio Syxty’s Gas Station, with Soft Breeze….….….……. 193 America! America! #2: Magazzini Criminali’s On the Road…………..…………….. 212 Blue Fugues: Spatialisation and Fugue in La Gaia Scienza………….……………… 227 ! Part Three: New Spectacularities, New Spectacles, New Spectators Surface Games and Side Effects: the Neo-Spectacular Image…….….….………..…. 249 Cathode Mamma Kiss Me: Television and the New Spectacularity……..…….….…. 267 Consumers, Consuming, Consumed: the Antonio Syxty Fan Club and the Fake …… 289 What isn’t, is: Paraphrasis of Kaputt Necropolis………………..…..…….…..…..….. 317 Another Panorama……………………………….…….……..……..………..….…… 347 An Epilogue in the Key of Swimming Pools, Horses and Sunsets……….…….….… 349 ! Bibliography……………………………………………………….……….…..……. 377 Other Cited Works…………………………………………….…..….………..….… 399 Appendices ….….….….………………….….…………..….…….…………….…… 403 ! !7 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !8 ! ! ! !Acknowledgements I have been blessed with the help of many in the making and writing of this thesis. The protagonists of this work, Antonio Syxty, Marion D’Amburgo, Sandro Lombardi, Marco Solari, Alessandra Vanzi and Romeo Castellucci have offered me their time and told me their tales, sometimes with mixed feelings but always with interest and respect. I am deeply grateful to them for their past work, of course – but also for their present generosity. My utmost thanks to Valentina Valentini, Oliviero Ponte di Pino, Carlo Infante, Gaia Calimani and Cinzia Ruggeri for their kindness in offering me help, conversation, and even friendship; my thanks also to Michele Mangione at the Venice Biennale archives, Francesco Gajani at Ubulibri, Antonella Bacchini at Riccione TTV and Gilda Biasini from Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. It has been a pleasure to pursue this work at the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance at University of Roehampton, whose staff and students I wish to thank for a four-year interesting conversation. Ella Finer, Fabrizio Manco, Annalaura Alifuoco and Irene Liverani in particular are in this thesis by having been such scintillating interlocutors througout its formulation, and it has been a joy to share intellectual kinship and friendship with them. I would also like to thank Sarah Gorman for the care she has taken in reading and helping me further my work. My supervisors P.A. Skantze and Joe Kelleher I cannot thank enough. They have shared their intellectual vigour and rigour with me with a generosity and an attentiveness which has consistently moved me and kept me moving, and they have tirelessly accompanied me in my search for fireflies. I am indebted to them on every page of this work and indebted I shall joyfully remain: it will be a pleasure and a privilege in the continuous to hold on to how their thinking has shaped mine. My thanks to them are truly ‘en abyme’. P.A. Skantze has been a maestra to me for the past ten years: as well as for her guidance in this work, I want to thank her for her friendship and for having shown me that this kind of work was even possible. My deepest appreciation to my friends David G. Lees, Jonathan Rogerson, Anya Keenan, Riccardo Vitello, Danilo Mandic, Joe Hales, Matthew Fink, Poppy Kohner, Gjorgji Janevski, Stephanie Ritch and Christian Heinrichs, as well as to those who have left me in these years and no longer need their names. I thank Robert Jack, whose love and intelligence runs through these pages, for being my accomplice always. I thank Yvonne Lokes and Francesco Pitrolo for their love, encouragement and trust, as well as for the gifts of bilingualism and of study. I was financially supported by a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council doctoral award in order to undertake this research; without that support, this project would not have been possible.! ! ! ! ! ! !9 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !10 ! ! ! !Note to the Reader Nuova Spettacolarità, ‘New Spectacularity’ was a term which began to circulate in Italian experimental performance around 1978 / 1979 to define a particular strand of what had, rather more officially, been termed the ‘Post-Avantgarde’1. The first time it appears in print is in an article by Giuseppe Bartolucci, considered the most acute, most attuned, most attentive critic of the theatre of this time. Bartolucci has a clear sense that the New Spectacularity is an evolution of the Post-Avantgarde: the latter appears to turn into the former2. In 1981 a festival took place in Rome called Nuova Spettacolarità – by 1981 or 1982 the term was being used in newspaper listings and in the current language of cultural commentators more generally. While the Post-Avantgarde had a more defined set of coordinates (places and people, poetic, performative and ideological intents) and as such is more defineable as a ‘movement’ in Italian theatre, the idea of ‘New Spectacularity’ begins its life as a label qualifying a genre or a style of theatre more than its makers – only later did it begin to apply to companies. While it is sometimes used now as synonymous with media-theatre or video-theatre, the set of activities the term originally designated is much broader: the intensely technological experiments it engendered were just one declination of a larger re-imagining of the theatre as 1 Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye elaborate on the Post-Avantgarde and its protagonists in Staging the Post-Avant-Garde: Italian Experimental Performance after