Theatre and Impegno: Commitment, Struggle and Resistance on the Italian Stage Submitted by Ilaria Pinna to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Drama In September 2015 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. 1 Abstract This thesis examines the development of Italian political theatre between 1968 and 2010. It analyses the relationship between political theatre during the 1970s and politically engaged practice in the following decades in terms of continuity rather than rupture, thereby challenging recent theatre historiography and criticism which interpreted the two periods as diametrically opposite: one characterised by profound political engagement and the other by a widespread retreat from the political (riflusso). The analysis of the case studies is grounded on a rigorous contextual approach which places theatre practice in relation to its social and cultural context. Chapter One reviews the current debate on theatre and politics, reassessing the terms of its discourse and evaluating their potential and shortcomings. Chapter Two introduces two examples of engagement before 1968, namely the birth of teatri stabili and the linguistic research of the theatrical neo-avant-garde. Chapters Three, Four, and Five are dedicated to the analysis of the case studies. They are structured as a comparative analysis of significant examples of politically engaged theatre practice between 1968 and 2010 and include the work of Dario Fo, Marco Baliani, Marco Paolini, Giuliano Scabia, Franca Rame, Laura Curino, and Compagnia della Fortezza. 2 The analysis highlights how Italian practitioners moved beyond modernist forms of political performance and restructured their political and aesthetic strategies in response to changing political, economic, and cultural contexts. The findings point to an original approach to political engagement on stage which articulates itself around two main elements: on the one hand the interconnectedness of the ethical and the political, and on the other an understanding of political resistance no longer as the fight for a working-class cultural hegemony but rather at the creation of a post-hegemonic cultural landscape open to multiplicity and difference. 3 Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................... 2 Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... 6 Introduction ................................................................................................ 8 1. Political Theatres: Shifting Paradigms in Practice and Scholarship . 26 The Political Theatre Debate in Italy .................................................... 48 Intellectual Commitment in Post-war Italy ............................................ 61 2. Before 1968 ........................................................................................ 72 The Teatro Stabile: a Theatre for the People ....................................... 73 The 1960s: The Search for New Languages ....................................... 84 3. Theatre and the Left ............................................................................ 98 Shaping Working-Class Culture: Dario Fo’s Revolutionary Plays ..... 109 Conclusions ......................................................................................... 132 Staging the Seventies ......................................................................... 135 The Inability to Act: Marco Baliani’s Body of State ............................ 142 A Political Coming of Age: Marco Paolini’s April ’74 and 5................ 160 Conclusions ......................................................................................... 175 4. Utopian Spaces ................................................................................. 178 Exposing Contradictions: Giuliano Scabia and Laboratory P ............ 185 An Institution in Revolt: The Anti-psychiatric Movement ................... 189 Laboratory P: Setting Contradictions in Motion.................................. 193 Conclusions ......................................................................................... 210 From Prison to Cultural Institution: Compagnia della Fortezza ......... 214 4 Theatre in the Fortress ....................................................................... 220 Two Case Studies: The Blacks and Sharks ....................................... 231 Conclusions ......................................................................................... 248 5. At the Core of Politics ...................................................................... 253 Italian New Feminism: an Introduction ............................................... 259 We All Have the Same Story to Tell: Franca Rame’s Feminist Theatre ............................................................................................................. 268 All Home, Bed and Church: Feminist Awareness as Process ........... 274 Conclusions ......................................................................................... 293 Renegotiating Subjectivity .................................................................. 296 Beyond Emancipation and Critique: Italian Feminism after the Mass Movement ........................................................................................... 298 A Gendered Theatre Practice: Laura Curino’s Autobiographical Monologues ......................................................................................... 309 Relational Subjectivity in Passion and The Golden Age .................... 318 Conclusions ......................................................................................... 332 Conclusion ............................................................................................. 336 Implications: Political Theatre, Impegno, and a Post-hegemonic Politics ................................................................................................. 341 Bibliography ........................................................................................... 348 5 Acknowledgments The completion of this thesis would not have been possible without essential support from individuals and organizations. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Gabriella Giannachi and my second supervisor Kerrie Schaefer for their guidance throughout this research. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my examiners, Karen Jürs– Munby and Cathy Turner for their detailed and generous responses to my thesis. I am greatly indebted to the academic, technical, and administrative staff at and to the extraordinary postgraduate community at the Department of Drama. I would have never made it without their help. I would like to thank Compagnia della Fortezza for providing material and information about their work, Carlotta Pedrazzoli who generously shared her work on Divina, and Biblioteca Universitaria and Biblioteca del Dipartimento delle Arti at the Università di Bologna for allowing me access to their library and video archive. Thanks should also go to the faculty and participants to the 2012 Mellon School for Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University, to the IFTR Political Performances Working Group, and to the Society for Italian Studies. I would like to thank the theatre company La Botte e il Cilindro for their support through the years and for reminding me why theatre matters. A number of wonderful individuals also deserve a mention. In different capacities they supported, advised, and encouraged me; they shared ideas and feedback; most importantly, they cared: Caterina Balistreri, Claudia Cisneros-Foster, Martha King, Kim Komljanec, Ilaria Masenga, Stefania Placenti, and Pieter Verstraete. 6 Thanks are most definitely due to my mother Loredana Lai, my father Paolo Pinna, my stepmother Carmen Scaccia, my brother Gabriele Pinna, and to my parents-in- law Nadia and Stuart Harrison. And to Benjamin, who was always there: for better, for worse. 7 Introduction In this thesis, I analyse the development of Italian political theatre between 1968 and 2010. I focus on three strands of politically engaged theatre the origin of which can be traced back to social movements in Italy in 1968. I shall focus on three of these movements: the first one is the extra-parliamentary Left, which includes a significant part of the workers and the students movement; the second is the anti-authoritarian movement that contested and attempted to reform some of Italy’s public institutions, such as the asylum, the prison, the school, and the university; the third is the feminist movement, which openly challenged the boundaries of political discourse. Each one of these movements had its moment of greatest visibility during the 1970s and transformed in the following decades. I will analyse how political theatre changed in response to the movements’ priorities and approaches to struggle, and how the transformations set in motion during the 1970s developed in the subsequent decades. This thesis aims to answer a precise set of questions. What is the relationship between the social movements from the1970s