It would be difficult to think of an historical acting style that affected twentieth-century performance more than the Italian sixteenth-century commedia dell'arte. For avant-garde directors in the 1910's—people like Meyerhold, Evreinov, Reinhardt, Copeau—the commedia, with its reliance on stereotyped characters, masks, broad gestures, and improvised comedy, represented the very theatricality of the theatre. Performing across Europe and elsewhere from 1550 to 1750, often without dramatic texts as such and outside proscenium stages, commedia troupes developed large audiences of all classes, another feature that made their work so attractive to avant-garde directors. Even the most popular entertainments of the first part of the twentieth century—silent and sound motion picture comedy as well as radio comedy—seem closely related to the commedia. Indeed, it is hard to conjure images of the commedia without seeing Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Bert Lahr, the Marx Brothers, or Laurel and Hardy.

In the years after the first World War, two plays unexpectedly achieved a clamorous success in the major capitals of Europe. This phenomenon demonstrated that an important new phase of Italian theatre was replacing the almost exclusive domination of D'Annunzio in the years past. The two plays were: Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello, staged in Paris in 1923, and The Mask and the Face by Luigi Chiarelli, staged in London in 1924.

The triumphant reception given by the Parisian spectators to Six Characters was the beginning of Pirandello's international success, and it initiated the prodigious dissemination of his work. The London production of The Mask and the Face, on the other hand, was the end of a flowering of plays that had taken place during the war and had been given the rather incorrect name of the Theatre of the Grotesque.

What is particularly Italian about the theatre that is produced in Italy? What characteristics make it different—recognizable—to the foreign spectator?

After the war, Italian theatre was scarcely significant for its innovations. An effort to restore tradition in theatre absorbed most creative energies. Three outstanding influences belong to this period. The first is that of the Academy of Dramatic Arts, founded in 1936 by Silvio D'Amico with the purpose of raising the cultural level of Italian theatre. The Academy concentrated on the critical analysis of texts. Orazio Costa and his students, Luigi Squarzina and Vittorio Gassman, were the main exponents of this concern for tradition. The institution was a profound influence on the generation of postwar actors.

The second influence was that of foreign theatre. After the war, there was a consumer attitude toward French, English and American “hit shows.”

Giuliano Vasilicò began his theatrical career in 1968 when he returned to Italy from Sweden, where he had spent eight years studying literature and the arts, though without any specific concern for the theatre. His sister, Lucia Vasilicò, had been working in Rome as an actress in experimental theatre and films with, among others, Fellini and Warhol. With her and Ingrid Enbom, who had come with him from Sweden, he began to articulate his ideas and formulate plans for theatrical activity. He and Enbom joined Giancarlo Nanni's group as actors in the production of Escurial by Michel de Ghelderode. Their association with Nanni, however, lasted only a few months. Vasilicò was impatient to verify his own ability as a playwright.

He subsequently staged two of his own plays: Psychopolitical Mission in 1969 and Occupation in 1970.

After having worked with Giancarlo Nanni as a scenographer, Memè Perlini began his career as a director in 1973 with a signal work in the history of Italian experimental theatre: Pirandello, Chi? (Who's Pirandello?). The production is based entirely on the relationship between light and objects. It does not interpret a script. On the dark stage, the actors move as though in a performance for themselves, hidden from the spectators, revealed only by flashes of light. It is a darkness full of phantoms—like the unconscious of the representation, like the deep structure from which emerges traces of violent struggle.

In the dark theatrical space, Perlini, from the front of the stage, works with small projectors on the magma of unknown actions. He cuts out square and rectangular pieces of light—very precise areas in which he captures details, parts of bodies, parts of objects.

Altro was founded in 1972 in Rome by Achille Perilli, an artist, with the two fundamental and complementary ideas of collective work and intercode creation. Perilli, who originally worked as an artistic collaborator with only one actor, was subsequently joined by Lucia LaTour, an architect who does most of the choreography; Walter Branchi, a composer; and Bruno Magno, a photographer and lighting technician. Luciano Martinis and Gianni Trozzi have been working with the group from the beginning.

The idea of intercode creation has often extended beyond theatrical performance to workshop activities, political seminars, photographic exhibitions, concert series, and a lecture on linguistics. Of nine projects to date, only five have been performances; and some of those performances have included related “side shows.”

Ostal, the home environment as a workshop in madness, is a series of performance pieces produced by the Italian experimental group Cfr., directed by Aldo Rostagno. Ostal was performed by the group in New York for two weeks in April 1977.

Ostal [pr.: oo-stou’(t)] is a word of Languedocien, the dialectal variant of Old Provencal spoken in Southern France west of the Rhone. Ostal meant house, when the house was abode and temple at the same time, a sacred place where life was celebrated as a ritual—as opposed to the home of present days, a jungle of electrical appliances in which we cultivate our private neurosis.

The Cfr. (short for confrontation) was founded by Rostagno in 1975, after leaving the U.S. and returning to his native Italy.

Lisi and Silvana Natoli founded the group Spazio Zero in 1973. Their work focuses on certain ethnic and historical aspects of Sicily, Sicily being, for them, a microcosm of the Third World. The title of their most recent production, To Salvatore Giuliano, is a dedication to a famous Sicilian criminal. Giuliano began as a rebel, then became the emblem of the revolt of the poor in southern Italy. The American invasion and the collapse of state authority after Italy's defeat in the second World War turned him toward politics. He championed an attempt at secession from Italy, masterminded by the Mafia, who expected to profit by Sicilian independence. The attempt failed, but Giuliano remained linked to the Mafia and was subsequently hired by them to massacre striking farm workers in Portella della Ginestra. The story is treated as a popular myth by Spazio Zero.

The group Ouroboros takes its name from an alchemical symbol: a dragon that forms a perfect circle by holding its tail in its mouth. The symbol, according to the group, alludes to the structuralist tenet of the perfect autonomy of the signifier.

Pier Luigi Pieralli, the director of Ouroboros, created The Death of Geometry from a poem by Giuliano Scabia. The poem has the same relationship to the performance as it might have, for example, to a musical composition by Morton Feldman. The words are rendered “musical” by being stripped of any verbal value. Syllables are isolated, protracted and repeated; they proliferate other sounds (some of which are on tape) and the cumulative effect is rather meditative in a way that recalls Cage.

The gymnasium measured 24 × 18 meters. The space was articulated primarily through the use of light. All other elements were reduced to two dimensions, so that the space appeared empty even though there was a “street” represented by a narrow strip of asphalt that entered from the open door and transversed the entire gymnasium. An obstacle on the side of the street was represented by a circle of 60-watt light bulbs attached to a metal base. Another obstacle was a sheet of plexiglass on which was projected a slide showing a window. To the right of the entrance were eighteen red velvet theatre seats with large plates of glass leaning on them to prevent anyone from sitting down. On the floor, perpendicular to the street, were six strips of wood that copied the line of vertical beams that supported the ceiling.

We chose this title because we like it. What is proposed here is only a moment of our research. We have analyzed the ways in which, among an infinite number of possibilities, the elements that constitute the language of the theatre may combine: space, time, rhythm, light, sound, objects and the “actor.” The latter, however, is continually attempting to work with language. We cannot help but glance at the uninterrupted flux of reality and notice the bustle of a thousand details all linked in a truly surprising manner to the universal situation. Our gratitude to Nietzche, to Laforgue and others who gave us permission to quote.

As for the rest, the text of our work does not depend as much on words as on concrete stimuli (objects, documents, photographs, slides, verbal material) that each “actor” grasps in its everyday “existing.”

Presagidel Vampiro (Presages of the Vampire) is not a performance. It is the refusal of performance. Presages: something extremely definite in itself—the single presentiment—but inarticulated, or better articulated according to a procedure not of “necessity” but of demonstration. Articulated a posteriori.

Presages of the Vampire is a selection from studies on the theme of the rapport inside-outside. The outside in the inside and the inside in the outside: the Duchampian door.

Presages of the Vampire leads to a reflection-decomposition of the theatre in the theatre, of time in the theatre, of space in the theatrical space, Vampire. One can have presentiments of war, presentiments of a storm, presentiments of being attacked, presentiments of death.