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Epilogue
PROVA

Italiano


Epilogue


WHY WE STILL INSIST ON TALKING ABOUT DRAMATURGY, AND WHY WE ARE CONVINCED THAT EVERY REINVENTION OF THE NEW NECESSARILY PASSES FROM THE ANCIENT, AND WHY THE GENERAL VACUUM DOESN’T PREVENT ME FEELING THE HEART THAT BEATS IN MY RIBCAGE. 

Yes, why do we still after more than a century of avant-gardes, destructions of language, de-structuring etc., why do we still persist in using words which may sound (out of date) “archaic” to over-refined ears? Why “the actor”, why the “theatre”, why then “dramaturgy”? Etymologically dramaturgy means “interweaving of actions”: it therefore supports and precedes, or better, embodies the “weaving of words”. It is an equivocation that has never been sufficiently dispelled: before being verbal, dramaturgy is physical: western theatre is not a “theatre of words” but a “theatre of flesh” that also accommodates the word; bodies in action that clash and embrace. It’s like an ex-voto: let’s think of it as an ex-voto. 

Votive images, which for millennia have passed through much of western history, tell in their persistence a singular iconic story. Votive offerings are not generally considered in aesthetic matters, they give no voice to the so called originality of art. They are an amorphous mass, a fleeting form. Votive images are organic, vulgar, so unpleasant to look at as they are superabundant and widespread. They go through time ignoring the separation between paganism and Christianity. Their history has to take account of a different temporality which in itself persists against and resists all evolutionary and “progressive” chronology. It is set up in “duration”, beyond the evolution of styles: it is a howl of our desire that invokes healing. It is the form of the conflict that divides us, of the actions that put me against myself, it’s the evil that lacerates me. 

Think of the malleability of an ex-voto in wax: with wax you form bodies, pieces of bodies, breasts, legs, genitals, everything you place in the sanctuary to ask for grace or acknowledge grace received. Think of the resemblance between wax – mysterious fruit of the bee’s body – and the consistency of flesh. Think of the psychic evocation elicited by these wax bodies, like the fleshly bodies of actors. And of the “actions” that the latter have been carrying out on stage for millennia: murders, marriages, wars, empires that fall, plagues and healings, furores. Flesh figurines that burn their biological time on the stage, like candles. 

We know as many do that we are floating in a vacuum full of simulacra. We know we inhabit a reified world where goods, money and the ghosts of both are Masters (also Godfathers in the mafia sense of the term). We know we’re living in the west where the sun has gone down in a normal, obvious, taken for granted and bureaucratic absence of meaning: and yet... and yet those votive offerings tell us that since time immemorial creatures have been screaming their desire for meaning! 

And desire today is still “action”, the tangle of desires is “dramaturgy”. On stage as in life. Doesn’t that dark red muscle pulsing in your ribcage still whisper it? 


Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari 
Ravenna, 27th November 2007