"...l'avant-garde c'est la libertè!"

On Thursday night we had the first meeting of the workshop When ‘Absurd’ crosses Theatre: Eugéne Ionesco a baptism at the spring of ourselves, at the beginning, where there’s vague shape and intense drive. Ionesco will be with us. We have forced him with the enticing message (but did it work?) that we are an anti-piece, like him, behind him; with the enticement that we have been following, now for a few years, the idea that the artistic process cannot be separated from the final product, or the consequence is a praise to the narcissism of art, like a monument that is made of marble and incorruptible or made of wood and combustible, a reductive amplifier of ‘fear’!

He twisted his nose a bit, I can assure you. That chubby-chops face is only the casual deception for those who pretend they have not received and provocation or stimulus, without the disguises of didactics, the perverse connections with the political, artistic or cultural establishment of each and every time period, with the aim to frighten the impersonal habit.
On the contrary, the idea of a dramatherapy that crystallises its process to turn it into theatre was taking shape. Founding it a r o u n d the Ionescian question of the Rhinoceros was the best possible choice. Not long ago, I was leisurely browsing one of those books you buy for a morbid curiosity and because it has been suggested to you: Theatre without a Director. It was suggested to me a couple of years ago by a representative of the European Association for Theatre Culture. The book itself has been written by the artistic director of this Association, Jurij Alschitz. Many passages of his text, so humanly autobiographic – an autobiography as search… - interested me, but one in particular summarised what I had been thinking for a while: “What I’m interested about in art not so much the final product, as the natural and spontaneous process that leads to it” (1). The idea of the artistic process as a process of truth, of hermeneutic research for a meaning to existence, so closely connected to what is creative in the shamanic vision, now showed me a further testimony. This director creates his/their theatre around the humanity of his actors; he bends destiny to the creative vision of what is happening and can be observed! And isn’t it Ionesco who states: “Je crois que la création artistique est spontanée!” [“I believe that artistic creation is spontaneous”](2)?

A forced analogy with what, in a different context, happens in the dramatherapic process, free from the rules of the stage - if they are too tight - and which makes the actors’ path its end, rather than its means. There are no less sacred Allelujas exploding in the streets, when they bring to successful communication, or on stage, where the two sensible sides of theatre, actor and audience, come into contact. It could be a stage diluted in the circular structure of Grotowsky’s theatre, or a traditional one, as long as it is possible to discover this modesty as a shadow that finds again the birth of drama every time it meets it. How enticing is the idea of gathering around an idea and letting it shape our intentions, disembodied by back-stages and floodlights, and of observing the tender wisdom of Bérgerer, when he advises his friend Jean to see a doctor.

I have an ambition, my strongest and most challenging: giving again visible humanity to Ionesco’s characters. Let’s be clear: not that they need it! They exist like this, human ‘capsules’ sleeping between language and logic, fear and recklessness, quarrelling with life, born to interrogate, between a chasm and anarchy. What would happen if they go through the soul of our actor? We are not on stage, we are in the particular context of dramatherapy, in the virtual space in which the ‘as if’ meets delirium and memory, with lapse and action; in which tenacious training (long live Grotowsky!) measures - rather than containing - the distance between reality and trauma, between pain and drive for life. The crossing will take a new appearance, it will leave something behind and it will take something on again. It’s a cat-walk, often silent, amongst an audience that has not paid, because invisible; mates of another time and of other stories. Then the message of the avant-guarde: “L’avant-guarde, c’est la liberte’” (3) takes on a new, human character, which is able to think over the transformations and the changes…over its identity.

(1) Alschitz, Jurij (2007) Theatre without Director, Pisa: Titivillus (p.19)
(2) Ionesco, Eugène, Expérience du théatre, in Notes et contre-notes, Paris: Gallimard (p.48)
(3) Ionesco, Eugène, Discours sur l'avant-garde, in Notes et Contre-notes, Paris: Gallimard (p. 91)