Resumen de Il cerchio invisibile. Due esperienze di teatro-comunità in Campania: da Leo de Berardinis a Punta Corsara

Alfonso Amendola, Vincenzo Del Gaudio

• The theatre offers profound potential for contact among bodies. Without contact, there is no theatre, understood as the art form whose defining principle is being tied to one space and one time, leading to the need to build a community. We analyse the analogies and differences between two important experiences in Campania. These experiences are based on a theatre project that is also a social project to build a temporary community. In this perspective, the two experiences are exemplary cases in which the community is built like a choral community, like events in which singular bodies aspire to a particular kind togetherness that philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy terms singulier-pluriel. First, we examine the work of Leo de Berardinis and Perla Peragallo between 1967 and 1976 in Marigliano to show how the teatro dell’ignoranza or teatro del grado zero, as the director defines it, was a prototype of choral theatre that feeds on diversity to transcend the limits of the theatre space to become integral with the social fabric. The second experience that we consider is the company Punta Corsara, the culmination of the Arrevuoto project that started in Scampia in 2005. Arrevuoto is an educational initiative based on Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari’s non-scuola concepts. Non-scuola is not a drama/art school but a workshop for developing new models of social living. Punta Corsara’s work is based on reconquering suburban space as a choral space. With these two experiences, we define a new theatrical space intended as a choral and community space that encourages contact between bodies.