ON THE STAGE, BEYOND THE PAGE
dedication by
GIORGIO ALBERTAZZI
There is no other theatre than what
belongs to the stage, what is upon the stage, outside the page. The rest
is literature, i.e. materials that are preteatrical, prescenic,
pretext. I mean to say that the script is dependent upon writing about
the action or about the language of the action. It is a subcode of the
complex code that is dramatic writing. The deadly theatre is that which
stays on the page, that which is literature. Whoever says of the text,
“I’d rather read it,” does not know what theatre is or maybe fears it or
maybe hates it. Nobel Laureate Dario Fo says, “I feel like a son of
that period (referring to 1968) and those experiences because we strove
to break from slavery to the text, which we were already by that time
handling with a certain freedom and which, since then, has become only a
canvass [canovaccio] upon which we act every evening.”
In the case of Commedia dell’Arte, the principle characteristic that
distinguishes it as a genre is the absence of the script. The actors,
instead of imparting to memory predetermined lines, based their own
interpretations on a plot outline and improvised on stage. This
preserves the idea of a possible bridge from the page to the stage: The
indispensable is written; the inexpressible is left to the craft of the
actor.This kind of theatre implies a relationship with the audience that is different from the norm, which partitions the audience to one side and the actors, and therefore the show, to the other. It manifests a relationship of confrontation and collision of more vital and dynamic understanding, of active complicity. Making together one single thing. The Greek Theatre, the Phylax plays, Orpheus, and Narcissus: the creator and the executioner, who mix themselves together, interchange themselves and become Hermes, the god of communication, Hermes the trickster, god of thieves. Because everything materializes on stage or in the arena or wherever you want the location to be: so everything is physicalized, from content to feeling, to phonic reality: From signified to signifier, eccentric in respect to consciousness: Theater is the art of the signifier.
Personally I have never written a line
without hearing it spoken or shouted or whispered or twisted by a voice,
a breath; indeed, first hear it, then write it. Theater means
recovering that word heard before transcribing it as an event that has
already happened on a piece of paper.
Giorgio Albertazzi