Stages of History: Performing 1970s Italy with Narrative Theater.

Abstract

Emerging from the unrest of the 1970s in Italy, a minimalist one-person performance genre, later known as Narrative Theater, shifts the focus from dominant national allegories to the experiences of individuals and what they can reveal about society at large. Through a combination of research, ethnography and storytelling, narrators such as Ascanio Celestini, Laura Curino, and Marco Paolini resuscitate the local, shedding light on unknown and underrepresented narratives in Italian history. With these techniques the genre not only supports the subaltern perspectives of factory workers, for example, but also dialectically layers private and public memory to construct a more comprehensive and collective history. I begin my analysis of the genre with a genealogical account of its historical and theatrical influences. Following this is an examination of the role of the narrator (chapter two), orality and language (chapter three), the importance of space both in terms of stage and geographic territory (chapter four) and, finally, the migration of Narrative Theater into contemporary visual media (chapter five).

The project deploys historical, critical, and performative methods to examine the cultural environment in which this type of theater developed. The historical lens is crucial not only because of the varied connections between the 1970s and Narrative Theater, but also historiographically for how it uncovers the ways in which narrators developed rigorous strategies for performing history in their plays. Specifically, the founders of the genre intertwined microhistory as conceived by Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi with oral history in light of the works of Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli. In addition to a more traditional dramaturgical examination, I draw on performance studies to analyze the extra-textual dimensions of narrative practice. Erving Goffman’s concept of social dramaturgy, along with Victor Turner’s notions of community, are particularly helpful in negotiating Narrative Theater’s efforts to both counterpoise and interrelate individual experience within the broader socio-political context. Ultimately, Narrative Theater fuses the practice of microhistory with a political consciousness derived from the social conflicts of the 1970s to produce an innovative style of community-theater that serves as a form of historical recuperation.