In June 1998, Patrizia Falcone was invited to give a lecture at the International Center for Information Management, Systems and Services in Torun, Poland. The text of her lecture follows.

Outline

1. PART I: The theater in the Western experience
   • The Theater of Ancient Greece
   • The Theater of Ancient Rome
   • The Theater of the Middle Ages
   • The Theater during the Renaissance
   • The Theater of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
   • The Theater of the Eighteenth Century
   • The Theater of the Nineteenth Century
2. PART II: Contemporary Western theater
   • The Theater of the Twentieth Century
   • Theatrical Techniques and Methods, and Their Purpose
   • Approaches to theatrical technique outside of the theater, and their uses
3. Historical Sources

PART I: The theater in the Western experience

Is there anybody who has never dreamed of acting, even if just for his friends, or with his classmates at school, or when he was a child telling splendid lies to his parents, or dancing at a party, or singing hymns in the church?

In fact, the impulse to act is profoundly rooted in the nature of man: theater was the first spectacle—think back to the prehistoric tribal rituals; a spectacle for which people created, and still create, a complex set of rules and an organization all for the purpose of reaching that specific goal inherent in the theater: communication. In this sense, across the various historical periods there has always been—and there still is—a deep connection between language, dramaturgy (understood as the written use of language) and theater. For this reason, in this first part of my presentation it is important to examine the historical origins of theater, in order to discover in them the extraordinary modernity in many of its communicative aspects.

The Theater of Ancient Greece

A first example in the Western experience is represented by the theater of ancient Greece; a theater that developed around three forms: tragedy, satirical drama, and comedy. The origins of tragedy and its definition (in ancient Greek the word means “the singing of a goat”) constitute an open problem in the sense that even today, we still know little or nothing about it. It is certainly necessary to confront the key problem between ritual and theater that is the basis of tragedy. It is a key problem because the relationship between the god of wine and the festival (Dionysius) and theater is fundamental in order to discover the genesis of tragedy from the moment in which theater was the documentation and the expression of a religion. That is demonstrated by the fact that the tragedies were staged in the Theater of Dionysius in Athens, which was associated with this god’s name. For the duration of the festival, an ancient image of Dionysius was brought in. This image was conserved for the rest of the time in a sanctuary called the Akademia. The procession evoked the arrival of the god in Athens.

In his work “Poetica,” Aristotle says that tragedy “through scenes that bring about either pity or terror, has the effective of uplifting and purifying the soul from these emotions.” This phenomenon, called catharsis—that is, purification—is typical of the ritual performances in which disorder or crisis also contain within themselves the means to overcome, to be liberated from themselves.

The role that is attributed to Dionysius in the origins of tragedy is also linked to satirical comedy. This form of theater was very important in ancient Greece, but very few written texts have survived until today. Satirical comedy seems to have developed according to the model of tragic theater. The only thing we are sure of is that the ritual origins of all three theatrical forms—tragedy, satirical drama, and comedy—all are somehow connected with the god Dionysius.

One interesting and important fact to observe is that tragedy is a theatrical form that is not found in either oriental theater, or in Hebrew theater. Hebrew theater is convinced that the ways of God are neither capricious nor absurd, and that we can come to know them if only our search is illuminated by obedience. In contrast, tragedy has its origins in exactly the opposite way of thinking: “necessity is blind.” When man encounters it, he is unable to see it. This is the ancient Greek way of thinking, and it is the basis for their fundamentally tragic view of life. It is the principal contribution of ancient Greek thought to our civilization. Injustice and vengeance make a man noble. They don’t make him innocent, but they purify him as though he had passed through fire. This is why in the final, conclusive moments of the great tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus (the greatest exponents of this theatrical form), joy and sorrow are united together.

As I mentioned earlier, even comedy has ritual origins. Comedy was intended to represent men who are inferior, not like the great tragic heroes. The emphasis is on what makes them ridiculous. Being ridiculous is like being mistaken or deformed, but without causing pain or harm. The world of ancient Greek comedy is a complex world. It is even sometimes contradictory. Aristophanes is its most important representative, and his so-called “masks” illustrate the wonderful contradictions of human existence. The language he uses is a beautiful invention, which is able to create sophisticated linguistic structures, and refined yet caustic verses.

And so we see that all of ancient Greek theater was written exclusively for being performed on a stage. This was also a rather common phenomenon in the historical periods that followed. For this reason, the role of the playwright was the important one. That is different from this century, where the role of the director has become the most important one.

Theater in ancient Greece was an integral part of the religious, social, cultural, and civic life of the people. Yes, it was a ritual—but it was also a place for the people to come together, for emotional involvement, and for cultural learning. It was so important, in fact, that it was supervised by a high public official. The principal actors were paid by the State. The role of the principal actor was as important as the role of the author himself. Actors were always males, and never adolescents—which is the way that female roles were interpreted by men in the Elizabethan theater many centuries later. And so actors had a very important role in society. Furthermore, they were paid like royalty, and were often used by the State to carry out missions of a political nature and even received important ambassadorships.

The chorus, which has a fundamental place in tragedy, and even in comedy, is another central element in ancient Greek theater. The choristers sang and danced, directed by the chorus master, and accompanied by the music of a flute. And so the role of the chorus was no less important than the role of the principal actor himself.

Costumes were symbolic—the color of the costume indicated the character of the person wearing it: young characters were dressed in red, noble characters in white, immoral characters (“the bad guys”) in black.

It is easy to imagine how important the masks were in the theater of ancient Greece. The use of masks had ritual origins. It also had the function of indicating to the spectator the characteristics of the role the actor was playing. The masks in tragic theater are basically expressionist—that is, they visualize emotional states such as sorrow and anger by means of deformations of the face, such as wide-open eyes, dilated nostrils, etc.

In addition to dance, song, and the spoken word, ancient Greek theater also used another medium of communication: music—although unfortunately, almost no written music at all has survived from that period. Thus, in a sense, the ancient Greek actor was closer to an opera singer than to the prose actor that we know today.

For the audience in ancient Greece, the theater was something that was unrepeatable, something that involved him very profoundly, in a way that we modern people can only imagine, and not feel.

The Theater of Ancient Rome

Ancient Roman theater, contrary to what is commonly thought, was not at all a mere imitation of ancient Greek theater. Although it is true that the Romans loved circus games, it is also true that the games in which they performed theatrical texts were rather sophisticated.

Just like in Greece, the theater in Rome was strictly connected to festivals from the very beginning. One example of the festivals in which theater was performed were the Roman athletic games.

What separates the Roman theater from Greek theater, however, is something else. We saw that both tragic and comic Greek theater were strictly connected to the political and civic life of the city. The Roman theater did not have this characteristic.

The Romans had a strong interest in theatrics, mime, and gestures. The number of days dedicated to theater were numerous—even more numerous than the number of days dedicated to the circus. Unfortunately, today we know very little about this theater, where music, mime, and pantomime had a fundamental role. We do know about the plays of Plauto and Terenzio, and some tragedies by Seneca.

In such a “theatrical” form of theater, the text had a relatively unimportant role in its staging. In Rome, the theater was a phenomenon that involved a diverse group of social classes—although it didn’t play the central role in society and politics that it did in Athens.

The origins of Roman theater seem to be Estruscan, rather than Greek. In fact, Tito Livio, the Roman historian, tells us that in 364 B.C. a group of dancers was called to Rome from Etruria, who danced to the music of a flute with the goal of placating the gods who had caused an epidemic of disease. Viril, the Roman poet, believes that the theater was born out of the festivals that were organized by farmers for the harvest. These festivals were celebrated using dancing, song, and masks: the farmers covered their faces with masks that were made from the bark of olive trees. In contrast, in the theater that was performed during the athletic games, the faces of the participants were uncovered.

The Roman theater is based essentially on comedy. In fact, the fescennini were rather coarse and rough sketches, but also very biting and sarcastic. The farmers exchanged them during the festivals in honor of the harvest. The fescennini that were written in verse, together with dancing, probably became the origins of the Satura. In addition, the Atellana, a kind of farce, confirms the many different influences on Roman theater, especially the comic influences.

One certain influence was mime, which was acted out during the period of the Roman Republic as a farce at the conclusion of a performance. It was a form of theater that was based on violent and licentious caricature and on obscene situations. It was a form of acting—if you can call it that—without masks. In this theatrical form, singing and dancing became more and more important with the passing of time.

Theatrics were a fundamental aspect of Roman civilization. Everything was a spectacle: the victory of a general, the execution of a criminal, a funeral, a trial. This was a kind of theater that was performed in a large variety of places: in the forum, in the circus, in the spaces in front of temples. The organization of the performances was handled by magistrates who also were given financing by the State. These magistrates did not directly manage the shows. It was done through the principal actor and the head comic, called the dominus gregis—who was in turn paid by the other members of the theater company. But first of all, this head comic paid the author of the text.

The role of the actor in Roman society was profoundly different from the role of the Greek actor in his society. Whereas the Greek actor had a very prominent social and civic role in Athens, the Roman actor had more the origins of a slave or a freed slave. The actor, the dancer, the singer, the musician did not have civil rights in Rome, and had a bad reputation: they were considered the lowest level of society, a person without dignity or morals. Whoever stepped onto the theater stage was considered to be similar to a prostitute. This phenomenon shouldn’t be surprising, because the same thing happened in other historical periods that are relatively close to us, such as between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the actors of the Commedia dell’Arte.

However, the actors were idolized by the Roman public in the same way that movie and television stars are idolized by us in the twentieth century. The Roman actor was complete—he was able to sing, act, and dance. In this way, he was more similar to our opera singers or actors in musicals than to our actors in the prose theater. In the absence of the masks that were used in Greek theater, the costumes were used to identify the characters in Roman theater.

The Theater of the Middle Ages

If we look more closely at the origins of Italian theater, we can find them in the theater of the Middle Ages. The Italian Nobel Laureate in Literature in 1997, Dario Fo, dedicated himself to studying and re-creating a part of this theater form in his work Mistero Buffo (“Comic Mystery”), in which he examines the minstrel tradition of this period. For several centuries, the Middle Ages did not develop a precise and coherent approach to the theater, but presented religious ceremonies and profane festivals that were extraordinarily rich in theatrical situations and themes.

Dramatization is an important, even fundamental aspect of medieval culture. The first aspect of medieval theater to point out is that to a great extent it is a form of expression that is strictly connected to the Church: it is first of all a religious, liturgical, and didactic theater, in which the “utilitarian” component—if we wish to call it that—dominates the esthetic component: the theater as a pure form of communication of the message of Christ.

But this phenomenon presents some paradoxical aspects when we consider the attitude that the Catholic Church had towards the theater during the entire Middle Ages, according to both Christian writers and especially in the official documents of the Church itself. The Church considered the theater to be the source of all vices, and it attacked not only the pantomime and mime performances that were clearly obscene, but even the classical tragic and comic dramas. This accusation of the Church is also confirmed in the writings of Saint Augustine.

When we look at the history of pontifical documents, their condemnation of theater is constant and unforgiving. To give just a few examples, the Council of Carthage in 419 A.D. even prescribes the excommunication of anyone who attends the theater on a Church holiday. The Trullan Council in 691 not only forbids Christians to attend any form of performance, from dance to mime all the way to combat with wild animals, but it even gives advice on how to sing in church. Even as late as 1215, the sixteenth Constitution of the Fourth Lateran Council forbids priests to have contacts of any type with mimes, clowns, and minstrels.

All of these prohibitions and excommunications are paradoxical, not only because the Church itself turned around and used the theater as a true means of communication with the masses, capable of involving tens of thousands of Christians, but also because all of the dramatic forms from which Western theater developed have their common origins in ritual: they were born as the most essential and significant moments in religious ceremonies. Even profane theater has origins of a sacred character, no more or less than Christian drama—except that this birth took place in the ritualistic world of pagan religions. The fascination of medieval theater lies in the co-existence of many diverse dramatic forms, both pagan and Christian, linked to the ritual origins that are fundamental to ancient Greek theater, both tragic and comic.

Rituality is expressed in various ways, but its common denominator is in both the liturgical ceremony that is carried out in Church, and in the great annual and seasonal festivals that are still with us today, such as Christmas and Carnival, in which the people collectively celebrate the renewal of the seasons and their hopes for a good future.

The history of the passage from the liturgy to religious drama has its roots in liturgical chant and, in particular, in an event that at first may seem insignificant: the prolonging of the “Ah-h” sound at the beginning of the “Alleluia” that was sung to celebrate the visit of Mary to the tomb of Christ and the announcement that Christ had resurrected. This was only a small variation from the official Easter liturgy, but it had enormous consequences, creating the conditions that made the dramatization of the Easter liturgy possible. This mini-drama acquired a larger and larger dimension, that was enriched by the presence of other characters such as Saint Peter and Saint John, and even going as far as having Jesus himself appear to Mary Magdalene.

And so we see that there was the simultaneous existence of a clerical culture and a minstrel culture, which led to the development of drama written in the vernacular language rather in addition to the Latin language that was used in the liturgical texts. The minstrel is difficult to define as a theatrical figure—we think of him in many roles, from buffoon to acrobat to musician. A real minstrel, however, must always know how to live among the powerful with courtesy, playing and singing verse.

By the late Middle Ages, the development of religious theater had reached an exceptionally spectacular level, involving even Rome, where in the fifteenth century there were very successful performances of the Passion in the Coliseum and the Resurrection in the Church of San Giovanni Laterano or in the Basilica of Saint Peter. Both of these productions lasted until 1539 until they were forbidden, because they provoked violence against the Jews.

But the city in which they really flowered during this period was Florence, where young men formed theatrical companies especially for staging performance of sacred plays. These were companies that had the objective of reciting dramatic texts so that the young men acquired perfect physical control, as well as gestures and diction that were necessary for a correct rhetorical technique. This is the same kind of experience that we see in theatrical workshops today. At the end of the fifteenth century, however, the sacred literature was only a recollection of a remote past, because it was being used for completely different purposes.

The Theater during the Renaissance

The theater of the Renaissance, that miraculous season of creativity in all forms of expression, marks the birth of modern theater. It was in Italy that this theatrical civilization was created, that would eventually extend itself into all of Europe. Within a single century, it would give birth to the splendid flowering of the English Elizabethan theater, the French theater of the Grand Siécle, and the Spanish Siglo de Oro.

This was a theater that was finally distinguishable in all of its components, and in which an essential and irrefutable relationship is created between authors and spectators; a theater of many forms—comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy, pastoral drama, melodrama—that would have a determining influence on all of European drama up until the middle of the eighteenth century.

Furthermore, the Renaissance not only initiated the flowering of the prose theater, but also the phenomenon called Commedia dell’Arte—the comedy of professional actors—that was to last until the middle of the eighteenth century. This was a phenomenon that completely played off the capabilities of the actor for performing mime and gestures, at the expense of the spoken word and, strictly speaking, the written text itself.

The development and originality of Renaissance theater cannot be explained as being sudden and miraculous. In reality, the process that led to its birth was long and complex, with strong roots in the humanistic culture that characterized all of the fifteenth century.

The Theater of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

If all of the comic and pastoral theater of the Renaissance was Italian, and had a decisive influence on the dramaturgy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nevertheless the powerful development of Italian theater during this period was due to something else: the Commedia dell’Arte. Unfortunately, this form of theater ended up suffocating the written word, through its constant efforts to reduce the text to a simple plot in which a fixed set of characters—some of which are distinguished by wearing a mask so that they can be easily identified—elaborated their own improvisations on the stage. In contrast, in England the Elizabethan theater was exploding, with Shakespeare at the forefront; in Spain, the Siglo de oro with authors such as Calderon de la Barca; in France the theater of the Grand Siécle with Moliere.

The phenomenon of the Commedia dell’Arte reduced theater to mere spectacle, without the written dramatic part, since that part was left to the improvisation of the actor. However, it is also true that the plots of the Commedia dell’Arte, only simple written sketches or subjects, expressed an aggressiveness and a vitality that often broke through the narrow confines created by the Counterreformation in all areas of social life.

The seventeenth century, however, was also the century of the grand flowering of the Baroque, and the theater of that age did not miss the opportunity to involve the great architects of the time—think only of the performances in Rome in which Gian Lorenzo Bernini was involved.

The beginning of this century also signaled the beginning of a great theatrical form: the melodrama—especially with regard to its musical aspects.

The Theater of the Eighteenth Century

The necessity to react to the Baroque illusionism, centered on the virtuosity of the actors, was the objective of the men of Italian culture who founded the Academy of Arcadia in 1690. This reaction was embodied in the creation of a theater in which the spoken word returned to prominence.

But it was only with Carlo Goldoni, the Venetian dramatist, that this revolution truly occurred. He had in mind an historical mission for Italian theater: to overcome and dissolve the “improvised” comedy of the Commedia dell’Arte. His relationship with the actors became relatively complex, because it was his intention to change the very foundations of the concept of theater that was embodied in the Commedia dell’Arte.

However, the more difficult relationship was with the audience, which needed to be liberated from the lazy habits it had developed in its relationship to the text of the plays that were being performed up until that point. He began to experiment with different new forms, from situation comedies without the use of masks, to comedies that included a mixture of characters with and without masks.

The principal instrument he used to accomplish this reform was the invention of a language for the theater that was absolutely original, far away from the stereotypes of the Commedia dell’Arte and, at the same time, just as far away from the literary abstractions of the Academy of Arcadia. For Goldoni, the issues of language are on the same level of importance as issues of popular fashion and changing tastes. He is especially sensitive to the diversity of peoples, regions, and social classes. For example, a nobleman cannot talk like a common man. In this way, it is the language that produces the synthesis between theater and the outside world. Thanks to Goldoni, the Italian theater was destined to be appreciated once again throughout Europe.

The Theater of the Nineteenth Century

After the intense activity of the eighteenth century, the Italian theater returned to being a marginal phenomenon in the shadow of that great cultural, artistic, and political phenomenon that was known as Romanticism. During the nineteenth century, Italy experienced the flowering of only one particular form of theater: melodrama. This took place thanks to musicians such as Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi—the true dramatists of Romanticism, in addition to being great composers of opera, of course. On a more strictly theatrical level, there was some experimentation with the language of “epic theater”—this was theater that demanded a vigilant and critical spectator; a spectator who does not identify himself with the destiny of the characters.

Only towards the end of the nineteenth century was there a renewal of Italian theater with authors such as Giovanni Verga. The phenomenon introduced by these authors was called verismo. The term underscores the attempt to represent reality—that is, the truth that lies inside reality. For this very reason, this type of theater developed in different ways from the North down through the South of Italy. The reason was that it was the pursuit of reality that justified the use of a language that was not only the official Italian language, but also the dialects of the various regions in which the plays were set.

PART II: Contemporary Western theater

The Theater of the Twentieth Century

The Italian drama of the twentieth century is identified most prominently with the name of a Sicilian author: Luigi Pirandello. The worldwide importance of the pirandellian theater has been an essential point of reference for all of the important authors who followed him.

But another profound theatrical innovation was made by the futuristic author F. T. Marinetti. The futurist movement was associated with performances in all of the modern art forms. Its influence was important in almost all subsequent drama, and also in Pirandello’s concept of “theater within theater.” But the futuristic influence was also important in the avant-garde in Russia—for example, on authors such as Kozincov, and even on Eisenstein, who was later to become a grand master of the cinema. And it was still a great influence on certain German dramatic works, such as those of Sternheim. It was also an influence on surrealistic drama, and even, many decades later in the Nineteen-Sixties, on the “happenings” in the United States, and in general on the neo- avant-garde.

Theatrical futurism had one unique characteristic in the story of the avant-garde: it took place on a traditional stage, utilizing popular actors. That is, it was directed towards all of the audience, without distinguishing between “conservative” and “avant-garde” spectators. The three principal manifests associated with futuristic theater were: the theater of Variety; the Synthetic theater; and the theater of Surprise.

Variety theater, with its uproarious laughter, its easy relationship with the public, with its dynamism, represented a kind of antidote against the theater of that period, in which the authors were trying to make contradictions explode.

The mission of the Synthetic theater was to shake up the public, with performances that lasted a very short time: only seconds, or minutes at the most. These performances were abstract or unreal—for example, some of the actors might be inanimate things, or even just pure colors. This was a form of theater that, in the end, was both instantaneous and dynamic, and therefore capable of breaking down the barrier between the stage and the audience. It made the audience a protagonist in the theatrical event at the same level as the actors themselves.

The theater of Surprise tried to expand the theatrical experience beyond the confines of the stage—for example, by continuing the performance in other spaces outside the theater; or continuing the performance on the next day. The greater part of the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde of the Nineteen-Sixties and Seventies departed from this point.

Coming back to Pirandello, we can note that he changed twentieth century theater in such a radical fashion that it would never be the same again. In his dramatic revolution, Pirandello returned to the origins of ancient Greek theater. In particular, he returned to that dialectic between truth and fiction that was at the foundations of Greek theater. The novelty of modern theater, essentially founded by Henrik Ibsen, was that it brought back onto the stage—for the first time since the ancient Greeks, although in a very different way—the drama of man coming to terms with the truth, determined to go to the very bottom of his nature, to settle accounts with the world in which he lives, and therefore not to stop for any kind of human respect.

From Ibsen to Strindberg, to Shaw, to Chekhov, to Pirandello, we are no longer dealing with theater about this or that conflict, about this or that human situation, about this or that passion—we are dealing with theater about truth. Or, more precisely, with theater about the problem of truth. This is what determines the highly intellectual character of modern theater, from the patriarch Ibsen to the modern contemporaries Beckett and Ionesco. The truth we are referring to now has nothing to do with the truth of the verismo form of theater. In that form, as we said earlier, truth is basically found in reality. But Pirandello confronted the problem of using theatrical fiction as a vehicle for achieving a higher form of truth—a truth that involves everyone in a profound way.

And so, we have the two characteristics of modern theater: the first is that, through his willingness to question himself and to question the audience about the meaning of the action on the stage, the author effectively becomes a character in the drama, and he himself is involved in the action. The second characteristic is that the spectator himself is also on the stage, in the sense that he is forced to ask himself the questions that are posed by the actors; to judge the logic of their actions; to discuss their conclusions.

On the stage, everything becomes theater—even a real fight among the actors, for example. The stage is the place where reality is questioned openly and where freedom from everyday fiction is achieved through theatrical fiction. And so we have arrived at the concept of “theater within theater,” which for Pirandello, in contrast to the futurists, was not a pure theatrical device, but instead an expressive enrichment of the relationship between Truth and Fiction.

Theatrical Techniques and Methods, and Their Purpose

Up until this point, I have emphasized the communication that takes place within the theater, and I have highlighted the changing relationship between the written text and the performance from an historical point of view. The role of the actor has sprung out of this relationship. The task of an actor in the modern experience is to interpret life. In order to accomplish this task, actors make use of their imagination and concentration. Acting in front of an audience can involve a feeling of being extremely alone, and actors must be able to make use of all the interior strength that they possess.

In short, acting is a combination of intuition, intelligence, observation, memory, and skill. However, first of all there is the work itself to be interpreted. The function of the actor, under the supervision of the director, is to bring the world of the playwright onto the stage, and to bring alive the characters that inhabit his work—that is, real people.

Naturally, it is the director who decides which approach will be taken to the work. To do this, he might undertake a study of the period in which the play is set, or a study of the themes that are treated in the work itself, trying to understand the message that the author wants to convey. I believe that this type of study must be undertaken even by someone who has chosen to change the text in a radical way in order to present it in a contemporary fashion.

These problems were first confronted by the Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938). In his activity at the Art Theater of Moscow, Stanislavsky underscored the value of the interior motivation of the characters and the importance of reconstructing a well-defined character from what is written in the text. The characters must be imagined in terms of emotions and physical structure. This highlights the two important aspects of acting: the body, and the voice.

The body and the voice must be physically aligned. This makes it necessary to learn the techniques and methods of the acting profession. The study of these tools makes possible communication in two directions: with the audience, and with oneself. The objective of communicating with oneself is achieved through techniques that have a liberating effect on the psychological barriers that each of us tends to have within himself.

In today’s theater workshops, therefore, you will see the development of techniques of many different kinds, where all of them are directed toward the same goal: acting. For example, relaxation exercises are directed toward improvement of concentration. Breathing exercises are directed toward reinforcement of respiratory capacity and control of the diaphragm. Then there is the study of diction, for achieving the correct pronunciation of the phonetics of the language; and singing, which develops the higher and lower tones of the voice, which are essential for the ability to produce more colorful intonations. Intonations play an important role in the study of the emotions which produce them; they allow the actor to create different voices according to the different characters that he must interpret.

Alongside these exercises for the voice, there are the exercises for the body, which complete the expressive skills that the actor needs for effective communication. In this sense, bioenergy develops the capacity to identify the strongest points of the body, to which energy should be directed. We can also add dance to the set of skills to be learned, because an actor may be called upon to interpret a part that asks him to do a dance or song in addition to acting in the strict sense. As an example of this, consider the American musical theater tradition.

On the other hand, the use of the facial mask and of mime technique make it possible to act without the use of words—which is exactly what happens with dancers. Therefore, the character must be studied and rehearsed in every possible detail. The text must be analyzed from the point of view that is associated with the character, including the point of view of the other characters. Furthermore, it is also necessary to decide at which point in the work the audience must be made to understand these observations. It is especially important to note with particular attention what happens to the character during the play, and how the character is transformed or modified as a consequence. Every character has his own development and his own dynamics during the course of the play, with his own motivations and his own conclusions. The ability to overcome difficulties or “actor’s block” when approaching a particular character is very important, and can be achieved sometimes by concentrating on a physical activity—for example, acting out the scene while the actors throw a ball to each other.

In fact, concentrating on a physical activity rather than acting helps to lower tension. The actors are able to act out their parts in a more flexible way, and that gives them the ability to understand and overcome their “block.” As you can see, it is this process of decomposing reality into all of its multiple components that permits us to reconstruct this reality on the stage in a way that it appears natural and not simply “naturalistic.”

The theater uses many conventions—the most prominent of these conventions is illustrated when action is carried out in a room that has only three walls, and not the four walls that reality would impose. As another example, the presence of the audience makes it necessary to speak in a loud voice even when acting out a scene in which the character is supposed to be making an intimate reflection—something that a real person, of course, would never do. Yet, all of these conventions seem perfectly natural on the stage. Think what would happen if the scene were simply played out as it would happen in real life, without the use of any theatrical technique. It would appear theatrically unnatural, so much so that that audience would perceive “false notes” in what it was seeing and it would no longer appear natural at all.

Approaches to theatrical technique outside of the theater, and their uses

The use of these techniques over the last few decades has turned out to be useful for other purposes, too, and this has led to an enlargement of their scope of application. For example, their ability to help eliminate psychological blocks has led to them being used in group therapy for people who have special emotional barriers—the mentally ill, the handicapped, children or adults who have suffered particular traumas. The theatrical experience, with all of its power for communication, has turned out to be particularly useful for people who are deprived of their liberty for a long time, such as prisoners. Theater can have a cathartic effect in these situations, too.

But beyond these situations, which of course are rather extreme, these techniques are being used more and more frequently for particular categories of people who show an interest in learning them for use in their own work—or perhaps only for simply overcoming a personal tendency (I might add that it is no coincidence that many actors are formerly very shy people). In these cases, professionals of various kinds, who have no interest in stepping onto the stage, can learn to interact better in their work environment when necessary—for example, to participate in a conference as a speaker. Using good timbre in the voice; sustaining a sufficient level of volume; articulating words well; making judicious use of pauses; using different intonations; all of these skills make it possible to make a more effective delivery and be more convincing to the audience.

In my own experience, I have often had teachers as pupils in special courses. For these teachers, theatrical techniques give them the possibility to interact better with their own students, perhaps capturing their attention by a more effective reading of a scholastic text—something that young students often hate, not only because it is made obligatory by the school, but also because sometimes a monotonous and boring delivery by the teacher makes it harder to digest and harder to appreciate. A more effective delivery doesn’t just result in a more attentive class, but even more importantly, it instills the germ of curiosity in a larger number of students—and as we know, curiosity is the mother of knowledge and culture.

Historical Sources

The following sources proved to be particularly useful in the preparation of the historical treatment and are gratefully acknowledged:

• Antonucci, Giovanni, Storia del Teatro Antico: Grecia e Roma, Tascabili Economici Newton, 1997.

• Antonucci, Giovanni, Storia del Teatro Italiano, Tascabili Economici Newton, 1995.

© 1998 Patrizia Falcone