Intra-Cultural Theater: Performing the Life of Black Migrants to Italy: Teatro dele Albe and the Performance of Ethnic Diversity acros Politics, News, Public Discourse, and Art (review)

Raffaele Furno's Intra-cultural Theater: Performing the Life of Black Migrants to Italy: Teatro delle Albe and the Performance of Ethnic Diversity across Politics, News, Public Discourse, and Art joins a growing body of performance studies scholarship that examines spectacles built on the experiences of immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers. Whether studying the use of migration narratives in corporate-aid projects and human-rights campaigns or situating "immigrant performances" within nation-specific celebrations of multiculturalism, this scholarship asks one of performance studies' central questions: If analyses of anti-racist aesthetic practices are to move beyond the binary of resisting versus re-instantiating toxic stereotypes, how does the messy, multidimensional nature of performance complicate the work that identity markers do?

Furno's book arrives at this question by way of the Ravenna-based theatrical collective Teatro delle Albe and their "Afro-Romagnole experiment" (6), a series of performance works that involved collaborations between the group's Italian director Marco Martinelli and actor Ermanna Montanari and Senegalese actors Iba Babou, Abibou N'Diaye, Khadim Thiam, Mor Awa Niang, and Mandiaye N'Diaye. Depicting Albe's work against the broader background of "intra-ethnic relations between Italians and black Africans" (27), Furno draws on both ethnographic research and his analyses of twentieth-and twenty-first-century Italian immigration policies and discourses. Early in the book, he suggests that, in Italy, "the momentum of theater as the privileged contestation site has long passed" (12). The rich chapters that follow are neither a redemptive idealization of Albe's work nor do they deny the group the personal connections, intimacies, and experiences to which performance practice can give rise; rather, the work functions as an "inquiry into the logics that control, produce, enhance or censor the freedom for individuals and communities to express themselves, access information, and intervene in their self-representations" (7).

Following an introduction that sets up the book's two intertwining histories—that of Teatro delle Albe and of how non-European immigration has transformed Italian racial identity—the book is organized into four chapters. Chapter 1 provides a historical background that stretches back to the late-nineteenth-century Risorgimento to counter the prevalent fiction that "immigration in Italy is a recent phenomenon, a fast-paced multi-directional invasion, and a national emergency" (32). Blackness, Furno argues, secures unity in Italian society among previously differentiated regions within the nation, shifting the axis of racial Other-ness from northern versus southern Italy to Italian whiteness versus African immigration. The chapter ends with a discussion of Albe's I Ventidue Infortuni di Mor Arlecchino, a 1993 production that draws from commedia dell'arte and an eighteenth-century Goldoni scenario to present a "black Arlecchino" (60), a complicated theatrical proposal that Furno analyzes in detail.

Chapter 2 provides a broader examination of blackness in Albe's early work, with a focus on the 1988 production Ruh Romagna più Africa Uguale, which juxtaposes the exploitation of immigrant labor in Emilia-Romagna with the environmental challenges that industrial growth has brought to the region. Although the chapter positions Ruh as key to "the theorization of an Afro-Romagnole identity" (71), Furno is quick to point to the production's over-determined, primitivist undertones and labor tensions that marked both the rehearsal and performance. Furno connects these early experiments to the concept that has since underlined the troupe's aesthetic and social ethos: mise en vie, a focus on the actor's personal experience that emphasizes "one's own body movement in the theater space, energetic arch, sensibility towards the relation with the audience, [which] would stem from the truth of the actors' perception of themselves and their own histories" (80).

With Albe's basic vocabulary established, chapter 3 traces...