Italian Theatre in the New Europe: Notes on Santarcangelo dei Teatri XXII

Italian Theatre in the New Europe Notes on Santarcangelodei TeatriXXII GautamDasgupta SANTARCANGELO, A TINY MEDIEVAL village inland from the seaside resort of Rimini, lies on the ancient Via Emilia, a Roman thoroughfare linking the imperial capital to the waters of the Adriatic. A derelict arch welcomes visitors to a slate-encrusted piazza, adorned with a central obelisk and ringed by stately eighteenth-century buildings. From here, stepped alleyways radiate out and up towards the forlorn remnants of a fort, affording distant vistas of the Emilia-Romagna countryside and the jagged contours of the hilly Republic of San Marino that casts its shadows on the plains. Far removed from the centers of art and privilege in Italy and the rest of Europe, Santarcangelo has housed, thanks to an enlightened municipality, an international summer festival of theatre for the past twenty-two years. Though by no means of the same scope as some of the major European festivals dedicated to the theatre, it has remained true to its original mandate of providing a staging ground for youthful talent and has proved hospitable to work that is at an experimental stage. Never one to commit itself to any specific artistic creed, the festival offers a fairly pluralistic sampling of new tendencies in theatre in any given year. Over the years, however, it has seen fit to adapt to changing times. In the 70s and early 80s, its reach, both artistically and globally, was farranging , a policy that could be sustained in an era of unlimited funds. When I was first there in 1981, about fifty theatres from over twelve countries were represented, with events spread out among neighboring 63 communes. Committed, then as now, to actor-centered groups, the festival those days offered a mix of avant-garde theatre, performance art, and dance, including the likes of Laurie Anderson and Elaine Summers Dance and Film Company. In recent years, as a result of its reduced budget (still in the vicinity of a million dollars, half of which goes towards the festival, the remainder for year-long theatre-related work that includes pedagogical activities and support of local talents) and a general realignment of theatre worldwide to smaller-scale works, the festival has curtailed its scope. Be that as it may, it continues to serve as a barometer of shifts in the theatrical landscape, and never more so than this past year-1992-the year of European unification. By June of last year it had become fairly obvious to all that European unification, even on the political and economic fronts, was rapidly turning into a nightmare. On the cultural front, what its implications were was anybody's guess. In anticipation of this annus mirabilis,a central office organized around members from all European nations was set up in Brussels to initiate and coordinate artistic events across the continent, its stated purpose to facilitate the mounting of festivals, such as the one in Santarcangelo , among other activities. Easier said than done, according to Antonio Attisani, theatre scholar and former editor of Scena, and now artistic director at Santarcangelo, who ran into the same bureaucratic and political machinery that has bedeviled his tenure as festival head these past few years. The Brussels nerve center, riven by political upmanship and intranational infighting, failed to support in any substantial manner the Santarcangelo festival. As a last resort, Attisani had to fall back on his earlier contacts in the Italian and European scene, reaching out for funds in the usual places that had nourished the festival in prior years. They were the not unexpected local authorities in the commune of Santarcangelo, and the government of France (Philippe Tiry of ONDA, a French cultural organization, proved an invaluable asset). Welcome as such sources are, they are nevertheless predicated, particularly in the first instance, on homegrown politics and walking that thin and fragile line between art and local municipal concerns. The French connection, says Attisani, is built around certain common principles and national and cultural ideologies that bind Italy and France. He maintains that much of the contemporary French theatre scene is not unlike that in Italy, with a return to local, even personal, histories serving as the ground on which...