ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the work of two Italian dramatists, actors and directors, Emma Dante and Fausto Paravidino. Since the early 2000s, when their careers began, Dante and Paravidino have both enjoyed considerable national and international acclaim, but the mode in which spectators have experienced their work abroad has been significantly different. Family relations – seldom of affectionate, nurturing, and respectful kind – are great protagonists of Dante’s and Paravidino’s work. Families are deployed as microcosms that communicate both literally – that is, that speak about blood relationships in their respective cultural and aesthetic framework – and metaphorically. Still Life captured European and international audiences with its entertaining humour. It was also presented as a reading at the Italian Cultural Institute in London in 2009, but according to Paravidino, ‘nobody found it funny there’. Paravidino acknowledged the intercultural negotiation mechanism that often reduces cultural products to representatives of their national identity, pigeonholing them within simplistic understandings of heritage.
