ABSTRACT
Fifteen children, ages 6 through 12, dressed in miserable, secondhand clothes, are acting in a poor, miserable space. Few elements trace the outline of a scene. Gray. Faint, shadowless light. Not a single aesthetic consolation. Everything accomplished with very few means, little color, no stage objects, no technology, nothing sophisticated. Everything seems rigid, cold, but at the same time emphatic and rhetorical. Firstly, this group of children constitutes a “theatre company”: this is the fact. In the course of the performance, the first characters emerge, thus delineating a beginning of drama, of dramatic construction. The textual content of the piece is taken from the western tradition of drama—a classic, so to speak. The title of the selected classic is the factoid, the background through which we see the children; it might be Pirandello, Chekhov, Ibsen, or Shakespeare himself. The choice of title is not really important. The audience will have to—eventually—guess at its physiognomy and its textual referent on the basis of the words and the action; but not necessarily. If no title comes to the spectator’s memory, it means the objective has been reached: the loss of the Signified. The children’s manner of acting, reciting, bodily comportment, and moving through space are all severe and controlled to the core. The air is of the kind one breathes before a serious, grave event. The actions they execute speak of tremendous psychological dramas, of blood and ghosts; but in the end, a tautological light seems to emanate from the children’s gestures. Everything here is solemn and Greek, monochromatic and contentless. Divorced from everything else. The child actors do not pretend to be adults. No. They behave like what they are: poor, child actors, living in poverty on this stage. Poverty is a choice, not a disgrace. The stage and the ancient language are all they possess. They are ascetics of the ancient theatrical gesture. They lay claim to the theatre as the purest and most ancient Art.
