ABSTRACT
"In 1963, Gruppo '63 was founded by a group of writers, poets and critics who maintained an unprecedented open-mindedness toward the visual arts, music, and theater, drawing inspiration and ideas from forms of art traditionally disdained by much of the Italian intellectual class. Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media in 1964. This chapter discusses the rupture caused by Carmelo Bene, whose phonetic deformations of verbal language made sound into a dramatically expressive element. In late 1966, Sipario published a sort of manifesto, Towards a New Theater Conference, which served as a prologue to the watershed Ivrea Conference held the following year. Theater would exist at the center of civil society, in the social present. Political commitment was to be intrinsic to artistic practice, with a tight connection between theater, society, and experimentation. The Sixties also produced a terrain for experimentation between aesthetic codes frequented by dancers, visual artists, architects, and musicians.
