ABSTRACT
The Seventies in theater trace an arc crossing from the explosion of 1968 to the implosion of 1977. In Italy, also in 1971, Luciano Giaccari equipped his Studio 970/2 in Varese with videocameras to record spectacles and performances, while Lola Bonora inaugurated the first institutional center for video art at the museum in the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, which promoted the U-Tape Festival. The relationship of the new with the historical avant-garde was demonstrated by the inclusion of a text by futurist Luigi Russolo, The Noises of Nature and Life, and by a 1933 manifesto on music by futurist founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, La radia. Common to the expansive drive of the arts was a shift of attention from the discrete to the continuous, from the representational to the lived. In the realm of art, Lea Vergine's pathbreaking study of Body Art, published in 1974, exposed Italy to a boundary-crossing new conception of artistic practice.
