ABSTRACT
In Italy, a G8 summit meeting held in Genoa in July 2001 turned violent when the forces of order attacked protesters, resulting in the death of young Carlo Giuliani, who became a martyr for anti-globalization activists. For Italian theater, the new millennium opened with the question posed by Societas Raffaello Sanzio concerning tragedy: What form, if any, can tragedy take today? With the passing of the era of the neo-avant-garde, a significant element in the theater of the new millennium developed a "dramaturgy of diffuse bodies" without setting hierarchies between the organic and the inorganic or between the real and the virtual. The performer and the objects used in performance had equal status with sound and visual elements. New technologies produced a tangible "liveness", as in seminal pieces by Studio Azzurro and Giorgio Barberio Corsetti in which there was no distinction between the human body, the sound body, and the chromatic-luminous body.
