ABSTRACT
The New Theater, Meldolesi charged, had grown up spontaneously, outside the institutional structures of training, leaving aside the encounter with specific methods and techniques. New Theater centered discourse about the actor on the gesture-body-word, a platform upon which to build a rapport between diverse cultures, between discipline, and between languages. The reproduction of the voice had effects as profound as the photographic reproduction of the body. The words "collective" and "laboratory" expressed an effective synthesis between experimentation with languages and political-social commitment in a dimension separate from the radicalism of North American experimental theater. A widespread practice of the anti-performative, anti-illusionistic New Theater actor was one that might be termed, in parallel with literature, auto-fiction. Auto-fiction is one of the ways theater in the new millennium has responded to the problem of the drama and the character. Instead of conceding "the impossibility of representation", it highlights the ways in which theater represents.
