"Anti-manual" seminar 2020 focuses on actresses. We have chosen to examine a crucial period, the theater between the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, when many of the greatest theater artists, including internationally, are women. In this period some women are even comical leaders of their companies from an artistic and economic point of view. Under this theme another also flows: how to narrate the theater?
The history of theater, compared to the other arts, must be based on the "lack of the object". A theatrical event from the past leaves traces in the documents, but cannot be analyzed directly. At the same time, it does not have the weight the authority of history.
How can we make the past alive? What details to choose, how to keep the listener's attention awake, without losing the philological rigor? On the first day it will be five interventions, followed by questions and comments from a "listening group" of scholars of this and of other universities. Students and doctoral students will participate in the discussion. Each intervention will tell a story of actresses, trying to make people understand why it can be considered exemplary for reflection on our theme. We will talk about the peculiarity of female work in the theater, the reactions of the public, the body on stage, and female power.
The second day of the seminar is designed for a smaller group, with more possibilities for discussion. It will be dedicated to an analysis of the interventions proposed in the first part from the point of view of the composition and assembly process, but above all from that of research.
The first day speakers will discuss these individual steps by showing the documents and explaining the methods. Specific problems, that is to say relating to the documents of the single topic, and transversal, that is recurrent and shareable, related to the practice of research and symptomatic of an approach to studies will be brought to light. Also in this case, the speeches will be taken up, commented on, expanded and discussed by the listening group, as well as by the students and doctoral students.
If the aim of the seminar is to narrate the theater through a story, this part of the work is dedicated to the material weaving of that story: to its construction made of tiny and macroscopic elements, of single details and weaves, of document selection and the search for a lexicon capable of remaining close to the practice, both that of theater and that of research.
7-8 maggio 2020