MIGRATIONS / MEDIATIONS. Promoting Transcultural Dialogue through Media, Arts and Culture

This special issue – stemmed from a three-year-research program funded by Università Cattolica that provided encounters, reaserch networks and opened perspectives and collaborations –1 starts from the assumption that migration is a historical and natural phenomenon, but its definition is political, linked to the time frame and socio-economic context, and influenced by the media, as the infrastructure that constitutes the world, in material and symbolic ways. Today, both social interaction and cultural reproduction pass through the media. Whether analog or digital, media contribute to the process of construction of reality by people, as well as to the formation of shared imaginaries and social representations. By suggesting to us what and how to think, old and new media – together with a multiplicity of institutions, subjects, sources, tools and communicative practices that coexist rather than replace each other – shape our common sense of the world2. Sometimes fueling fear of the other and legitimizing its criminalization, sometimes stimulating curiosity and empathy3 toward the other and the elsewhere

REIMAGINING NARRATIVES ON MIGRATION The Role of Media, Arts and Culture in Promoting Transcultural Dialogue

In the last decade, the representation strategies and discursive practices enacted by a wide range of state and non-state actors have been presenting irregular migrants crossing borders as an ‘emergency’ to be managed in terms of a wider social, cultural and political ‘crisis’. These media representations of migration and asylum seeking as a ‘crisis’ have outstripped the reality of the situation. In order to go beyond this depoliticised politics, that is based on detached forms of compassionate care and technocratic control, it is essential to enhance an alternative vision of solidarity that is capable of recognizing the other as a human being and unveiling the harsh oppressive conditions of the global and local structures of injustice. Thus, moving away from othering and alarmist, depoliticised representations of the others, the article calls for the need to challenge current narratives and discourses and to create and construct alternative one

The 'travelling invention': new practices of an ancient trade in Pippo Delbono's theatre

This article proposes a \u201cdiffraction reading\u201d that tackles one of the most successful and interesting theatrical experiences of the last decades in Europe, Pippo Delbono\u2019s work, using an evocative comparison with the professional way of life and trade of the Italian Commedia dell\u2019Arte. There is no phylogenetic evolution from the old form, and Delbono\u2019s performances are certainly not among the many contemporary works that found outright inspiration in what has become a\u2018mythical\u2019 genre. Still, the contemporary troupe in its \u201cinexhaustible wandering\u201d, European identity and mutual solidarity between all its members, seems to collect some of the greatest legacies of those comici who were authentic foreigners that provoked and aroused disturbance in the public, attracting, bewildering and fomenting scandal. The comparative approach, centered on the core relationship between historical and contemporary scenes, seems also to give a contribution to the debate on contemporary theatre studies, placing present and past phenomena in a long-term perspective to avoid the risk of focusing solely on the present

Migrations / Mediations . Promoting transcultural dialogue through media, arts and culture

Migration has been a phenomenon throughout human history. However, as a result of economic hardship, conflict and globalization, the number of people now living outside their country of birth is higher than ever. It has also become a key focul point for the media. Even though irregular immigration constitutes only a minor part of the total immigrant population in the EU, it is the one most spectacularized by the media. This over-mediatization of the phenomenon leads to a consistent discrepancy between the perception and the reality of the issue, and this distance has favored the shift of migration issues from ‘low politics’ to ‘high politics’, fueling an emergency management and a securitarian approach.. Media, performing arts and culture can foster innovative practical actions, and also alternative imaginaries on social phenomenon and spaces of collective participation. Indeed, different “liberal” and “applied” arts (film, theatre & performance, photography, crafts, architecture, design, etc.) as well as emerging cross-media forms (interactive and social media, games, street art, circus and performative practices, etc.), have a pivotal role to play in this direction.On this basis, this special issue of Comunicazioni sociali has assembled a diverse range of international scholars to discuss these issues using interdisciplinary methods and transdisciplinary perspectives

La drammaturgia di Dacia Maraini. Paradossi di un teatro di militanza e poesia

Il saggio viene a colmare una lacuna critica ricostruendo l\u2019esperienza drammaturgica di Dacia Maraini attraversi un\u2019ottica che tiene conto della doppia liminarit\ue0 del \u2018teatro al femminile\u2019. Spunti di analisi tratti da una molteplicit\ue0 di testi del suo vasto corpus (da La famiglia normale a Veronica Franco meretrice e scrittora, passando, tra gli altri, per Il manifesto, Dialogo di una prostituta con il suo cliente, I sogni di Clitennestra e il brano scritto per il primo spettacolo del Teatro della Maddalena, Mara, Maria, Marianna) consentono di cogliere la rilevanza di un\u2019esperienza teatrale che, dagli anni Sessanta ad oggi, coniuga impegno artistico e solidariet\ue0 in maniera del tutto originale attraverso una scrittura a ridosso della scena che mai dimentica il valore conoscitivo della parola. Ideologie, istanze sociali e politiche, militanza femminista sono state spesso motori per una scrittura che va poi sempre oltre posizioni rigidamente programmatiche per indagare la complessit\ue0 del reale e interrogarsi sull\u2019animo femminile e umano tout court con uno sguardo consapevole e la convinzione \u2013 come dice lei stessa \u2013 che il teatro sia \uabil luogo delle grandi questioni che mettono in rapporto l\u2019uomo con la trascendenza\ubb. Il saggio propone quindi anche un parallelo tra la drammaturgia della Maraini e il teatro N\u14d, anche biograficamente significativo per l\u2019autrice, che chiarisce la forte presenza di fantasmi su una scena che fa del paradosso e della contraddizione uno dei suoi maggiori punti di forza.This essay fills a critic gap by piecing together Dacia Maraini\u2019s dramatic experience through a perspective which reckons with the double liminality of \u2018female\u2019 theatre. Analysis from passages from a good number of texts from her vast repertoire (from La famiglia normale to Veronica Franco meretrice e scrittora, to, among others, Il manifesto, Dialogo di una prostituta con il suo cliente, I sogni di Clitennestra and the play written for the first performance of the Teatro della Maddalena, Mara, Maria, Marianna) allows us to grasp the significance of a theatrical experience which from the Sixties up to today combines artistic involvement and solidarity in a unique way. She writes very close to the scene but never forgets the value of words. Ideologies, social and political issues, feminist activism have often been the driving force behind her writing. But her work always transcends strict program views in order to investigate the complexity of reality and question the female and human heart with a conscious approach and the belief \u2013 as she says \u2013 that theatre is the \uabplace of great matters connecting mankind with transcendence\ubb. This essay also presents a parallel between Maraini\u2019s dramaturgy and N\u14d theatre, significant also in the author\u2019s biography, explaining the large presence of ghosts on a stage, hers, which has paradox and contradiction among its main points of strength

La vocazione teatrale della scrittura di Natalia Ginzburg

The essay underlines the peculiar elements in the whole Ginzburg\u2019s work that make it inherently theatrical. Even though she came to write dramas only after 1965, all Ginzburg\u2019s writings are always voices of characters. Her novels and even essays go towards mimesis and show a specific attention to bodies and concrete display of feelings, too. The material with which her characters have to do is the same materials actors use for their work: heart and body. Recent readings of her essays and some theatrical productions from her novels seem to confirm the theatrical attitude of her works. The author then focuses on the last, brief, pi\ue8ce written by Ginzburg, Il cormorano, which is also her last creative piece of writing, and is emblematic of her way of looking at the world and life, with a feminine concreteness and an ethic call for responsibility

Scintille dagli esiti memorabili: la collaborazione di Giovanni Testori e Luchino Visconti tra pagina, schermo e scena

Luchino Visconti di Modrone and Giovanni Testori were two great Lombards and two decisive artists, Their personal and creative paths crossed and gave interesting fruits. On the other hand, occasions for frictions and lively controversies were as many as they are notorius. The paper reconstructs the creative work of Testori and Visconti between synergies and conflicts in the creation of three works very different in languages, contexts, occasions, as well as in balances of authorial cooperation such as "Rocco e i suoi fratelli" , "Arialda" and "La monaca di Monza". Delving into generative opportunities and at the same time criticalities and limitations of these collaborations, and dwelling on the analysis of the documents surrounding the never fully clarified affair of the breakup of the relationship between the two artists, the contribution also attempts to shed light on how the collaboration, even through the experience of its failure, contributed to the lines of development of individual poetics and in particular to the shift of Testori's idea of theatre with "il Ventre del teatro" and the pieces of the Seventie

Oggi... le comiche!

Il saggio indaga la presenza della comicità al femminile sulla scena pubblica (segnatamente teatrale e televisiva) negli ultimi decenni, individuandone un forte trend di crescita e un successo a cui non sembra però corrispondere una adeguata considerazione del fenomeno negli studi, in particolare proprio quelli di genere o women studies, che sembrano diffidare da un territorio, come quello del comico che pure risulta efficaci nel promuovere, valorizzare e diffondere un punto di vita femminil

Theatre: inside and out (1945-1978

The essay provides a summary of the development of theater and live performance in Italy between 1945 and 1978, dividing it into three periods: "On stage. 1945-1959: towards stability and the norm\u201d; "Wings and dressing rooms. 1959-1967: \u201chow\u201d, \u201cwhere\u201d and \u201cwhy\u201d we must make theatre", "Outside the theatres. 1968-1978: bodies in revolution . Examining the lines of the "teatro di regia" , "nuovo teatro", "animazione" , between names of personalities and historical productions, the essay tries to identify the fundamental joints and themes of an extremely fertile and intense period whose path , difficult to order in a unified development, has led the theater to rethink and transform itself into a plurality of realities and experiences