«Come una stella cadente, passò sulle loro teste»: genesi e fortuna critica del Programma per un teatro proletario di bambini di Walter Benjamin

Abstract

This essay aims to explore the compositional and editorial genesis of Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis’s Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theatre, highlighting the parallels that, forty years after its composition and reception, shaped its political, cultural, and theatrical outcomes: in the avant-garde season of 1928 and in the somewhat analogous youth protests of 1968 (in Germany and Italy). The reflection will then be guided by the fruitful contradiction inherent in Benjamin’s text between the programmatic and militant approach that should have characterized it in a functionalist sense (toward «the relevance of a radical communism») and its content, which, precisely because of children’s theatre, escapes any ideological discipline. Thus, in the interpretations of some of the pedagogical and theatrical exponents of the 1968 movement (from Elvio Fachinelli to Giuseppe Bartolucci, to the protagonists of animation), an idea of theatre emerges that becomes all the more revolutionary the more it eludes any ideologically preemptive and homogenizing drift, prefiguring, in children’s theatrical gestures, the signs of a new pedagogy and a new theatre always awaiting completion.