Dionysus in 69: Richard Schechner tra teoria e prassi della performance

Abstract

The paper aims to review the Schechner’s play Dionysus in 69. An event that, although the critics (and the director himself) have historicized as a simple epiphenomenon of American radical theater, however shows that it already possesses those foundations and principles that, in his post-theatrical analisys, Schechner will identify with the broad spectrum of performance, with particular reference to the concepts of ‘actual’, the ‘restoration of behavior’, ‘transportation and transformation’. So we will do an exercise in refocusing that reverses the direction of research, bringing it back (historically and conceptually) from the macro system of the living languages (human and animal) to the micro-system of the play (actor-spectator), from the ‘future’ of ritual to his ‘past’, finding analogies that encourage a cyclical recovery of the origin, of the starting point.