ABSTRACT
The years from 1978 to 1985 — the final years, in short, of Julian Beck’s life and of his artistic and theoretical production — represent a significant but little-studied moment in his artistic journey. Beck came, in fact, from the experience of street theatre and direct political agitation that had characterized the 1970s, and he began to ask new questions, both regarding artistic creation and theoretical production. The latter is collected in Theandric, a volume of writings, notes, ideas, and theatrical and political visions that Beck wrote during those seven years and left unfinished due to his death in 1985. In 1992 the book was published posthumously, and it constitutes a territory of extraordinary importance to traverse in order to understand how the visionary thought of its author was evolving. There is a dominant thematic motif in the book, concerning the question that Beck continuously poses to himself about what a revolutionary strategy could and should be when the insurrectional impetus of the 1970s has already faded. In Beck’s words there is no indulgence in nostalgia, nor a flat repetition of the visionary positions of the two preceding decades. Rather, there is a lucid analysis of the drift of the times, experienced with both suffering and clarity, which leads him to pose the question of theatre in terms of a non-conservative return to the opera. Beck theorizes an aesthetic of resistance and survival that signals the traits of the new dialectic established between libertarian vision and social reality.
BIOGRAFIA
Lorenzo Mango insegna Storia del Teatro moderno e contemporaneo presso l’Università di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’. Ha scritto Federico Tiezzi. Storia di un regista di teatro (2025), Edward Gordon Craig (Carocci 2021), Il Novecento del teatro. Una storia (Carocci 2019), L’officina teorica di Edward Gordon Craig, (Titivillus, 2015), La scoperta di nuovi sensi. Il Tattilismo futurista (CUE Press, 2015), Il principe costante di Calderón de la Barca/Słowacki per Jerzy Grotowski (ETS, 2008), La scrittura scenica. Un codice e le sue pratiche nel teatro del Novecento (Bulzoni, 2003), Teatro di poesia. Saggio su Federico Tiezzi (Bulzoni, 1994).
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