Mantichora n° 3

RIVISTA ITALIANA DI PERFORMANCE STUDIES - PEER REVIEWED ANNUALE DEL CENTRO STUDI UNIVERSITEATRALI DELL’UNIVERSITA’ DI MESSINA

N. 03

mantichora 2013

dicembre

www.mantichora.it

Redazione c/o Centro Studi Internazionale UniversiTeatrali, via Consolare Pompea, 98167 - Messina - Reg. Trib. Me 9/10 - ISSN 2240.5380 - Ance: E211987

Hugo Rheinhold - Affe mit Schädel - 1893

www.mantichora.it Rivista Italiana annuale di Performance Studies peer-reviewed del Centro Studi Internazionale UniversiTeatrali dell’Università degli Studi di Messina n. 3 dicembre 2013 Reg. Trib. Me 9/10 - ISSN 2240-5380 - Ance: E211987 Redazione: c/o Centro Studi UniversiTeatrali di Villa Pace, via Consolare Pompea, 98167, Messina – tel. 090 3147032 Direttore Editoriale: Dario Tomasello Direttore Responsabile: Luciano Fiorino

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Comitato di Redazione: Alessia Cervini, Carmela Cutu-

N. 03 dicembre 2013

mantichora

RIVISTA ITALIANA DI PERFORMANCE STUDIES - PEER REVIEWED ANNUALE DEL CENTRO STUDI UNIVERSITEATRALI DELL’UNIVERSITA’ DI MESSINA

Editoriale

Interviste (a cura di CARMEN CUTUGNO)

DARIO TOMASELLO Il “Tra” ............................................................. p. 01

Saggi ALESSANDRA ANASTASI L’ordito del bello. Trame bio-etologiche dell’evoluzione del senso estetico ..................................... p. 03

Richard Schechner’s Performance Studies ......................................... p. 135 A “specific perspective” from a “Performance studies international” voice.

An interview with Maaike Bleeker ........:::......... p. 148 Rebecca Schneider’s Performance studies remains ............................ p. 160

PIETRO SAITTA Performance dell’abitare: Rom a Mazara del Vallo …............................................... p. 25 CARMELA CUTUGNO TDR, The drama review: a script for the “gestation” of Performance studies ...................................... p. 57 JOSELLA CALANTROPO, MICHELE FANNI, FRANCESCA LATEANA, CARLOTTA MENCHICCHI, VERLENE MESQUITA, ANNA SALUTATO The great refusal. Mirrored semblances in Vatican ............................................................... p. 62 PERESSINI Voguing: examples of performance through art, gender and identity

Da Laas Gaal al John Lennon Wall Homo sapiens tra tecnologie e nuove dimensioni rituali ................................................................. p. 125 2

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DARIO TOMASELLO

IL “TRA” Today, as never before, an ethological strategy seems able to provide the elements needed for a broader analysis of human skills in relation to the non-human animal world. The temptation and the risk to find clear points of contacts among these entities, offer again the chance to proceed with a phylogenetic understanding of performing arts.

Non-human animals would act without the inhibitions of humans, and appear free from human sentiments of shame, embarrassment, and so on.

In spite of all this, though, remains the human doubt (perhaps, too human!) that the inquire into the ritualized animal behavior is not any longer easily distinguishable from the rituals of Homo sapiens.

In fact, are we so certain that, beyond the limits of the problems of self-awareness in the non-human animals, a Hamletchimpanzee or a bonobo are not already asking the crucial questions needed to put into crisis the outcomes of an anthropocentric reflection on performance?

A partire dalla riflessione originaria sulla performance, la pervasività di questa prospettiva epistemologica si è configurata come efficace medium: tra discipline diverse, tra una realtà sempre più fluida e imprendibile e le sue rappresentazioni impervie, tra modernità e postmodernità. La lezione di Victor Turner sulla liminalità, su quel momento di passaggio, quel “tra” necessario che solo un sapere performativo e processuale sarebbe in grado di intercettare, è oggi più viva che mai.

Ecco, allora, che Mantichora ricomincia da tre.

Questo terzo numero, non a caso (grazie alla presenza preziosa di Carmela Cutugno), con una prima serie di interviste ad alcuni tra i massimi esponenti dei Performance studies (Richard Schechner in testa) vuole sondare la caratura fruttuosa di questo retaggio, proponendosi l’ambizioso compito di esporsi pubblicamente come rivista italiana di Performance Studies.

Tra i nostri compiti (soprattutto in un futuro prossimo), stante la collocazione delle attività scientifiche del Centro Internazionale di Studi sulle Arti Performative nel Dipartimento di Scienze Cognitive, della Formazione e degli Studi Culturali dell’Università di Messina, riteniamo ineludibile il superamento, che i Performance Studies tra l’altro pretendono, dell’opzionalità coatta tra una campitura culturalista e una campitura naturalista.

Anche a tal riguardo, Richard Schechner aveva illustrato, a suo tempo, la necessità di un’indagine a tutto campo sulle dinamiche analogiche e omologiche tra animali umani e non umani. Ancora una volta, un confine, un “tra”, da esaminare performativamente.

Una strategia etologica sembra oggi più che mai in grado di creare le coordinate per una disamina di ampio respiro delle human skills a confronto con il mondo animale non umano. La tentazione e il rischio di intercettare vistosi punti di contatto rilancia

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l’opportunità di una lettura filogenetica delle performing arts.

Gli animali non umani agirebbero senza le reticenze e l’impasse tipiche dell’animale uomo; sembrerebbero al riparo dai tormenti e dagli imbarazzi umani: «[…] anche se ci fosse un Edipo-gorilla che si domanda angosciato se deve lasciare la sua giunglaCorinto per evitare l’orribile sorte che l’attende, sarebbe tutt’altra cosa dal personaggio sofocleo» (R. Schechner, Magnitudini della Performance, Roma, Bulzoni, 1999, p. 228).

Nonostante tutto, però, rimane il dubbio, umano (forse troppo umano), che l’indagine del comportamento animale ritualizzato non sia più così facilmente distinguibile, in una dizione capziosa, dal rituale dell’Homo sapiens.

Siamo così sicuri, infatti, che, al di là dei limiti ineffabili del problema di un’autocoscienza negli animali non umani, un Amleto-scimpanzé o bonobo non stia già ponendoci le domande decisive per mettere definitivamente in crisi i risultati di una riflessione antropocentrica sulla performance?

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ALESSANDRA ANASTASI

L’ORDITO DEL BELLO. TRAME BIO-ETOLOGICHE DELL’EVOLUZIONE DEL SENSO ESTETICO One of the most admired characteristics of bird behavior is song but there are many examples of discrimination of aesthetic stimuli by animals. A wide range of animals, from fish to primates, successfully learn discrimination of music, while preference for particular music is rather rare in animals, although songbirds prefer some musical stimuli to others. Some animals, such as chimpanzees and elephants, draw and paint, however the animals do not “enjoy” their products and the products do not have a reinforcing property to other conspecifics. This constitutes the clear difference between human art and the art-like behavior of animals.

Introduzione L’adozione di una prospettiva evoluzionistica in relazione all’estetica si accompagna, inevitabilmente, al problema dell’origine dell’arte stessa e alla possibilità di datare le prime produzioni artistiche dell’uomo. Gli inizi delle arti creative, almeno nell’accezione semantica attuale, probabilmente resteranno ignoti, ma ciò che non possiamo certo sottovalutare è che esse siano frutto di un’esplosione creativa giunta al culmine di una coevoluzione genetica e culturale che ebbe inizio in Europa circa 350.000 anni fa (Wilson 2012; trad.it 2013). Per capire la storia naturale dell’uomo, ben si presta a mio parere, il tipico approccio delle scienze cognitive biologicamente orientate che consentono di attuare una ricostruzione mediante i dati di natura paleo-antropologica piuttosto che etologica, delle capacità cognitive umane e animali. Sarà mio intento in questo saggio, provare a dimostrare come l’estetica, in tutte le sue declinazioni, sia frutto della continuità evolutiva tra specie umana e specie animale, sebbene, tale dimensione, nella nostra specie, abbia prodotto un profondo mutamento nelle partiture che scandiscono gli accordi tra individuo e ambiente.

Come ha più volte ribadito il naturalista Wilson (1998), l’arte migliore è quella più fedele alle nostre origini biologiche. Certo, mi rendo conto che un simile approccio potrebbe non attirare grandi simpatie da parte dei principali addetti ai lavori, ma non vedendo alcun vantaggio nel portare avanti superate dicotomie tra natura e cultura, ritengo che sia possibile indagare tutto ciò che il senso comune ha etichettato come “cultura” con rigore scientifico.

Proverò di seguito a spiegare la mia idea, procedendo a piccoli passi, e sposando una prospettiva darwiniana rivista alla luce dei nuovi dati della biologia evoluzionistica. L’estetica, a lungo considerata come una branca della filosofia, ha

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subito una sua evoluzione a partire dal 1876 quando Von Fechner, fondando il campo di sperimentazione estetica, sviluppò i primi metodi di misurazione psicofisica ancora oggi utilizzati nello studio della “sensazione”. Si trattava, di fatti, del primo approccio sperimentale alla percezione della bellezza.

Una seconda svolta avviene nel 1976 con Berlyne e con la nascita dell’estetica comportamentale con la quale si assiste all’introduzione di quattro metodi per l’indagine sperimentale in estetica, vale a dire, il giudizio verbale, la psicofisica, l’analisi statistica e la misurazione del comportamento esplorativo. Secondo Berlyne (1976), il meccanismo alla base della fruizione dell’arte è il rinforzo sensoriale, il che comporta un’apertura verso l’utilizzo di dati sperimentali provenienti dall’etologia, dalla primatologia, dalla zoologia, nello studio dell’estetica.

La terza fase è quella che porta alla nascita della neuroestetica per opera di Semir Zeki (1999; trad.it 2003). L’approccio neuroscientifico utilizzato da Zeki (1999; trad.it 2003) ha come obiettivo quello di estrarre il concetto di bello ricorrendo ad una dettagliata analisi dei meccanismi cerebrali coinvolti nella fase di percezione estetica.

L’uso delle brain-imaging ha permesso di constatare come durante la percezione estetica di un’opera d’arte piuttosto che di un’immagine, vi sia un’attivazione della corteccia cingolata anteriore e della corteccia orbito-frontale (Kawabata e Zeki 2004).

La prospettiva della neuroestetica per quanto innovativa, produce, tuttavia, un netto stacco con ciò che le arti creative rappresentano in toto. Per quanto sia stimolante svelare i retroscena cognitivi e cerebrali che caratterizzano il processo di elaborazione dell’estetica, probabilmente, l’approccio di Zeki (1999; trad.it 2003; 2004) può apparire, per certi versi, riduzionista in quanto l’attenzione verte, principalmente, sulla modalità di fruizione dell’arte e non di produzione. Infatti, “costringere” l’arte ad una mera produzione di meccanismi automatici che coinvolgono l’empatia, piuttosto che l’emozione, genera una sorta di negazione dell’atto della performance stessa che occupa un ruolo del tutto centrale nella fase di creazione di una qualsivoglia forma di arte. Ovviamente, non è di questo avviso Zeki (1999; trad.it 2003), quando afferma che il mondo che noi percepiamo altro non è che una proiezione delle nostre strutture e funzioni mentali, ovvero dei nostri stati interiori, ed implica sempre uno sforzo attivo da parte dell’osservatore.

L’ultima tappa di questa breve ricostruzione, è quella che culmina nella definizione di estetica darwiniana, secondo cui l’estetica è frutto di un adattamento all’ambiente in cui gli esseri umani si sono evoluti (Voland e Grammer 2003; Dutton 2009). Proprio a quest’ultimo aspetto sarà prestata una maggiore attenzione.

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The sense of beauty e la selezione sessuale Elemento di punta dell’estetica evoluzionistica, il senso del bello, sembra attingere le sue origini nella ben nota teoria della selezione sessuale di Darwin (1871; trad. it. 2011). L’attenzione, come è facile immaginare, si concentra sul ruolo della femmina e della “scelta estetica” che essa compirà. Tuttavia, viene spontaneo chiedersi se la “bellezza” sia davvero negli occhi dell’animale che guarda, oppure, gli orpelli di cui i maschi sono stati dotati dalla selezione naturale, hanno solo una funzione di equipaggiamento genetico? (Cronin 1991; trad.it 1995). La logica che si cela nel principio della selezione sessuale, mostra chiaramente come molte delle esuberanze estetiche presenti nel regno animale hanno come obiettivo l’aumento della fitness. Si potrebbe quindi ritenere che i meccanismi di scelta hanno fondamento in ciò che l’etologo Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989; trad.it 1993), definisce “pregiudizi speciespecifici della percezione con rilevanza estetica”. Proprio come accade nel regno animale, le impressioni istintive giocano un chiaro ruolo nella percezione estetica anche nell’essere umano, in cui la prospettiva culturale evidenzia come la scelta, oltre a rispondere ad una questione istintiva è legata ad una rappresentazione ideale dell’uomo o donna ideale.

Di questa questione, si interessò anche Lorenz (1943), che sottolineò la tendenza dell’essere umano a rispecchiare la propria idea del bello anche negli oggetti inanimati. Un tipico esempio è quello delle case, costruite, a suo dire, proprio come fossero volti umani con occhi (le finestre), sopracciglia (cornicioni) e bocca (il portone). Si intravede, quindi, quella che potremmo definire una iperbole antropomorfica, a cui anche il mondo del cinema ha dato le fattezze e le sembianze più diverse. La mia memoria, ad esempio, non ha mai dimenticato la particolare costruzione dell’ambientazione a cui ricorse Pupi Avati ne La casa dalle finestre che ridono (1976).

Questa sorta di selezione estetica a cui animali umani e non sono sottoposti, è, dunque, un processo basilare della percezione che nel corso dell’evoluzione ha assunto un chiaro valore adattativo. Ovviamente, in questo contesto, è bene sottolineare che il sense of beauty, così come la selezione sessuale, possono essere vittime di equivoci dati dall’idea che la preferenza estetica espressa dall’animale piuttosto che dal sapiens, sia praticamente a costo zero. Le selezione estetica è frutto di una molteplicità di pressioni selettive che non possono non essere dispendiose; come nota lo stesso Darwin (1871; trad.it 2011) orientare la scelta estetica non implica solamente l’avere una percezione fenotipica dei caratteri posseduti dall’ipotetico partner, bisogna infatti tener presente che essa è mossa da una spinta biologica, probabilmente ancorata al corredo genetico di ogni individuo. Su questa

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interpretazione, ben si presta la declinazione di scelta estetica fornita da Voland (2003) secondo cui gli ornamenti animali rimandano a strutture genetiche vantaggiose dalle quali le femmine sono attratte. I sostenitori dell’arte come adattamento biologico sostengono l’ipotesi che la percezione del bello sia uno strumento utile per l’incremento della fitness e le prove, a tal uopo, sono numerose.

L’esempio classico è quello della ruota del pavone (Pavo cristatus) che rende perfettamente l’idea di come le femmine di molte specie animali abbiano un senso estetico, e che preferiscono alcuni tratti perché incontrano il loro gusto.

In breve, ci si accorge che se la femmina del pavone preferisce sempre accoppiarsi con maschi che hanno code più lunghe e colorate, allora le code dei pavoni, a causa della spinta di quella che potremmo definire “selezione estetica” diventano sempre più lunghe e vistose. Per estensione, i maschi di ogni specie si sarebbero quindi evolutivi sotto la pressione di un qualche “capriccio estetico” promosso dalla femmina (cfr. Falzone 2012).

In tal caso, la percezione del bello porta con sé un connubio di aspetti che protendono per l’esaltazione di tutte quelle componenti (colore, simmetria, etc.) che detteranno il giudizio estetico; d’altra parte, è bene non dimenticare l’esigenza di esaltare gli elementi di diversità (Miller 2000; trad.it 2002). In questa grande esibizione a cui il pavone maschio è chiamato a partecipare, solo l’individuo dotato di una sovrabbondanza di colori e forme nella coda, sarà in grado di soddisfare il “capriccio estetico” della femmina che è, certamente, costoso in termini evolutivi, ma che, se ci pensiamo, rappresenta l’equivalente del nostro “anello di fidanzamento” il quale, descrive, non solo una consuetudine tipica di molte culture, ma, da una prospettiva malinowskiana (in Lévi-Strauss 1947; trad. it 1984), scandisce parte delle dinamiche relative ai meccanismi di prestazione e contro-prestazione atti, anche nella specie umana, ad elaborare e modulare rapporti ed interazioni tra individui, compresa, naturalmente, la riproduzione sessuale.

La teoria nota come “Runway Selection” o Teoria della Selezione galoppante (Fisher 1958), spiega a tal proposito come mediante un processo evolutivo in tre fasi si sarebbe giunti alla scelta, da parte della femmina, del tratto che avrebbe stabilito il vantaggio evolutivo in termini di sopravvivenza per il maschio oltre che per la prole.

Nella fase iniziale le femmine, selezionano il carattere (allungamento della coda), il cui risultato immediato si produce nel miglioramento della fitness e nella diffusione del carattere selezionato. Durante la seconda fase i maschi portatori del nuovo carattere, sviluppano un doppio vantaggio: il primo, generato per mezzo della selezione naturale, riguarda la funzionalità della coda; il secondo, frutto invece della selezione sessuale, permette di avere migliori chances riproduttive. Nella terza fase, infine, si assiste a ciò che si definisce “disequilibrio della concatenazione” (Fisher

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1958). In sostanza, il vantaggio acquisito dal possedere una coda lunga prende il sopravvento sulla stessa sopravvivenza messa continuamente a repentaglio dal fatto che l’ingombro della coda rende, certamente, più difficile fuggire ad un predatore (Miller 2000; trad.it 2002).

Lo sviluppo, dunque, di un carattere così costoso rappresenta, secondo la teoria di Fisher (1958), il prodotto inutile di un processo nato inizialmente in termini di utilità.

Il meccanismo evolutivo responsabile della selezione sessuale, per mezzo di una sorta di training effect in cui carattere sessuale e preferenza estetica sono sullo stesso programma evolutivo, genera ciò che Fisher (1925) definisce runaway process (processo a cascata), in cui il gusto femminile e l’orpello maschile si rafforzano reciprocamente finché non si giunge a una sorta di contro selezione. Seguendo questa logica, i geni per il carattere e la loro preferenza si sarebbero diffusi e fissati nella specie (Fisher 1930).

Di fatti, la selezione sessuale che per milioni di anni ha “abbellito” e allungato le code dei pavoni, una volta esaurita la sua spinta propulsiva ha impedito alle code di allungarsi ulteriormente e questo anche per ovvi motivi strutturali. Tutti i maschi dispongono, ormai, di code vistose e lunghe allo stesso modo. Si potrebbe dire che il processo di arricchimento estetico ormai giunto al culmine della sua espressività, ha comportato anche un cambiamento dei criteri di scelta utilizzati dalla femmina. La preferenza, infatti, è oggi dettata sia dalle componenti morfologiche che comportamentali, che essendo ancora soggette a variabilità, sono facilmente discriminabili (Miller 2000; trad.it 2002).

Il dispendio energetico che comporta l’avere alcuni ornamenti, viene spiegato in termini di handicap, da Zahavi (1997). Secondo ciò che egli definisce Principio della selezione dell’handicap, i costi della selezione sessuale hanno una caratteristica adattativa e non disadattativa. La teoria di Zahavi (1997) ha il pregio di fornire una spiegazione per tutti quei comportamenti in apparenza eccentrici o svantaggiosi, possibili da osservare nel regno animale. È il caso del pellicano bianco (Pelecanus onocrotalus), che durante il periodo di accoppiamento sviluppa una grossa protuberanza sulla fronte, che di fatto, pur ostacolando il campo visivo durante l’attività di pesca, è un chiaro segnale di disponibilità sessuale (Zahavi 1997).

Seguendo questa visione, diventa semplice comprendere perché tante specie di uccelli si prodighino in attività apparentemente futili: l’uccello giardiniere pettofulvo (Chlamydera cerviniventris) costruisce piccole opere d’arte che fungono da rifugio amoroso per quelle femmine difficili da conquistare; i pellicani rosa (Phoenicopterus roseus) per intensificare il colore delle penne applicano sul proprio piumaggio dei carotenoidi, pigmenti colorati prodotti da una ghiandola, l’uropigio, posta sopra la

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coda che produce un liquido oleoso che l’animale stende sulle proprie penne come fosse una sorta di make-up (Amat et al 2011).

L’esperienza estetica, come definita da Dutton (2009), coinvolge la percezione visiva, umana e non, e induce l’organismo a cercare attivamente nell’ambiente delle regolarità che gli consentono di sopravvivere. Una tale abilità non può che essere frutto dell’evoluzione; mediante essa è possibile esplorare l’ambiente alla ricerca di “indizi visivi” (colori, forme, configurazioni) che indicano cibo, piuttosto che pericoli e possibili partner. È plausibile, quindi, ritenere che molti patterns di colori e forme che caratterizzano gli ornamenti, come la coda di pavone, abbiano influito sul modo in cui sono successivamente comparse le arti visive nell’essere umano. Ciò supporterebbe l’idea che la percezione della bellezza possa avere radici genetiche e quindi sia emersa mediante i meccanismi di selezione naturale e sessuale (Dutton 2009).

Il contributo dell’evoluzione nell’origine dell’arte Uno dei problemi principali dell’estetica è definire cosa sia realmente la bellezza.

Impresa non semplice a quanto pare. È un concetto che è definibile sia oggettivamente che fisicamente, e ovviamente una simile descrizione dipende dagli individui e dalla cultura di appartenenza. Anche se si tratta di un concetto socialmente costruito, sembra che vi siano alcune caratteristiche comuni che costituiscono, quanto meno, una definizione di base.

Quando Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989; trad.it 1993) introduce l’idea del “pregiudizio estetico” indica tre diversi livelli per spiegare l’ipotetico connubio tra estetica ed etologia umana e animale. Un pregiudizio estetico condiviso con i vertebrati superiori, secondo cui la nostra percezione del bello avviene nel medesimo modo in cui avviene negli altri animali. Un pregiudizio specie-specifico dell’uomo, intenso nel senso che alcune delle peculiarità presenti in natura come il canto degli uccelli o la coda di pavone, appaiono ai nostri occhi come esempi di bellezza. E, infine, un pregiudizio specificamente culturale mediante il quale emerge la tendenza dell’essere umano ad antropomorfizzare l’ambiente che lo circonda: case, giardini, espressioni animali, sono solo alcuni degli esempi in cui si delinea la tendenza ad esaltare i lineamenti tipici della cultura umana (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989; trad.it 1993).

Quando si parla di arte in un contesto etologico, non dobbiamo intendere l’azione creativa in sé bensì il fenomeno comportamentale che caratterizza tutte le specie e non solo una stretta minoranza di soggetti che comunemente definiamo artisti. Tutte le società umane producono arte ma per quanto concerne la storia e l’origine di tale

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comportamento, è opportuno considerare non solo il valore selettivo ma anche quello culturale. Strumenti come pietre scheggiate o statue della fertilità come la “La Venere di Willendorf” sono i primi segni che mostrano l’esistenza di un pensiero creativo ma non l’inizio dell’arte stessa che, con ogni probabilità, fa il suo esordio con l’evoluzione degli ominidi nel pre-paleolitico (Dissanayake 1980). Nel senso più antropologico del termine, l’arte appare chiaramente come una manifestazione della cultura umana, ma allo stesso tempo non si può sottovalutare il suo valore selettivo.

In quanto adattamento biologico essa è stata indispensabile per rinsaldare i legami sociali (Dissanayake 2000), ma a quando risale davvero la comparsa dell’arte?

In generale, ciò che gli archeologici definiscono “esplosione creativa” (cfr.

Pfeiffer 1982) sembra risalire a circa 35.000 anni fa nel Paleolitico superiore, con l’arrivo di Homo sapiens in Europa. Il ritrovamento delle grotte di Lascaux nel 1940, è una delle più grandi testimonianze di arte creativa. Lungo le pareti della grotta è rappresentata una grande quantità di animali che appaiono suddivisi per tipologie: cavalli, tori e bisonti, sembrano rientrare nella categoria degli animali dominanti; ci sono anche cervi, capre, renne, un grande felino e un rinoceronte (vedi Fig.1).

Fig.1: Pitture rupestri nella grotta di Lascaux, Francia meridionale. © Sisse Brimberg

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La grandezza delle figure varia dai 50-50 cm fino ai 5 m circa nel caso del toro.

Compaiono, inoltre, alcune tipologie di graffiti che pur apparendo del tutto incomprensibili pare abbiano un forte valore simbolico. Al senso estetico si accompagna la capacità di rappresentazione simbolica a partire da ciò che rientra nell’orizzonte conoscitivo dell’uomo (Facchini 1993).

In realtà, manifestazioni simboliche precedenti al Paleolitico superiore, sono state di recente rinvenute in Africa, nella Grotta dei Piccioni presso Taloralt (Marocco): collane fatte di conchiglie perforate (Nassarius gibbosolus), coperte di ocra datate 82.000 anni fa sono solo alcuni degli esempi di manifestazione simbolica (Bouzzouggar et al 2007) che è possibile collocare ben prima dell’esplosione creativa di cui si è fatto cenno in precedenza. Per quanto la mente propriamente umana è definibile tale dal momento in cui le forme simboliche fanno la loro comparsa, Tattersall (1998), non attribuisce a specie ominidi diverse dalla nostra, come i neandertaliani, la capacità di usare simboli e tantomeno quella di pianificare un futuro non immediato. Una visione, questa, che l’antropologo ha mitigato negli anni successivi, ritenendo che i neandertaliani avessero un’attività cognitiva complessa, ma non processi cognitivi simbolici come l’uomo moderno (Tattersall 2009). Dotato di un certa organizzazione di gruppo oltre che di una raffinata tecnica di lavorazione della pietra utile per la caccia, il neanderthal fu in grado di sopravvivere a periodi complessi oltre che ad un ambiente ostile, tuttavia, per Tattersall, fu proprio l’assenza di un pensiero simbolico che lo rese troppo debole nella competizione evolutiva con Homo sapiens. Le recentissime scoperte circa l’intenzionalità del neanderthal nel seppellire i propri conspecifici (Rendu et al 2013), e il ritrovamento nella Grotta di Fiumane (provincia di Verona) di una conchiglia della specie Aspa marginata tipica del mar Mediterraneo e dell’Oceano Atlantico su cui è possibile notare delle incisioni non casuali sulla superfice (Peresani at al 2013), spingono, in realtà, nella direzione opposta al pensiero diffuso da Tattersall negli ultimi anni.

In tal senso, la lettura dataci da Leroi-Gourhan (1964; trad.it 1965) appare illuminante. Di fatti, anche se i primi sapiens erano anatomicamente molto simili all’uomo moderno, non vi sono resti che testimonino la presenza di attività simboliche come la sepoltura dei morti o le pitture rupestri. La fioritura artistica delle grotte europee non ha antecedenti noti (Leroi-Gourhan 1983). L’arte dunque, avrebbe fatto la su comparsa in Europa circa 32.000 anni fa o forse anche prima, ed è fiorita nei millenni successivi. Secondo l’archeologo e antropologo francese, il motivo che spinse i nostri antenati alla produzione di arte, era il fatto di vivere in piccoli gruppi e quindi l’avere creato dei legami aveva portato, in seguito, alla comparsa tanto dell’arte mobiliare (frammenti o piccoli oggetti d’arte) che di quella parietale (disegni sulle pareti delle caverne o sassi), (Aczel 2009; trad.it 2010).

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A questo punto, pur rimanendo ignoti i messaggi e i contenuti che i nostri antenati hanno provato a rappresentare attraverso le pitture rupestri di Lascaux, la spiegazione che ai miei occhi appare più plausibile è che l’arte rupestre piuttosto che la musica, la danza, le sepolture ornamentali, che hanno accompagnato la vita sociale dei nostri antenati, siano una chiara manifestazione non solo di una capacità cognitiva complessa ma di una sorta di intelligenza simbolica che ha raggiunto il massimo della sua espressione con la comparsa del linguaggio verbale. Ciononostante, una parte dell’arte potrebbe essere stata semplicemente una forma di espressione estetica (cfr.

Halverson 1987).

Non sembra dello stesso avviso lo psicologo evoluzionista Humphrey (1998), quando avanza l’ipotesi che l’arte rupestre sia frutto di una mente premoderna e con scarso interesse per la comunicazione. La sua congettura sostanzialmente supportata dalla somiglianza tra i dipinti animali di Lascaux e i disegni di una giovane autistica, Nadia, (vedi Fig. 2 e 3), lo porta a ritenere che vi fosse una completa mancanza di linguaggio fino a 20.000 anni fa. Ciò appare improbabile soprattutto alla luce dei dati di natura morfologica piuttosto che paleoantropologica e paleoneurologica (cfr.

Lieberman 1975), oltre alle non poche ipotesi selezioniste sull’origine del linguaggio (cfr. Deacon 1997), che illustrano chiaramente quali siano le principali tappe che hanno portato all’evoluzione del linguaggio.

Appare sempre più probabile che l’esplosione dell’arte sia parte dell’avanzamento della capacità di comunicazione. L’attitudine alla rappresentazione definita da Deacon (1997) representational stance, è la chiara dimostrazione di come la comparsa di un linguaggio simbolico abbia sostanzialmente aperto le porte ad una nuova attività cognitiva basata sulle competenze tecniche e creative, la coesione collettiva e una prima forma di linguaggio non verbale che da quel momento, hanno dato vita a ciò che oggi è comunemente definita arte.

Simili caratteristiche, frutto di un adattamento biologico identificano il sapiens come l’unica specie a possedere un simile requisito. Questa nuova architettura cognitiva è, a questo punto, non solo correlata al possedimento di un cervello più grande e a un particolare apparato fonatorio, ma identifica la possibilità di usare un nuovo sistema di rappresentazione della realtà (Donald 1991; trad. it 2004).

Il fatto che l’espressione estetica assolva diverse funzioni nelle società preistoriche non spiega tuttavia, perché essa abbia fatto la sua comparsa: per quale motivo i nostri antenati hanno sviluppato una simile facoltà? La risposta implica non poche discussioni date le diverse correnti di pensiero, ma ciò su cui, in linea generale, tutti si trovano d’accordo, è che alla comparsa dell’arte non è coinciso alcun cambiamento fisico distinguibile nei nostri antenati.

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Fig. 2: Riproduzione dei cavalli delle grotte di Lascaux. Tratto da Humphrey 1998.

Fig.3: Disegno dei cavalli fatti da Nadia a 3 anni e 5 mesi. Tratto da Humphrey 1998.

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L’Arte visiva e creativa nel mondo animale In ambito etologico l’arte assume un chiaro aspetto comunicativo; è uno strumento per l’invio di un messaggio ad un conspecifico (o ad altre specie in alcuni casi). In tal senso, il messaggio non deve necessariamente essere attraente, ciò che davvero importa è che esso sia biologicamente rilevante. Ovviamente, quando si parla di arte in campo etologico non dobbiamo intendere l’azione creativa e artistica in sé bensì il comportamento messo in atto dalla specie interessata. La sociobiologia, al riguardo, ha chiarito il concetto di bellezza nel mondo animale individuando un chiaro valore genotipico in tutte quei segnali estetici che il maschio invia alla femmina. Ancora una volta si ricorre ai meccanismi di selezione sessuale per spiegare la percezione del bello negli animali non umani. Ma siamo davvero certi che accada tutto in maniera così meccanica? Di recente, la tesi della biologa Rougharden (2012), ha sconfessato alcuni dei pilastri darwiniani su cui è fondata la selezione sessuale individuando nella selezione sociale, il meccanismo cardine attorno a cui ruotano alcune delle scelte compiute in natura. In poche parole, la femmina non è necessariamente attratta da quelle doti che, apparendo più vistose, sono state fino ad oggi interpretate come portatori di buoni geni, ma prende in considerazione le capacità del maschio in attività come la cooperazione piuttosto che la cura della prole o il suo ruolo all’interno di una gerarchia sociale (Rougharden 2012; cfr. Pennisi 2014).

Il piacere provocato dalla bellezza appare, a questo punto, non più vincolato dal solo desiderio sessuale. Questo dimostra chiaramente come la scelta estetica compiuta dalle specie oltre a non essere dettata dall’idea di “buoni geni”, è stata spesso influenzata da una visione antropomorfica di bellezza; in realtà, quanto appare bello ai nostri occhi non lo è anche per la femmina di una qualsiasi specie animale.

Allo stesso modo, quanto appare poco gradevole ai nostri occhi, può essere attrattivo agli occhi della femmina; si pensi, ad esempio, al barbiglio dei tacchini il cui aspetto appare, ai nostri occhi, poco “armonioso”, diviene una componente attraente perché correlata alla possibilità di avere meno parassiti (Buchholz 1995). È ragionevole, dunque, parlare di un diverso “gusto estetico” tra l’uomo e gli animali non umani, ma in termini di pura percezione visiva e di bellezza, cosa accade? Esistono degli elementi naturali o artificiali, che spingono alcune specie animali ad esprimere una sorta di preferenza estetica? L’approccio cognitivo e comparativo a questa argomento ha trovato fertili linee di ricerca ricorrendo all’uso del metodo sperimentale, del condizionamento operante e dello studio del comportamento animale (Watanabe 2013).

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Rensch (1957;1958) si è soffermato, ad esempio, sulla descrizione della preferenza per forme, regole e modelli simmetrici nelle scimmie cappuccine (vedi anche Anderson et al 2005 come ulteriore conferma); Wilson e Goldman-Rakic (1994) hanno misurato l’attività visiva di alcuni macaco rhesus mentre osservavano diverse riviste constatando la loro preferenza verso i volti e le immagini.

Nella convinzione che lo studio della mente e del cervello animale possa aiutare a comprendere il funzionamento di tutte le menti, compresa quella umana (Vallortigara 2005), sono state prese in considerazione alcune tipologie di esperienze soggettive, come le illusioni ottiche, tra specie animali filogeneticamente distanti. Caso esemplare si è mostrato essere il completamento amodale con figure come il “triangolo di Kanitzsa”. A tal proposito, si è potuto esaminare come il riconoscimento e la percezione amodale (capacità percettiva innata che implica l’attivazione di sfere sensoriali diverse), sono comuni a mammiferi, uccelli, pesci e insetti, il che dimostra che una stessa esperienza fenomenologica è “implementata” da strutture fisiologiche fortemente diverse persino a livello di citoarchitettura cerebrale (Vallortigara 2000).

Da questo punto di vista, appaiono ancora più illuminanti le ricerche sperimentali condotte sui piccioni (Columba livia) da Watanabe e colleghi (1995), in cui si mostrò la capacità di riconoscimento degli oggetti mediante la loro rappresentazione figurativa, oltre all’abilità di distinguere tra i dipinti di Claude Monet e Pablo Picasso.

Addestrati a riconoscere un quadro impressionista da uno cubista, i piccioni, durante la seconda fase dell’esperimento, oltre a mostrarsi abili nel discriminare lo stile in quadri di Monet e Picasso mai visti durante la prima fase, furono in grado di operare estensioni categoriali, associando ai pittori ormai loro noti, quadri di Renoir (impressionista) e Braque (cubista), (Watanabe et al 1995).

Come spiegare una tale capacità? Simili osservazioni non si interpretano se non ricorrendo ad una sorta di analogia nell’elaborazione percettiva che appare, a questo punto, un tratto esclusivamente umano; i piccioni, probabilmente, usano una strategia che potremmo definire bottom-up e che implica, secondo Watanabe (2011), l’applicazione di una diversa strategia per ogni differente compito di discriminazione.

L’abilità di creare arte si incrocia, certamente, con capacità complesse come cognizione, emozione, sentimento, tutte abilità che da sempre contraddistinguono l’idea che solo l’uomo sia in grado di produrre opere d’arte. Ma, come abbiamo più volte ribadito, il concetto di arte sembra trovare una sua declinazione anche nel regno animale. Welsch (2004) ha descritto due tappe evolutive che hanno interessato l’evoluzione dell’estetica in natura: una prima fase in cui il tipo di bellezza non è estetica e può essere osservata nelle forme e nei colori di coralli o anemoni di mare.

Si tratta di un tipo di bellezza generata da quei processi chimici che permettono, ad esempio. la creazione di colori. La seconda fase è invece nota come pro-estetica e si

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osserva nelle forme e nei colori di fiori e frutta, che hanno la capacità di comunicare con le altre specie ad esempio gli insetti per l’impollinazione (Welsch 2004).

La comparazione etologica consente, da sempre, di identificare tutti quegli aspetti con i quali, il più delle volte, si tenta di imbastire un possibile confronto con l’essere umano. La possibilità di ritrovare analogie piuttosto che omologie con gli altri animali rappresenta una delle tante possibilità per comprendere il cammino filogenetico e ontogenetico dell’uomo moderno.

I principali studi al riguardo sembra abbiano avuto inizio negli anni 30 ad opera di Kellogg e Kellogg (1933), le cui ricerche hanno privilegiato il confronto tra la capacità creativa degli scimpanzè (Pan troglodytes) e quella dei bambini. La pretesa avanzata da questa ricerca ha dato inizio a quel filone di studi, in seguito rivelatosi fallimentare, secondo cui sarebbe stato possibile far apprendere il linguaggio verbale ai primati non umani. Al di là delle innumerevoli critiche, fu ovviamente tanta la delusione nello scoprire che lo scimpanzè Gua, cresciuto con il figlio della famiglia Kellogg, pur apprendendo più velocemente non era stato in grado di sviluppare alcuna forma di linguaggio. Tuttavia, emerse la capacità di Gua di disegnare, una volta istruito, e a farlo in completa spontaneità, al contrario del bambino i cui disegni non erano frutto di una capacità imitativa (Kellogg e Kellogg 1933).

La spontaneità degli scimpanzè nel disegnare o dipingere, senza alcun bisogno di uno stimolo rinforzo è stata di recente documentata anche da Tanaka e colleghi (2003), e appare una conferma di quanto già Morris nel 1963 aveva definito azione autoremunerativa, in cui, in sostanza, la produzione dell’arte da parte dello scimpanzè rappresenta di per sé una ricompensa. È anche vero però, che lo stesso Morris (1963) documentò casi in cui l’animale, una volta finito di disegnare strappava il foglio forse a dimostrazione del fatto che non necessariamente si può parlare di rinforzo in un simile prodotto.

Negli stessi anni, la primatologa Nadia Koths (1935) che potremmo definire una “Jane Goodall” in bianco e nero, studiò le doti grafiche dello scimpanzè Joni mediante l’analisi e la comparazione con i disegni del figlio. Pur notando la capacità di apprendere l’arte del disegno constatò che lo scimpanzè Joni non era in grado di raggiungere il livello del bambino che, già all’età di 4 anni, iniziava a produrre immagini figurative.

Qualche anno più tardi, l’etologo inglese Desmond Morris (1963), si prodigò ad analizzare le tendenze artistiche dello scimpanzè Congo (Fig.4). Con l’intento di comprendere se la capacità creativa dei primati non umani producesse in loro una qualche forma di piacere o godimento per quanto realizzato, osservò come l’impulso creativo di Congo, in realtà, si affievoliva con il raggiungimento dell’età adulta ovvero, quando gli impulsi sociali e fisici si fecero man mano più presenti. L’etologo

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giunse alla conclusione che: “… solo le giovani scimmie possono tendere a comportarsi in questo modo. Esse possono graffire segni sulla terra o sugli alberi ma, con l’avvento dell’età adulta, queste cose vengono messe da parte e dimenticate di fronte ai più immediati problemi della sopravvivenza” (Morris 1963).

I casi di animali dediti all’arte non si fermano ai soli cugini primati, Levy (1992) documentò, ad esempio, la capacità dei delfini di tracciare forme come cerchi o la lettera T dopo aver osservato il proprio addestratore farlo su un’altra tela, mostrando, quasi certamente, la loro già nota dote mimica. Non mancano, in questo panorama artistico, i dipinti realizzati da cavalli, maiali, cani o elefanti (si consiglia per una visione accurata www.elephantart.com).

Fig.4: Dipinto realizzato da Congo. Fonte www.koimano.com

Quando, nel 1957, venne inaugurata all’Istituto di arte contemporanea di Londra, senza non poche polemiche, la prima mostra di quadri realizzati da primati tra cui quelli di Congo, il biologo Julian Huxley affermò: “Uno dei grandi misteri dell’evoluzione umana è l’improvvisa esplosione di un’arte di alta qualità nel paleolitico superiore. Ciò diventa più comprensibile se i nostri antenati scimmieschi hanno avuto queste primitive potenzialità artistiche a cui si è aggiunta in seguito la capacità peculiare dell’uomo, quella di creare simboli” (Cit. in Morris 1963).

L’entusiasmo dato dal possibile connubio tra arte creativa e biologia svanisce ben presto. Oggi, come allora, sembra ragionevole addestrare animali dotati di capacità motorie e cognitive tali da renderli in grado di eseguire un simile compito ma, ancora una volta, non possiamo non tenere in considerazione la piena autonomia funzionale, artistica e creativa di cui il sapiens si può fregiare. La possibilità poi, di servirsi dell’arte per la rappresentazione di uno stato interiore determina a mio dire, il

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maggior esempio di espressione artistica, che, resa possibile dalla capacità di possedere un linguaggio simbolico consente di utilizzare l’arte come una sorta di narrazione. Si pensi ai dipinti delle grotte di Lascaux o degli aborigeni australiani in cui vengono ritratte scene di caccia.

Per quanto sia pensabile parlare di un precursore dell’arte negli animali non umani, il peso che la nostra evoluzione culturale ha giocato nel creare una peculiare prospettiva dell’estetica ha reso l’arte oltre che una prerogativa unicamente umana, una facoltà socialmente costruita.

La musica delle parole Se, come affermato in precedenza, l’esplosione dell’arte sulla scena evolutiva ha costituito un avanzamento nella comunicazione, non possiamo non prendere in considerazione il ruolo occupato dalla musica nella costruzione della vita sociale, e non solo, dei nostri antenati.

Seppur considerata priva di vantaggi evolutivi da alcuni autori (cfr. Pinker 1997; Sperber 1996), la comparsa della musica è testimoniata dal ritrovamento di strumenti musicali; alcuni di essi, sono tra i più antichi manufatti che siano mai stati rinvenuti.

Si pensi al flauto d’osso scoperto in Slovenia presso le grotte di Hohle Fels, ricavato dal femore di un orso europeo e risalente a circa 40.000 anni fa (Conard et al 2009).

Lungo la catena di eventi che hanno contraddistinto l’evoluzione umana, la comparsa della musica non è passata di certo inosservata. Spiegata inizialmente nei termini di ciò che oggi definiamo estetica darwiniana e quindi, come un puro meccanismo a cui gli animali non umani ricorrono in fase di corteggiamento, essa può, a mio parere, trovare una diversa connotazione funzionale che non la riduce a un mero processo della selezione sessuale. Provando a sganciare la musica dalla connotazione culturale, sociale ed emotiva, appare possibile scoprire una sua diversa funzionalità che per certi aspetti le danno, probabilmente, un peso importante nello scenario evolutivo del linguaggio.

Nel 1961, William Thorpe afferma che “per quanto ampia sia la spaccatura che separa il linguaggio animale da quello umano, non c’è una sola caratteristica che possa essere usata come infallibile criterio di distinzione tra il linguaggio degli uccelli e quello degli uomini” (Thorpe 1961:11). La considerazione di Thorpe apre le porte a quel filone di studi che, mediante la comparazione etologica, indagano la natura del linguaggio umano e animale. Che peculiari e raffinate forme di comunicazione siano presenti nel regno animale sotto forma di canti piuttosto che di vocalizzazioni o danze è, ormai, un dato acclarato. Per questo motivo, sarebbe più

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opportuno, definire il linguaggio umano in termini di specie-specificità piuttosto che di unicità. Vantando, infatti, una conformazione del proprio organo fonatorio con una laringe permanentemente bassa, il sapiens gode della possibilità di combinare diversi suoni vocalici (Fitch 2002). Allo stesso modo, le vocalizzazioni dei primati non umani variano a seconda delle peculiarità strutturali di ogni specie: è evidente, infatti, che ogni specie animale possiede un suo “corredo fonatorio” che viene applicato a contesti ecologico-sociali differenti; si pensi alla funzione sociale della song di Indri (Indri Indri), il più grande lemure del Madagascar, costituita da specifiche informazioni contestuali (Maretti et al 2010).

Di recente, lo studio di Nishimura e colleghi (2012) si è mostrato, in tal senso, esplicativo. Sebbene possa apparire curiosa la sua messa in atto, il progetto realizzato dall’equipe giapponese ha previsto, l’inalazione all’interno di una camera contenente aria arricchita di elio, da parte di una ignara femmina di gibbone dalle mani bianche (Hylobates lar). L’elio, come è noto, ha la capacità di alterare le frequenze della voce motivo per cui, su un primate, le cui emissioni di frequenza durante il canto toccano picchi molto alti e intesi, vista la necessità di comunicare con i propri conspecifici, diventa un valido strumento di laboratorio per lo studio di simili frequenze. La possibilità di poter analizzare l’emissione del canto del gibbone e, quindi, le sue frequenze, ha consentito di notare come l’esecuzione delle vocalizzazioni di questi primati non umani richiamino la tecnica di esecuzione dei cantanti lirici (Nishimura et al 2012). Una simile osservazione spinge come ovvio, verso l’ipotesi che parlare di unicità per spiegare il linguaggio umano non è affatto convincente. Di fatto, sembrerebbe che il sapiens condivida con i primati non umani, non solo la conformazione del proprio organo fonatorio, ma, anche la capacità di manipolare i suoni.

L’uso della comparazione etologica permette non solo di individuare differenze anatomiche e derivazioni filogenetiche di tratti morfologici centrali e periferici che consentono la produzione vocale umana (Fitch 2010) ma anche di comprendere perché sia possibile definirla in termini di vincoli biologici, in riferimento alla nostra vocalità specie-specifica. Dal mio punto di vista, le similarità nella comunicazione fra primati umani e non umani suggeriscono l’esistenza di profonde radici evolutive riscontrabili nelle componenti prosodiche/musicali del parlato. La musica, quindi, come un vero e proprio linguaggio si è manifestata, prima, sotto forma di espressioni vocali (canti e vocalizzazioni) negli animali non umani e, solo dopo la comparsa di quelle strutture biologiche (tratti periferici e centrali) a cui si è ancorato il linguaggio in Homo sapiens, si è “installata” nei primi ominidi, garantendo loro una prima forma di comunicazione più o meno armoniosa.

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Secondo altre prospettive si potrebbe, invece, protendere verso una sorta di esattazione della musica data proprio dalla nostra “propensione estetica” e che sarebbe sfociata in un protolinguaggio musicale frutto, secondo Falk (2009), delle cure parentali. Madre e figlio, sviluppano un codice musicale che ha un chiaro significato di interazione e che viene presentato dall’antropologa come universale linguistico data la presenza del medesimo legame tra le popolazioni e le culture del mondo.

Quello con le “ninnananne” sembrerebbe essere solo il primo contatto con la musica e con la sua capacità di creare coesione sociale; madre e figlio sviluppano un ricco codice musicale che, oltre ad essere interpretabile come innata sensibilità alla musica, rappresenta un chiaro significato di interazione (Bunt e Pavlicevic 2001).

Sebbene il canto e la musica possano essere visti come una forma di comunicazione, ovviamente, il loro ruolo, in termini di collante sociale, non può essere ignorato. A tal proposito si mostra interessante la prospettiva delineata nel suo Homo Aestheticus da Dissanayake (1992) secondo cui, cantante e ascoltatore sono uniti da una “coscienza comune”, una sorta di modello comune di pensiero, atteggiamento ed emozione.

Nel corso dell’evoluzione il canto si è, quindi, distinto per essere una componente universale che viene utilizzata da diverse specie animali per creare e mantenere legami parentali e sociali. Optando per la possibilità che anche gli ominidi, attraverso il canto, abbiano sviluppato la possibilità di mantenere legami sociali, potremmo ritenere che le prime vocalizzazioni siano state oggetto della selezione naturale che ha consentito, una volta rese disponibili le adeguate strutture periferiche e centrali, di modificare tali canti con l’aggiunta di parole.

Fare musica incoraggia l’aggregazione ed essendo gli esseri umani animali sociali è molto probabile che essa abbia svolto un ruolo evolutivamente determinante nel promuovere sintonia intra-sociale (Sapolsky 1999). Se la caratteristica più scontata del produrre musica è generare attività di gruppo è bene anche considerarla quando viene eseguita da pochi individui. In tal caso, ad essere rilevante non è tanto il numero dei soggetti che la produce quanto il contesto in cui viene a crearsi questa coesione sociale: cerimonie religiose, danze, canto comunitario.

In tutte le culture umane, l’arte si è evoluta per ricoprire anche ruoli non propriamente estetici, si pensi ai lamenti funebri sull’isola di Tikopa (Pacifico orientale), in cui i cantanti avendo un legame di parentela con il defunto ritengono che verranno ricompensati per i loro sforzi (Layton 1991). Oppure, ancora, la musica può essere usata anche per promuovere la cooperazione di gruppo (Drewal e Drewal 1983), canalizzare l’aggressività mediante l’esecuzione di veri e propri duelli canori (nith songs) usati per risolvere alcuni rancori o controversie (Hoebel 1968.) Sebbene simili comportamenti rituali non trovino un vero e proprio riscontro nel panorama

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etologico-musicale, certamente, non si può sottovalutare la funzione comunicativa che il canto offre in termini di scambio di informazioni tra conspecifici. Allo stesso tempo, però, è bene non dimenticare come in natura, anche se non musicalmente vincolate, esistano forme di cooperazione (cfr. Trivers 1971) piuttosto che rituali di preparazione alla caccia documentati dalla primatologa Goodall (1986) al fine di creare alleanze cooperative.

La musica, così come l’arte, in tutte le sue forme, appare, da queste descrizioni, come un elemento essenziale della nostra vita sociale e, proprio come accade con il linguaggio verbale, consente di creare accordi sociali. Sebbene, tipicamente, l’arte venga intesa nella sua cornice puramente estetica, non possiamo esimerci dal considerare anche il suo ruolo di comunicatore. Un approccio evoluzionistico a tale questione può offrire numerosi spunti su cui riflettere e al contempo consente di discutere e delineare la nostra attitudine all’estetica, secondo un metodo interdisciplinare che appare inevitabile per comprendere la storia evolutiva umana.

L’emergere di comportamenti estetici nei nostri antenati, potrebbe, di fatto, rappresentare la loro necessità di comunicare; la pittura rupestre e il protolinguaggio musicale rappresentano, a tutti gli effetti, una prima forma di comunicazione a cui il linguaggio verbale ha fatto seguito, dopo la comparsa di adeguate strutture biologiche.

La diffusione dell’arte in tutte le società umane e la sua capacità di fungere da collante sociale sono la chiara dimostrazione di come essa sia stata destinata ad un uso oggi per lo più estetico proprio dal momento in cui il linguaggio, con la sua immane espressività, ha fatto la sua comparsa nella vita dell’uomo moderno.

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Fitch, W.T. (2002), Comparative vocal production and the Evolution of Speech: Reinterpreting the discent of the larinx, in Wray, A. (Eds), The Transition to Language, Oxford University Press, Oxford; Goodall, J., (1986), The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge; Halverson, J. (1987), Art for Art’s Sake in the Paleolithic, «Current Anthropology», 28: 63-89; Hoebel, E.A., (1968), The Law of Primitive Man, Atheneum, New York; Humphrey, N. (1998), Cave Art, Autism, and the Evolution of the Human Mind, «Cambridge Archaeological Journal», 8 (2): 165-191; Kawabata, H. & Zeki, S. (2004), Neural correlates of beauty, «Journal of Neurophysiology» 91:1699-1705; Kellogg, W.N. & Kellogg, L.A. (1933), The ape and child, McGrraw Hill, New York, in Watanabe S. & Kuczaj S., (Eds), Emotions of Animals and Humans. Comparative Perspective, Springer, 2013; Kohts, N. (1935), Infant Ape and Human child, Scientific memories of the Museum Darwininun, Layton, R. (1991), The Anthropology of Art, Cambridge University Press, Cambridgen trad.it., Antropologia dell’arte, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1983; Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1964), Le geste et la parole. Tecnique et language, Albine Michel, Paris, trad.it., Il gesto e la parola. Tecnica e linguaggio, Einaudi, Torino, 1965; Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1983), Le fil du temps, Fayard, Paris, trad.it., Il filo del tempo. Etnologia e preistoria, La Nuova Italia, Scandicci, 1983; Levy, B.A. (1992), Psychoaesthetics dolphin project, «J Am Art Ther Assoc», 9:193-197; Lévi-Strauss, C. (1947), Les structures de la parenté, Press Universitaires de France, Paris, trad.it., Le strutture elementari della parentela, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1984; Lieberman, Ph. (1975), On the origins of language. An Introduction to the Evolution of Human Speech, Macmillan, New York; Lorenz, K. (1943), Die angeborenen Formen moglicher Erfahrung, «Z. Tierpychol», 5:235 – 409, in Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (Eds), Etologia Umana. Le basi biologiche e culturali del comportamento, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 1993; Maretti, G., Sorrentino, V., Finomana, A., Gamba, M., & Giacoma, C., (2010), Not just a pretty song: an overview of the vocal repertoire of Indri indri, «Journal of Anthropological Sciences», 88: 151-165; Miller, G. (2000), The Mating Mind, Doubleday, New York, trad.it, Uomini, donne e code di pavone: la selezione sessuale e l’evoluzione della natura umana, Einaudi, Torino, 2002; Morris, D (1963), Biologia dell’arte. Uno studio sul comportamento artistico delle scimmie nei suoi rapporti con l’arte umana, Bompiani, Milano; Nishimura, T., Koda, H., Tokuda, I.T., Oyakawa, C., Nihonmatsu, T., & Masataka, N., (2012), Soprano singing in gibbons, « American Journal of Physical Anthropology», 149 (3): 347-355; Kohts, N. (1935), Infant Ape and Human child, Scientific memories of the Museum Darwininun, Moscow, in De Wall, F. (Eds), Infant chimpanzee and human child: A classic 1935 Comparative Study of Ape Emotions and Intelligence, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002; Pennisi, A. (2014), L’errore di Platone. Bioetica e diritti civili al tempo della crisi, Il Mulino, Bologna;

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Peresani, M., Vanhaeren, M., Quaggiotto, E., Queffelec, A., & d’Errico, F., (2013), An Ochered Fossil Marine Shell From the Mousterian of Fumane Cave, Italy, «PLOSOne», 8, 7; Pfeiffer, J.E. (1982), The creative explosion: An Inquiry into the Origin of Art and Religion, Harper & Row, New York; Pinker, S. (1997), How the mind works, W.W. Norton & Company, New York; Rendu, W., Beauval, C., Crevecoeur, I., Bayle, P., Balzeau, A., Bismuth, T., Bourguignon. L., Delfour, G., Faivre, J.P., Lacrampe-Cuyaubere, F., Tavormina, C., Todisco, D., Turq, P., & Maureille, B., (2013), Evidence supporting an intentional Neandertal burial at La Chapelle-auxSaints, «PNAS»; Rensch, B. (1957), Asthetische Faktoren bei Farb- und Formbevorzugungen von Affen, «Z Tierpsychol», 14: 71-99, in Watanabe S. & Kuczaj S., (Eds), Emotions of Animals and Humans.

Comparative Perspective, Springer, 2013; Rensch, B. (1958), Die Wirksomkeit aesthetischer Factoren bei Wirbeltieren, «Z Tierpsychol» 15:447–461, in Watanabe S. & Kuczaj S., (Eds), Emotions of Animals and Humans. Comparative Perspective, Springer, 2013; Roughgarden, J. (2012), The social selection alternative to sexual selection, «Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological sciences», 367 (1600): 2294-2303; Sapolsky, R., (1999), Hormonal Correlates of Personality and Social Contexts: From Non-human to Human Primates, in Panter-Brick C., & Worthman C. (Eds), Hormones, Health and Behavior, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999; Sperber, D. (1996), Explaining culture, Blackwell, Oxford; Tattersall, I. (2009), La sistematica dei neandertaliani e le loro strategie di sussistenza, in Facchini, F. & Belcastro M.G., (Eds), La lunga storia del Neandertal. Biologia e Comportamento, Jaca Books, Milano, 2009; Thorpe, W.H. (1961), Birdsong: The Biology of Vocal Communication and Expression in Birds, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Trivers, R.L., (1971), The evolution of reciprocal altruism, «Quaraterly Review of Biology», 46: 35-57; Vallortigara, G. (2000), Altre menti. Lo studio comparato della cognizione animale, Il Mulino, Bologna; Vallortigara, G. (2005), Cervello di gallina. Visite (guidate) tra etologia e neuroscienze, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino; Voland, E. & Grammer, K. (2003), Evolutionary Aesthetics, Springer; Voland, E. (2003), Aesthetic Preferences in The World of Artifacts. Adaptations for the Evaluation of Honest Signals? in Voland E. & Grammer K. (Eds), Evolutionary Aesthetics, Springer, 2003; Von Fechner, G.T. (1876), Vorschule der Aesthetik, Breitkopf & Hartel, Leipzig, in Watanabe S. & Kuczaj S., (Eds), Emotions of Animals and Humans. Comparative Perspective, Springer, 2013; Watanabe, S. (2011), Discrimination of painting style and beauty: pigeons use different strategies for different tasks, «Animal Cognition», 14 (6):797–808; Watanabe, S. (2013), Animal Aesthetics from the Perspective of Comparative Cognition, in Watanabe S. & Kuczaj S., (Eds), Emotions of Animals and Humans. Comparative Perspective, Springer, 2013;

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Watanabe, S., Wakita, M., & Sakamoto, J., (1995), Discrimination of Monet and Picasso in pigeons, «J Exp Anal Behav», 63:165–174; Welsch, W. (2004), Animal Aesthetics, «Contemporary Aesthetics», vol. 2; Wilson, E.O. (1998), Consilience. The unity of knowledge, Vintage Books, New York; Wilson, E.O. (2012), The social Conquest of Earth, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, trad.it., La conquista sociale della terra, Raffaello Cortina Editore, Milano, 2013; Wilson, F.A. & Goldman-Rakic, P.S. (1994), Viewing preferences of rhesus monkeys related to memory for complex pictures, colours and faces, «Behav Brain Res», 60:79–89; Zahavi, A. (1997), The Handicap Principle, Oxford University Press, Oxford, trad.it., Il principio dell’Handicap. La logica della comunicazione animale, Einaudi, Torino, 1997; Zeki, S. (1999), Inner vision: an exploration of art and the brain, Oxford University Press, London, trad.it., La visione dall’interno. Arte e Cervello, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2003;

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PIETRO SAITTA

PERFORMANCE DELL’ABITARE: ROM A MAZARA DEL VALLO (UN’ETNOGRAFIA) The present essay investigates the settlement process of a Roma community in the Sicilian Town of Mazara del Vallo. It suggests that, in spite of the high levels of discrimination, the Roma community became part of the national underclass, and that the integration within this class takes place through a set of informal practices involving the community and the State. The author describes the trajectory followed by this community in the aftermath of the Kosovo war of the 1990s, and reflects on some elements apt to generate a theory of action concerning the relation between individuals and the State.

Keywords: Roma, Sicily, action theory, State, immigration Parole chiave: Rom, Sicilia, teoria dell’azione, Stato, immigrazione

È dalla festa che forse occorre iniziare, da quando uomini, donne e bambini rom arrivano ordinati sulla scena, divisi per gruppi. La musica è già lì ad attenderli, ipnotica e a volume altissimo come sempre. I tavoli sono già imbanditi e pronti ad accogliere gli ospiti. Antipasti a base di salumi, formaggio e sardine sono serviti sui tavoli e attendono di essere assaggiati con circospezione, dacché abbuffarsi non è dato. Nessun ordine è previsto e gli invitati si accomodano come meglio credono, guidati solo dal rapporto che li unisce ai commensali o dal livore che li separa.

Neanche il tempo di sedersi e accendere una sigaretta che iniziano le danze. Gruppi dapprima piccoli e poi sempre più estesi di sole donne iniziano a ballare. Gli abiti tradizionali “turchi” e “albanesi”, bianchi o rossi, sempre vaporosissimi, si succedono alle trasparenze di lucidi abiti lunghi, di foggia “italiana”, a volte con ampi spacchi.

Danzatrici di ogni età invadono lo spazio; non importa che quest’ultimo sia adeguato e che i tavoli sistemati a guisa di rettangolo creino una sorta di pista all’interno della quale ballare. Quel che occorre è danzare ed esse, determinatissime, sanno sempre come fare a ricavare lo spazio necessario. Le immancabili birre fredde vengono presto servite da camerieri improvvisati vestiti con un grembiule bianco. Gli astanti, uomini e donne assetati per il caldo torrido, assumono avidi le bevande, iniziando il primo di un infinito giro che terminerà solo quattordici ore dopo. I bambini stanno ancora seduti in grembo alle mamme, ma mostrano chiari segni di irrequietezza. Da qui a poco saranno fuori, nel giardino e nella strada antistante la sala da ricevimento, a far capriole ed evoluzioni circensi travestite da breakdance dinanzi a un pubblico di bambini acrobati, per lo più vestiti in stile vagamente hip hop, che li applaudirà ed esorterà a far numeri sempre più spericolati o difficili. Adolescenti annoiati lasciano la sala da pranzo e si radunano in piccoli gruppi in aree appartate del giardino. A

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seconda dell’età, è ormai tempo per loro di fumare una sigaretta lontani dalla vista dei genitori, rollare una canna oppure fare la corte a una ragazza della città accanto.

Qualcuno va in strada a portare una birra a un cugino che non è stato invitato in ragione di qualche tradimento e che, riluttante all’idea di essere stato estromesso, ascolta da fuori i rumori della festa. Dentro, intanto, la musica si fa sempre più ipnotica e sofferta. Il cantante è già sommerso di moneta sonante. Gli spettatori gli infilano banconote da dieci, venti e cinquanta euro nelle tasche della camicia e nel bavero del colletto; oppure gliele appiccicano sulla fronte dopo averle leccate con un ampio gesto circolare. Intanto lui canta in onore del mecenate di turno e racconta del padre lasciato a invecchiare lontano e solo, in Germania o in Macedonia. Narra di quanto si era uniti un tempo e di come si è divisi ora, dei soldi che vanno e che vengono, ma che mai dovrebbero consentire a due fratelli di separarsi e a uno zio di scordarsi del nipote. Qualche anziana donna piange ballando, bevendo a rapidi sorsi dalla bottiglia di birra che tiene stretta in mano insieme ad una sigaretta. È ormai da un po’ che la festa va avanti. La cena è già giunta alla frutta, ma non importa. Un nuovo piatto di gulasch fumante sta infatti per essere servito, e poi di nuovo wurstel e carne arrosto a volontà. La serata, in fondo, è appena iniziata e tanto vale ricominciare a mangiare, bere, ballare, piangere e litigare. Due uomini in fondo alla sala stanno iniziando a discutere animosamente. Non si sente bene ciò che si dicono, ma è chiaro che da qui a poco si azzufferanno. I parenti li raggiungono, li calmano e li separano, imponendogli di non rovinare la festa. I congiunti hanno ragione, però devono riconoscere che non si può mica chiedere al cantante di suonare troppe canzoni e appiccicargli ogni volta decine di euro sulla fronte sudata e pensare di farla franca. Alla fine i parenti annuiscono comprensivi, ma convincono il parente alterato a far finta di niente, che la festa è bella e pure la pace. Non mancherà tempo per discutere, domani. Gli uomini sempre più numerosi nella pista improvvisata ballano ora insieme alle donne ed eseguono passi di danza balcanica, ruotando in circolo. Ben presto si fa l’ora di contribuire alle spese del banchetto. Il cantante si prende una pausa e la musica si fa bassa sullo sfondo. Il maestro di cerimonia passa lungo i tavoli riscuotendo il tributo degli ospiti. È un momento importante e tutti aguzzano le orecchie aspettando di vedere quanto stiano offrendo Tizio e Caio: “con tutto l’oro di cui è caricata sua moglie, saprà fare una ricca offerta oppure è un miserabile come tutti gli altri?”, sembra che pensino mentre guardano con curiosità per nulla dissimulata la mossa del prossimo donatore. Questi sa di essere osservato e assume un’aria orgogliosa mentre l’incaricato della riscossione annuncia di avere appena ricevuto cento euro e uno scrivano annota su un quadernetto la cifra ottenuta. Finito con gli oboli è di nuovo tempo di danzare. Il cantante ritorna sulla scena e altra birra è versata. Domani è un altro giorno, adesso l’oblio.

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*** Mazara del Vallo è uno di quei centri della Sicilia sud-occidentale troppo piccoli per essere chiamati città e troppo grandi per essere considerati paesi. Della città, tuttavia, possiede l’estensione, la diversificazione delle attività economiche, la pluralità delle cerchie sociali e dei tipi umani. Del paese ha invece quella certa lentezza che ne ammanta la vita, la preminenza di certi luoghi tradizionali di socialità (alcune gelaterie, la piazza principale o il lungomare) e, soprattutto, la difficoltà di essere totalmente anonimi o non ascrivibili a gruppi e a persone che costituiscono in qualche modo la geografia locale delle classi e dei tipi (i professionisti, gli “splendidi”, gli “sballati”, i tunisini o gli slavi). In un certo senso, Mazara del Vallo è un luogo “tipico”, esemplare di un certo modello di sviluppo urbano meridionale. È una cittadina che dispone di un centro storico antico, di origini arabe, che nel tempo è andato degradandosi a causa di fenomeni innanzitutto naturali e poi sociali. Una successione di terremoti in decenni differenti ma poco distanti tra loro, l’emigrazione di molti degli abitanti tradizionali verso il nord o l’estero, l’intensità dello sviluppo edilizio nelle contigue aree rurali a partire dalla fine degli anni settanta, la concentrazione di stranieri nelle vecchie case danneggiate e nei vicoli tortuosi che caratterizzano il cuore del centro storico, hanno decretato, almeno sino all’inizio degli anni duemila, un vistoso decadimento di una parte rilevante della città vecchia. Nel corso del tempo questo dedalo di vie ha finito col caratterizzarsi in termini di nazionalità e di classe. Non che gli italiani se ne siano mai davvero andati da esso, benché in parecchi lo abbiano fatto, spaventati dalla reputazione del quartiere e dalla insicurezza che lo ha caratterizzato per un breve periodo intorno agli anni ottanta (soprattutto a causa del traffico di droghe pesanti, di ubriachi molesti e degli scippi).

Tuttavia, mentre l’area andava accogliendo un numero sempre crescente di nordafricani, aumentava anche il novero di italiani che, in possesso delle risorse minime necessarie, desideravano andare ad abitare nei nuovi quartieri sorti in periferia o in quelli che andavano rinnovandosi lungo le principali vie di accesso alla città, più omogenei in termini sociali. Tra gli attori nazionali, dunque, i soggetti che decidevano di restare nell’area storica erano più spesso quelli che godevano di redditi più bassi, spesso troppo vecchi per andarsene, e i titolari di poche attività commerciali solide e al contempo radicate nel territorio (i quali non erano necessariamente residenti nel quartiere). Questa situazione ha innescato un circolo, vizioso per alcuni ma positivo per altri, che ha determinato il bassissimo costo degli affitti (meno di cento euro al mese per appartamenti dal metraggio spesso ragguardevole, all’inizio degli anni duemila), l’abbandono di un numero consistente di vecchie case, la conseguente inagibilità di un numero significativo di edifici nel

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quartiere e la progressiva riduzione di servizi pubblici come ad esempio la raccolta dei rifiuti o le disinfestazioni. Il degrado dell’area ha dunque determinato la possibilità per un crescente numero di lavoratori stranieri di accedere alla casa (talvolta alla proprietà di essa) a prezzi contenutissimi, innalzando la disponibilità di risparmio, sia pure in presenza di salari ridotti (in media, di sette o ottocento euro per quelli impegnati in attività regolari). Proprio questa caratterizzazione dello spazio urbano concorre a rendere Mazara del Vallo una meta desiderabile per un numero consistente di stranieri, che, malgrado la precarietà occupazionale e i bassi salari, continuano a risiedervi dalla fine degli anni sessanta, in barba a qualsiasi considerazione razionalista e a logiche interpretative fondate sui fattori di spinta e, soprattutto, di richiamo.

Non doveva tuttavia essere così nella seconda metà degli anni settanta, quando il processo appena descritto iniziava a delinearsi e questa costa della Sicilia appariva la terra promessa per un numero sempre crescente di lavoratori nord-africani, attratti dalla prospettiva di un facile impiego nelle flotte di pescherecci presenti nell’area e nelle campagne circostanti. La regolazione dell’immigrazione era pressoché inesistente in quell’epoca e gli immigrati, soprattutto tunisini, arrivavano nella zona immaginando di restarvi per qualche anno e poi tornare in patria con un capitale sufficiente ad aprirvi qualche attività autonoma, costruirvi una casa e non dover più andare via. Si trattava naturalmente di un’illusione, dacché gli immigrati maghrebini dalla Sicilia sud-occidentale non se ne sono mai andati e la loro permanenza ha finito col diventare strutturale nei settori agricoli e nella marineria (Hannachi 1998; Saitta e Sbraccia 2003; Saitta 2007).

Ma gli anni settanta sono un periodo di mobilità anche per altri gruppi nazionali. Dai territori della ex- Jugoslavia, per esempio, arrivavano in quell’angolo della Sicilia piccoli gruppi di rom, a volte delle carovane, composti da famiglie oppure da individui giovani e soli, impegnati a sbarcare il lunario con mezzi di fortuna. È all’interno di questo gruppo, che non va confuso con altri tradizionalmente presenti in Sicilia e nell’area di Siracusa in particolare,1 che vanno rintracciate le origine della comunità rom di Mazara del Vallo.

Descriverne le vicende in una prospettiva rigidamente diacronica, individuare con precisione date e luoghi in cui le azioni si sono svolte, è un’impresa ardua considerata la relazione difficoltosa che, nella prospettiva etnocentrica del ricercatore, 1

Su questi gruppi, la cui presenza in Sicilia è ormai secolare e le cui attività tipiche sono lungamente consistite in quelle di arrotino, ramaio, venditori ambulanti di calia e semenze varie nelle feste patronali, riparatori di cucine a gas e servizi analoghi, cfr. Pitrè (1882), Piasere (1995), Staiti (2000). In verità, Staiti narra di ibridazioni, ovvero di legami matrimoniali sorti tra gruppi di “camminanti”, così come alcuni definiscono gli “zingari di Siracusa”, e gruppi rom allogeni. Tuttavia, dovendo parlare dello sfondo storico lungo il quale si dipana la storia dei rom di Mazara del Vallo, è bene distinguere i gruppi “nativi” da quelli provenienti dalla Jugoslavia.

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unisce questi rom al calendario e, a volte, anche all’atlante. Del resto, come hanno notato Deleuze e Guattari (1980) e, più recentemente, Trumpener (1992), la storia è scritta sempre in una prospettiva sedentaria e nel nome di un apparato statale unitario.

Ciò di cui allora avremmo bisogno per descrivere accuratamente questa storia è una disciplina inesistente: la “nomadologia”, l’esatto opposto della storia. D’altra parte, bisognerebbe prendere molto sul serio le parole di Spinelli (2003) che lamenta la marginalità di un “discorso” sui rom prodotto dagli stessi rom, oltre che l’attuale debolezza ed isolamento della loro intellighenzia. Un bisogno, quello di divenire soggetti attivi nella produzione del discorso scientifico e storiografico relativo alla vita dei gruppi, necessario e comune a tutte le principali minoranze oppresse, come insegna l’esperienza degli afro-americani, degli ebrei, degli omosessuali e la questione post-coloniale in genere.

La mia storia, dunque, per quanto empatica nelle intenzioni e nei sentimenti, può difficilmente evitare di impiegare, sia pure inavvertitamente, categorie e criteri interpretativi culturalmente connotati. Tale occorrenza rende questa etnografia e la ricostruzione storiografica proposta in qualche modo inadeguate, tanto sul fronte “interno” che su quello “esterno”. Definisco nel primo modo, “interno”, il livello dell’analisi accademica e credo che la sua inadeguatezza consista nella impossibilità di garantire quei dettagli e quella minuziosità attesi nel momento in cui si produce una storia sociale. Infatti, quando si interrogano i rom su aspetti della loro biografia, le date, gli eventi e i luoghi vengono spesso taciuti, dimenticati, sovrapposti, di proposito o involontariamente. Che si tratti di un processo di rimozione o del tentativo di inventare biografie più nobili di quanto non sia la realtà, chi è intenzionato a far luce sul passato di questi individui deve districarsi tra vuoti lunghissimi, contraddizioni e reminiscenze improvvise che spesso vanificano anziché illuminare gli sforzi precedenti.

Definisco invece “esterna” la prospettiva del gruppo che pretendo di descrivere, i rom. Le loro interpretazioni della cultura e della vita, le parole impiegate per spiegare all’ascoltatore il loro mondo, possono solo fino a un certo punto rendere giustizia dei fatti e dei punti di vista. Per quanto creda fermamente che questi rom siano meno distanti da noi di quanto comunemente si creda, delle differenze infatti permangono. Forse non si tratta tanto di differenze valoriali quanto di vissuti; del modo, cioè, in cui la percezione della marginalità si fissa nella coscienza degli individui. L’esperienza della marginalità così come quella della discriminazione possono essere narrate da un soggetto e capite dal suo interlocutore ad un livello intellettuale – sarebbe a dire superficiale. Ma comprendere pienamente queste esperienze, afferrare in profondità l’effetto sulla psicologia individuale degli sguardi sospettosi lanciati giorno dopo giorno dai passanti o del tono rancoroso di

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interlocutori che non nascondono lo sprezzo, questo è senz’altro più difficile.2 Per questa ragione la descrizione che presento è senz’altro inadeguata. D’altra parte, non credo che debba rinunciare quantomeno a provare e confido che una mezza verità sia sempre meglio che un bugia completa.

Rinunciando dunque alla meticolosità che il lettore “interno” si aspetterebbe e ritornando alle piccole carovane di rom jugoslavi che giungevano in Sicilia intorno alla metà degli anni settanta, dovremmo fare lo sforzo di immaginare un giovane uomo. Si chiama Radjo Bajrami, ha appena vent’anni ed è sposato con una donna altrettanto giovane, rimasta momentaneamente in patria. Radjo arriva in Sicilia partendo da Gilane, una cittadina nel sud del Kosovo, spinto dal bisogno impellente e dallo spirito di avventura che i rom di ogni dove amano attribuirsi, malgrado sia spesso solo una vuota vanteria.3 Lui, però, avventuroso lo è davvero e nel 1975 decide di partire insieme a due amici alla volta dell’Italia. Come racconta egli stesso, scelgono la Sicilia per caso. Non hanno contatti lì e non possono definirsi anelli di una catena migratoria “esplicita”. Piuttosto ritengono che la Sicilia sia “interessante” e hanno sentito dire che lì si può vivere bene. La sosta più lunga in quei mesi non la fanno a Mazara del Vallo, ma in un centro vicino, ben noto per la produzione di vino e per la pesca. Non sono i primi rom ad arrivare nell’area. La provincia, infatti, è già da tempo meta delle visite di rom e sinti, ma il loro numero in quella stagione è piuttosto basso e la loro presenza è temporanea e nomadica. Il gruppo di amici viene presto in contatto con le famiglie rom che battono la zona a bordo di vecchie automobili Mercedes e di roulotte. È in questo tempo che Radjo apprende il mestiere che gli permetterà di vivere e di mantenere la famiglia nei decenni a seguire: quello di mendicante. I rom più anziani, infatti, gli insegnano che i siciliani sono gentili e sensibili alle immaginette sacre come quelle di Padre Pio. Bastano poche migliaia di lire per comprarle in tipografia e le offerte dei fedeli all’uscita delle chiese e nei cimiteri sono più che sufficienti a rifarsi dei costi e a ricavarci da vivere. Radjo, dunque, inizia a girare i paesi della provincia, impara a conoscere l’ambiente e 2

Sulla impossibilità di comunicare l’essenza quotidiana del pregiudizio e i suoi marchi sulla psicologia individuale, esiste una nutrita letteratura. In una prospettiva autobiografica, si veda Wheeler (1992), il quale raccoglie lunghe testimonianze scritte dai membri di un certo numero di comunità straniere “stigmatizzate” negli Stati Uniti. In una prospettiva forse meno accademica ma solo apparentemente ironica e, soprattutto, riferita all’esperienza italiana, crf.

Komla-Ebri (2002).

3 Il nomadismo, infatti, non è un tratto costante della cultura rom (Liegeois 1986; Reiss 1975) come dimostrato dal fatto che molte famiglie alternano periodi di nomadismo e stanzialità. Inoltre gli aspetti positivi di una vita stanziale (legati alla sicurezza, ai comfort, alla pianificazione del futuro, etc.) sono da sempre ampiamente riconosciuti e ricercati.

Peraltro il nomadismo e la stanzialità dei rom, ovunque in Europa, sono configurati dalle circostanze storiche (Levinson and Sparkes 2004). Il nomadismo, dunque, non va inteso come un tratto culturale assoluto. Piuttosto, esso svolge un ruolo centrale nei processi identitari di molti rom, è certamente un tratto dell’immaginario, una caratteristica attitudinale che connota il “buon rom tradizionale”, per così dire; ma nei fatti è lontano dall’essere una aspirazione o una pratica comune, oppure una condicio sine qua non dell’essere rom (McVeigh 1997).

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accompagna l’elemosina a piccole truffe e a furti di poco conto. Si allontana anche dall’isola, girando su e giù per la nazione. Trova che l’Italia sia un paese ospitale, più facile e carico di opportunità di Gilane. Inizia a pensare che forse potrebbe vivere lì per sempre, trasferirvisi con sua moglie Ferida, lavorare insieme a lei e crescere i loro figli.

Mendicare per lui è soprattutto un lavoro, qualcosa che gli permetterà di costruire il presente, se non il futuro. Forse avrebbero trovato dell’altro da fare prima o poi, ma questa idea è in qualche modo confusa. Non si può certo dire che ami mendicare, ma il tempo in cui inizierà a provare vergogna è ancora lontano. I volti degli italiani a cui chiede di versare un obolo sono ancora sconosciuti. Per i suoi compaesani elemosinare è normale. Per di più, pensa di conoscere la differenza tra ricchezza e povertà e, pur sapendo di non essere ricco, il denaro che improvvisamente si ritrovava in tasca gli dà la sensazione di non essere povero. Inoltre non vi è ragione di credere che la generosità e la fede in Padre Pio di queste genti italiane andranno perse. Vive così per alcuni anni, tra rapide puntate a casa e il ritorno in Italia. La sua mobilità, il suo nomadismo di corto raggio, non lo distolgono veramente dalla famiglia, che in meno di dieci anni si fa numerosa. Radjo e Ferida sono infatti fecondi come quasi tutta la loro gente e, tra il 1976 e 1984, vengono al mondo Magbujia, Selim e Esat. Nonostante le bocche da sfamare si siano moltiplicate e le entrate siano incerte come al solito (legate, per esempio, alla vendemmia o all’attività serale di suonatore di taburka nei ristoranti, oltre che all’elemosina e al furto), all’inizio degli anni ottanta Radjo può permettersi di comperare una macchina e una roulotte di seconda mano. Si tratta di un investimento importante. Intorno al 1984, profetico, ovvero sensibile al clima politico e ai venticelli di una guerra ancora lontana ma destinata a esplodere con virulenza, vi fa montare Ferida, i bambini e parte per l’avventura di una vita. *** La loro meta non è rappresentata subito da Mazara del Vallo. Infatti, prima di mettere su radici e restaurare malamente una vecchia casa abbandonata in Sicilia, risiedono per circa cinque anni in alcuni campi nomadi del Sud Italia. Ma su questo torneremo tra poco. Quel che è infatti importante sottolineare in questa fase della storia familiare dei Bajrami è la comparsa della guerra, un tema sempre presente sullo sfondo delle loro narrazioni. Come vedremo meglio più avanti, ciascun rom di Mazara del Vallo, non importa se giovane o anziano, tende normalmente a correlare la propria emigrazione dal Kosovo alla guerra. Non la guerra vera e propria, dacché quasi tutti hanno lasciato il paese prima che il conflitto vero e proprio scoppiasse, ma

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al clima anti-rom che la precedeva, fatto di insulti, attentati con bottiglie incendiarie, scritte sui muri. Profetici e perspicaci nel decifrare i segni che la società circostante dissemina, tutti loro lasciano la terra un minuto prima che la guerra civile la insanguini e tendono a definirsi esuli e sopravvissuti, dacché non vi è famiglia rom a Mazara del Vallo che non abbia genitori, nonni, cugini, fratelli o zii uccisi oppure abbia avuto la casa requisita dagli “albanesi”.

Il più vaticinante di tutti è però Radjo, che parte da Gilane circa cinque anni prima degli altri. Non siamo sicuri che egli abbia davvero previsto tutto e che quel suo sguardo strabico e bizzarro nasconda realmente straordinarie capacità di presagire il corso degli eventi storici e politici. Di certo, però, è bravo a interpretare lo spirito dei luoghi e indovinare le possibilità che gli ambienti urbani circostanti offrono. Per quanto assurdo possa apparire e per quanto degradanti sembrino le condizioni in cui egli e la sua famiglia hanno vissuto per anni, Radjo è stato in fondo abilissimo nel selezionare il luogo in cui fermarsi e costruire la propria vita. Fatto un rapido calcolo delle possibilità effettive a sua disposizione e stabiliti con approssimazioni i limiti entro i quali la sua vita avrebbe potuto svolgersi, tenuto conto della sua origine, delle sue effettive capacità e dello spazio che il “mondo” (leggasi: gli stati e le società nella cui orbita gravitava) era disposto a concedergli, Radjo aveva velocemente che compreso che il meridione d’Italia e la Germania (altro importante snodo in questa storia familiare, il cui ruolo affronteremo a suo tempo) erano i luoghi in cui, per ragioni differenti, conveniva insediarsi. Non vi è allora veramente da stupirsi che abbia saputo presentire la guerra, avvertire con forte anticipo il clima anti-rom che andava montando nella confederazione e che è, in fondo, così normale in Europa orientale (Rougheri 1999; Barany 2000; Ringold 2000; Edwards 2005). È dunque dalla guerra che scappano lui, Ferida e anche quei bambini, trasformatisi oggi in giovani adulti, che della Jugoslavia e del Kosovo conoscono praticamente solo i nomi.

Come abbiamo già visto, la guerra o la discriminazione come fattori di spinta sono elementi fondamentali per comprendere il movimento di queste popolazioni e le loro relazioni con i paesi membri più sviluppati dell’Unione Europea. Anche omettendo il ruolo dei conflitti, è infatti davvero arduo discutere della presenza rom in paesi come l’Italia o la Germania prescindendo dalle tensioni sociali, dai livelli di pregiudizio e dall’esclusione che ne caratterizzano la storia nei Balcani e in Europa orientale, a maggior ragione a partire dalla transizione post-comunista. Come nota Ringold, i rom sono stati più vulnerabili di altri gruppi rispetto agli effetti di questo passaggio storico tra modelli di economia e società per quattro principali motivi:

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In primo luogo, dacché i rom hanno generalmente livelli più bassi di istruzione e competenze professionali, essi hanno avuto difficoltà a mantenere i vecchi lavori e a concorrere per altre posizioni all’interno di un nuovo e più competitivo mercato economico. Nel corso del processo di ristrutturazione, essi sono stati i primi a essere licenziati dalle industrie, dalle miniere e dalle cooperative agricole di proprietà degli stati. Di conseguenza […] essi sono stati costretti a dipendere dai declinanti livelli di assistenza sociale, da lavori incerti nei settori informali e dalla fuga all’estero. In secondo luogo, le crisi economiche hanno esacerbato i numerosi problemi sociali tradizionalmente incontrati dai rom, inclusi i bassi livelli d’istruzione e le misere condizioni sanitarie. In terzo luogo, la transizione in Europa centrale e orientale ha avuto un impatto profondo sulla questione abitativa. I rom, storicamente non erano proprietari terrieri e le politiche di restituzione e privatizzazione hanno ridotto ulteriormente l’ammontare della terra e degli alloggi a disposizione di tale gruppo […] Infine, la crisi economica di molti paesi, combinata con la instabilità politica e l’indebolimento delle istituzioni pubbliche, hanno contribuito ad accrescere i livelli di discriminazione e di violenza razzista contro le minoranze, ivi inclusi i rom. (Ringold 2000, p. VIII).

Quando, come nel caso dei rom kosovari oggetto di questa etnografia, agli effetti della transizione si unisce uno scenario di instabilità e pace armata del tipo presente oggi nella loro regione di provenienza, si capisce che la mobilità è una scelta forzata, non dettata da motivazioni avventuristiche o da una semplice aspirazione a conseguire elevati livelli materiali di benessere. Diventa dunque secondario dibattere se la guerra sia la reale motivazione che si cela dietro questi processi di mobilità o meno. La possibilità che essa tenda piuttosto ad essere una espressione sintetica, una sorta di catch-all word che riassume un quadro strutturale fatto di marginalizzazione, persecuzione e povertà estremi, non sembra infatti indebolire la veridicità delle auto-rappresentazioni collettive. In questa rappresentazione l’Italia interpreta un ruolo di crocevia dei flussi oppure di meta finale a causa di un insieme di elementi costituiti: − −

dalla vicinanza geografica, che nei secoli ha reso consuetudinarie le relazioni con l’est e la circolazione delle popolazioni rom; dalla tutto sommato recente comparsa di un sistema di regolazione dell’immigrazione (risalente al 1986);

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− −

dallo sviluppo di reti e catene migratorie etniche (o claniche) favorite da questa lunga lacuna legislativa; dal diffondersi di una reputazione complessiva dell’Italia estremamente positiva (come nazione ospitale, più accogliente di tanti altri luoghi in Europa occidentale).

La vicenda della famiglia Bajrami, a cui è giunto il momento di ritornare, diventa allora paradigmatica. Queste cinque persone che avevamo lasciato a bordo di una roulotte parcheggiata in un campo nomadi del Sud Italia non sono infatti soltanto il primo anello di un catena migratoria “clanica” che, negli anni, porterà circa 150 persone a trasferirsi da Gilane e dai centri limitrofi in una remota cittadina del Mediterraneo, più vicina alla Tunisia che a Roma. Essi incarnano piuttosto una vicenda collettiva e transnazionale, che collega le coste di paesi meno lontani tra loro di quanto l’immaginario comune normalmente non reputi. Il campo nomadi di Foggia è parte di questo sistema di relazioni tra aree del Mediterraneo. È lì infatti che Radjo e i suoi si insediano appena arrivati in Italia, rimanendovi per circa tre anni. È un periodo di vita precaria, fatta, come al solito, di furti in appartamento, elemosina, truffe ai danni delle assicurazioni, e attività simili. Non sembra esservi molto da dire su questo periodo, considerato che è una fase di cui i membri della famiglia non amano parlare. In fin dei conti, cos’hanno essi in comune con quelle persone in una roulotte, abitanti di un pezzo di terra gravida di fango, priva di servizi, coi topi che vi corrono sopra a branchi e l’acqua razionata? Quelle persone non esistono più, sono altro da loro ormai. Quello era il tempo in cui essi erano non solo dei rom, ma degli zingari. “Zingari”, un termine impronunciabile oggi. Qualcosa che richiama appunto scene di degradazione insostenibile. Una condizione non solo di povertà materiale, ma miseria morale. Non sono più degli zingari e non lo sono mai stati, in fondo. Loro non erano nomadi, non lo erano mai stati prima della guerra. Avevano una casa, avevano un legame che li univa a un luogo, Gilane, da generazioni. È stata la guerra a trasformarli per breve tempo in nomadi; zingari, però, non lo sono mai stati davvero.

Non erano sporchi, non amavano stare nella roulotte.4 Loro volevano una casa e solo il destino li spingeva di campo in campo. Non c’era verso di farli veramente parlare di quegli anni, di strappare dalle loro bocche qualcosa di più di notizie sparute ed episodiche.

4

Naturalmente ritengo che molti pochi rom amino stare nelle roulotte e girare di campo in campo. Quel che è interessante notare qui sono le rappresentazioni degli attori indagati, le distinzioni tra gruppi. Qualcosa, peraltro, che si unisce alla distinzione tra “sporco” e “pulito”, tra chi è contaminato e chi non lo è. L’idea della contaminazione, peraltro, non è da intendersi in senso unicamente figurato (com’è comune nei discorso sociologico e antropologico specialmente italiani), di contatto inappropriato tra non-rom (gagè) e rom, ma anche in senso letterale, di ossessione per l’igiene. Su questi temi, cfr. Levinson (2005).

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Solo la presenza di qualcosa di bello sullo sfondo della narrazione permette il miracolo e fa sì che Magbujia, in un lento pomeriggio estivo, improvvisamente si apra e racconti qualcosa di quegli anni lontani. La città sullo sfondo non è più Foggia, ma Sassari (dove vi resta per circa due anni). Lui ha più o meno dodici anni e: la scuola mi andava bene. La maestra mi porta a casa sua per studiare e vedo che lascia fuori tutto l’oro, ma io sono troppo intelligente e capisco che vuole vedere il mio comportamento, così io non prendo niente. Poi giocavo a calcio, forte ero, numero 10 del Sassari giovanile! Giochiamo col Cagliari, partite importanti, e io sono il più bravo: tutti mi chiamano Stojkovic. Mi va tutto bene col calcio, ma mio padre se ne frega … Quando entro in campo ho vergogna. Capisci? Io del campo nomadi, lo zingaro, lo sporco … no, non sporco, però capisci, sento vergogna!

Mentre racconta della sua vita di piccolo nomade, possiamo vedere il piccolo Magbujia che transita da un campo all’altro, da una classe all’altra, e che matura, giorno dopo giorno, una chiara consapevolezza della sua diversità. Cerca uno spazio per affermarsi, per vedere riconosciute le sue qualità. Il calcio o la sua relazione speciale con la maestra sono gli strumenti per dimostrare al mondo che egli non è lo zingaro sporco e ladro che tutti pensano. Ma non c’è nulla che possa veramente fare a proposito. Innanzitutto vive in un campo e poi ha un padre che fatica a comprendere i rituali a cui si prestano gli altri genitori: andare a ricevimento dagli insegnanti o seguire e supportare i figli nel corso delle dispute sportive.

Pensandoci bene, è più interessante comprendere la mobilità con gli occhi del piccolo Magbujia, anziché con quelli degli adulti, guidati da bisogni e calcoli che abbiamo ormai imparato a riconoscere, legati alle opportunità lavorative, alle attività di polizia, alle relazioni con le famiglie del campo. Magbujia in quel tempo lontano ha altre preoccupazioni. Certo, anche lui concorre al magro salario familiare; mendica infatti occasionalmente e sa riconoscere le circostanze ideali per un piccolo furto.5 Ma Magbujia, con la sua sofferenza, il suo bisogno di stabilità o la sua resistenza alla mobilità (che vedremo meglio tra poco, quando gli toccherà andare via da Sassari alla volta della Sicilia) interpreta un ruolo fondamentale per comprendere l’emersione di un bisogno radicale di stanzialità in seno alla famiglia.

5

Qualcosa di ben noto al senso comune, ma i cui significati profondi sono stati analizzati, per esempio, da Okely (1983) e Carter (1996). Interessante, peraltro, il seguente passaggio di Levinson (2005, 511): “Molte volte gli adulti riferiscono che i bambini sono fuori a giocare, lì dove, in realtà, i piccoli stanno svolgendo dei lavori per aiutare la famiglia. Questo accade o perché i genitori non vogliono dare l’impressione che i bambini siano sfruttati o, in alternativa, perché la loro concezione di “gioco” è diversa dalla nostra. Quando in queste occasioni gli si chiede cosa stiano facendo, gli stessi bambini tendono a differenziare le loro risposte: alcuni giocano, altri aiutano”.

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Soprattutto, è la componente familiare femminile che avverte questo bisogno, che spinge per la stabilizzazione. Questo è vero per Ferida, del cui nucleo familiare discutiamo adesso; ma è vero anche per Hava, Abia, Shasha e le tante altre figure femminili di cui si comporrà nel tempo la comunità di Mazara del Vallo. Vedere i bambini crescere nel fango, girare di città in città, o farli vivere con lo stigma dello zingaro, sono elementi che urtano la sensibilità delle madri molto prima dei padri. In questo senso, il punto di vista dei bambini è dunque fondamentale: il mutamento graduale delle pratiche di vita e il processo di stanzializzazione di questo gruppo sono, in primo luogo, una conseguenza del dolore dei bambini e della difficoltà delle madri di continuare a causarlo.6 Certo, quando questo obiettivo sarà raggiunto e le pareti pericolanti di una vera casa, anziché di una roulotte, proteggeranno l’intimità della famiglia, lo stigma non verrà meno o si intreccerà con altri: il marchio della povertà, innanzitutto. Ma almeno queste donne sentiranno di aver fatto qualcosa, di aver contribuito attivamente a rendere le condizioni dei loro figli migliori, più sicure.

Inoltre avranno emancipato se stesse dalla sporcizia, dal disagio di non avere l’acqua, dai topi, dagli odori putrescenti del campo, dalle liti tra famiglie e dall’ira occasionale ed alcolica, ma capace di produrre strascichi lunghissimi, dei vicini di campo xoraxanè.

Ma il tempo della stabilità è ancora lontano per i Bajrami. Dopo Sassari, vi sono ancora Campobello e Marsala, in cui vivranno accampati in roulotte per circa quattro anni. Anche questo è un periodo duro, in cui il nucleo familiare continua a vivere sostanzialmente di elemosina e furti in casa, condotti nella province di Trapani, Palermo, Messina. Ma è anche la stagione in cui il nucleo familiare inizia ad allargarsi, ricevendo i parenti che fuggono dai prodromi della imminente guerra civile in Kosovo. Siamo sul finire degli anni ottanta e il primo massiccio insediamento di famiglie kosovare nel trapanese ha inizio in questa stagione. Arrivano Hava e Cato, per esempio, che sono rispettivamente sorella di Ferida e fratello di Radjo. Gli altri congiunti (per lo più fratelli e sorelle di Ferida e Hava) sono in dirittura di arrivo, ma per il momento vagano attraverso la Germania e il Nord Italia. Sanno che in Sicilia c’è una situazione interessante, ma per adesso sono intenzionati a esplorare le regioni settentrionali del continente. Ci sono tanti rom in Germania e lì si può vivere bene.

C’è lavoro e lo Stato fornisce casa e soldi ai profughi. Prima di andare in Sicilia, vale la pena di fare domanda di asilo in Germania.

6

In realtà, questo dato sembra contraddire quanto notato da una vasta letteratura anglosassone, che nota come il sedentarismo non sia apprezzato dalle donne, le quali prendono a sentirsi isolate, escluse dalle relazioni con le altre donne e dalle forme di reciprocità e sostegno. Al contrario degli uomini, che tendono a stringere relazioni con l’esterno e a svolgere la maggior parte delle proprie attività fuori di casa, le donne sedentarizzate sembrano più portate a soffrire di forme depressive (Levinson e Sparkes 2004; Kendall 1997; Daly 1990; Hyman 1989).

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Questo nome è attraente. Da alcuni anni Radjo sopravvive in Sicilia con difficoltà. La gente è brava, continua a lasciare oboli per lui e per quei suoi bambini così magri, ma c’è anche l’altro risvolto: quello delle truffe e dei furti. Inizia a stancarsi di sfuggire per il rotto della cuffia alla polizia, di vivere col patema d’animo delle perquisizioni nella roulotte. E poi, c’è la guerra. Il Kosovo è in fiamme, la sua gente scappa e le notizie che arrivano da casa sono terribili: i genitori sono morti, gli albanesi hanno preso possesso della casa. “Profugo”, non è forse questo quel che è?

Quel che tutti loro – lui stesso, Ferida, Magbujia e gli altri – sono ormai diventati?7 E, intanto, la Germania riecheggia continuamente, nei discorsi dei parenti e nei messaggi che in modo tortuoso li raggiungono. Sentono dire che tanti si sono rifugiati lì e che ci sono tanti soldi. Il tempo di lasciare Marsala si avvicina: Radjo ha deciso che andranno in Germania e presenteranno domanda di asilo lì.

Questo genere di decisioni, maturate spesso in modo improvviso e senza accurate riflessioni, giocano un ruolo importantissimo per la comprensione dei modelli di mobilità dei rom. I Bujrami, infatti, arriveranno in Germania, presenteranno la domanda d’asilo, trascorreranno circa due anni in attesa di un verdetto, vedranno la domanda respinta perché le autorità tedesche accerteranno che la famiglia ha trascorso diversi anni in Italia prima di varcare le loro frontiere e chiedere asilo, avranno problemi con la polizia; il loro terzogenito, Esat, farà in tempo ad andare in prigione per qualche giorno, sfruttare per qualche tempo una ragazza tedesca convinta da lui a fare la prostituta e, infine, torneranno tutti insieme in Italia. Per quanto si possa indovinare una razionalità di qualche tipo dietro scelte di questo tipo – come ad esempio sfruttare il sistema tedesco di protezione dei richiedenti asilo, ricevere un sostegno economico minimo, investire un paio di anni in un territorio più carico di opportunità che la Sicilia per far “affari” (truffe, furti o anche lavori leciti ma irregolari) – non si può certo dire che queste spedizioni costituiscano normalmente un successo.

Rispetto al fine principale – che consiste di solito nel conseguimento del permesso di soggiorno e in una qualche forma di agognata stabilità – le scelte dei rom risultano infatti abbastanza illogiche e foriere di nuovi danni (quali l’ottenimento di decreti d’espulsioni, l’arresto, la rivitalizzazione dei meccanismi di esclusione ed espulsione). Nel caso in ispecie vi erano pochi dubbi che le autorità tedesche 7

Quello sin qui descritto è, grosso modo, il processo di “definizione della situazione” in una prospettiva soggettiva. Ma esiste anche una prospettiva “ecologica”, che è in qualche modo speculare. Ci riferiamo in particolare a quella logica giuridica, ma sostanzialmente impregnata di un pregiudizio di senso comune, che tende di fatto a negare che gli stati di “nomade” e “rifugiato” siano tra loro compatibili (rendendo complicato il processo di riconoscimento dello status di rifugiato). Nota a tal proposito Sigona (2003, 75), commentando l’autorevole giudizio di un generale in forza alla NATO impegnato a distinguere tra profughi e nomadi, che “il termine nomade implica, per definizione, la condizione del “senza patria” o quello di una persona al di fuori dello stato o senza fissa dimora. Se questo è il caso, come può un nomade essere un rifugiato, dato che l’idea di cercare rifugio è legata alla migrazione forzata dalla propria casa?”.

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avrebbero trovata traccia della loro permanenza in Italia e il fatto di aver presentato domanda d’asilo in Germania avrebbe impedito successivamente di presentare la medesima istanza nella penisola. In modo analogo, la loro definizione implicita di frodatori, li avrebbe resi inqualificabili per l’ottenimento di un qualsiasi altro tipo di permesso e li avrebbe candidati automaticamente all’espulsione dal territorio tedesco.

Di queste vicende la biografia dei rom è solitamente piena ed esse costituiscono di fatto una delle principali concause della mobilità e del nomadismo presso questo gruppo. È infatti il dettaglio giuridico che impedisce sovente ai rom di interrompere il circuito della precarietà. Malconsigliati, troppo superficiali oppure semplicemente estranei per forma mentis a una legge che non hanno contribuito a scrivere e di cui possono essere soltanto destinatari passivi e vittime designate, i rom mostrano una straordinaria tendenza autolesionista nella loro relazione con il sistema giuridico. Abilissimi nel fornire la “risposta sbagliata” al pubblico ufficiale di turno e contrassegnati da situazioni giuridiche ingarbugliatissime8 che nessuno, nei paesi d’approdo così come in patria, intende veramente districare, ai rom per generazioni sono state imposte vite frammentarie. Cosmopoliti per necessità anziché per scelta, potremmo dire in breve.

Perfettamente includibili in questo modello, i Bujrami rimettono in moto la macchina e ripartono, decisi questa volta a fare sul serio. Finalmente, Mazara del Vallo. *** Quando arrivai a Mazara del Vallo nel 2002, la comunità dei rom era già estesa, apparentemente ben integrata come se fosse stata lì da sempre. Tutti loro parlavano generalmente un italiano più che comprensibile, in alcuni sporadici casi pressoché perfetto, ancorché caratterizzato da tracce di dialetto siciliano. I più giovani mostravano di conoscere tanti coetanei e, infatti, si rivolgevano ad essi con confidenza e complicità. Gli anziani, in genere, sembravano vivere esistenze più isolate. Frenetici, spesso in movimento, impegnati in attività non troppo chiare, non sembravano frequentare gli italiani. Non sapevo quanti fossero esattamente.

Qualcuno mi aveva detto che dovessero essere più di cento persone e che non abitassero tutti insieme. Questo mi apparve ovvio quando Esat, allora diciannovenne, 8

Dovute al fatto che molti di essi sono apolidi, privi di documenti di identità a causa della guerra che ha distrutto i registri o della corruzione dei funzionari pubblici che si rifiutano di rilasciare i certificati senza un’adeguata ricompensa. Non di rado, infatti, l’accertamento della situazione anagrafica richiederebbe viaggi in patria; una spesa o un impegno che i soggetti interessati non possono affrontare sempre con facilità. Sulle azioni della burocrazia in Kosovo tendente a “negare” l’esistenza rom da un punto di vista amministrativo, manipolando i documenti, le anagrafi, etc., v. Sigona (2003)

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mi portò a casa sua, in una via tortuosa del centro storico di Mazara del Vallo. Si trattava di un vicolo nascosto, a ridosso di una centralissima via, molto vicina al municipio, ai negozi e ai locali più frequentati della cittadina. Un modello urbano “tipico”, affatto differente da quello di Palermo o di Catania, dove vicoli bui e strade invisibili a ridosso delle opulenti vie centrali nascondono spesso scenari di povertà sconcertanti e palazzi decrepiti, vestigia di terremoti o dei bombardamenti della seconda guerra mondiale.

Tornando però a Mazara del Vallo, era raro all’epoca che i turisti si addentrassero in quei budelli stretti, sporchi, rasenti vecchie case abbandonate dagli ingressi malamente murati (la casbah). Se avessero deciso comunque di farlo, percorrendo gli angoli che impediscono la vista e che furono così disegnati dai coloni arabi a scopi di difesa (per fini, cioè, non molto diversi da quello degli abitanti attuali), si sarebbero ritrovati improvvisamente dinanzi a lenzuola e tappeti coloratissimi pendenti dai balconi, al vocio di bambini, uomini e donne che si chiamano da una stanza all’altra o da una finestra all’altra, cercando di superare il frastuono della musica che esce a tutto volume da una casa (o da differenti case, creando una babele di suoni difficilmente districabili). Questi turisti immaginari si sarebbero ritrovati proiettati improvvisamente in una dimensione parallela.

Dimenticati gli eleganti negozi di vestiti e la lenta passeggiata del corso che fa così meridione, essi sarebbero stati proiettati in un sobborgo di una città imprecisata in un paese in via di sviluppo, dove uomini a petto nudo e dalla carnagione scura si aggirano tra gli edifici, donne magrissime e dall’aspetto travagliato si affannano a pulire lo sporco impossibile delle strade e delle catapecchie, bambini nudi e a piedi scalzi corrono da una casa all’altra, fanno capolino da un vicolo, schiamazzano e improvvisano giochi rumorosi e pericolosi (come arrampicarsi su ringhiere pericolanti o fare circonvoluzioni circensi) tra le urla miste di disapprovazione e incoraggiamento dei ragazzi più grandi e degli adulti.

Per quanto questa strada raccolga appena da quattro a sei nuclei familiari9 (circa un sesto delle famiglie rom presenti in città) essa risulta estremamente affollata. Le case si sviluppano tutte su un paio di piani, al di sopra dei quali si rinvengono delle terrazze, impiegate come deposito, base per i serbatoi d’acqua (razionata in tutta la città e distribuita solo un paio di giorni alla settimana per un numero limitato di ore) e, in estate, come doccia o spazio di socialità (per bere birra e fumare canne, lontani dalla vista e dall’olfatto degli anziani più intransigenti in fatto di droga). L’appartamento di Radjo, oltre alla terrazza vera e propria, dispone invece 9

Il numero cambia in ragione degli eventuali problemi logistici affrontati dai rami più giovani delle famiglie, che, in mancanza di meglio o in seguito alla perdita della casa (per incendi, per sfratti, per la sopraggiunta inagibilità delle abitazioni) possono tornare nella casa paterna per periodi più o meno lunghi.

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di un secondo piano terrazzato, alquanto stretto ma utilizzabile per i giochi dei bambini, per dormirci per rilassarsi nei lunghi momenti di pausa, seduti su tappeti e cuscini. Dal 2002 sino, grosso modo, al 2005 quest’area raccoglieva all’incirca un quarantina di persone: adulti tra i quaranta e i cinquant’anni e, soprattutto, giovani e bambini, spesso in tenerissima età. La dimensione media dei nuclei familari, in quest’area così come in altre, era di cinque persone circa. Ma vi erano famiglie costituite da nove persone: due genitori di circa trentacinque anni e sette figli. E non bisogna credere che un household così composto fosse eccessivamente denso. Radjo Bajrami, che ha abitato in questa strada sino al 2005 ed è stato il fondatore di questo insediamento (che più avanti nel testo verrà talvolta richiamato come “isolato A”), ha vissuto a tratti in un alloggio ben più affollato.

In certi momenti, e per periodi abbastanza lunghi (prossimi a un anno), nella palazzina a due piani che occupa attualmente hanno infatti abitato, oltre a sua moglie Ferida, i suoi quattro figli con le relative famiglie. Precisamente, Magbujia con Xania e i loro quattro figli; Esat con Leila e il loro bambino (la secondogenita sarebbe venuta dopo, quando ormai avrebbero cambiato abitazione); Selim con Eljveda e i quattro figli; e, infine, Zuleica, che era ancora adolescente e non sposata. Un totale di diciannove persone, a cui potevano aggiungersi occasionalmente degli ospiti, come ad esempio congiunti dalla Germania o, più prosaicamente, ricercatori in vena di esperienze esotiche.

Il piano superiore era perfettamente abitabile. Lo si può immaginare come uno spazio unico o come due appartamenti. Due ingressi, contigui e disposti ad elle, posti in prossimità di una stretta scala dalla ringhiera pericolante (per lungo tempo dissaldata e assicurata da fil di ferro), permettevano l’accesso a quello che era un appartamentino di una cinquantina di metri quadri, composto da: − − −

una stanza da letto, munita di credenza, armadio e televisione: da un soggiorno con divano letto, tavolo con sedie, una ampia credenza, televisione e impianto stereo una cucina stretta e malmessa, dal rubinetto non funzionante, con porta su un minuscolo bagno in cui si trovano il gabinetto (senza vaschetta funzionante) e una mini-vasca da bagno, impiegata per fare la doccia o come lavandino, per pulire i piatti o per lavare i panni.

L’altro ingresso dava su un ampio soggiorno, munito di: − −

divano, un ampio tavolo di vetro,

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− − −

una estesa credenza a vetri, un apparecchio televisivo con lettore dvd una porticina, nascosta da una tenda, che si affaccia su un’ampia stanza nascosta, impiegata in certi periodi come deposito e in altri come camera da letto “d’emergenza”.

Al piano terra, costituito da un cortiletto malmesso, che a prima vista richiama ingiustamente immagini di fogna a cielo aperto (a causa del lastricato consunto, scuro, piegato, reso eternamente bagnato dall’acqua gettata dalle donne di casa durante le infinite pulizie quotidiane), si trova un altro spazio, composto di due vani, dalle mura rese irregolari dall’umidità, ancorché perfettamente imbiancate (secondo un costume tipico dei rom) e da un gabinetto minuscolo e maleodorante.

A seconda dei periodi, questo spazio può essere indistintamente uno spoglio studio di registrazione o una sala prova (Magbujia è infatti un cantante), uno spazio di aggregazione per i giovani della comunità rom e i loro amici tunisini e italiani, oppure un appartamento. In quest’ultimo caso, tappeti e tende pendenti ad ogni angolo ravvivano l’ambiente e tengono nascosta la visione deprimente dei muri e del pavimento (oltre che a tenere per quanto possibile lontana l’umidità). È qui, per esempio, che hanno abitato Selim e Eljveda, rispettivamente figlio e nuora di Radjo, quando, insieme ai loro quattro piccolissimi figli, tornarono rocambolescamente dalla Germania, oppure quando la casa che affittarono alcuni mesi dopo il loro ritorno prese fuoco.

Gli altri alloggi nel vicolo erano decisamente meno affollati (oltre a versare in condizioni leggermente migliori), ma questo non bastava ad abbassare la media degli abitanti del vicolo. Inoltre, a poche centinaia di metri dall’isolato A, in un vicolo altrettanto stretto, centrale e nascosto, si stagliava un altro insediamento pressoché uguale al precedente (“Isolato B”), abitato da un numero pressoché uguale di famiglie, con le quali avevamo in genere scarsi rapporti e che negli anni della ricerca è andato in gran parte svuotandosi, anche a causa della inagibilità di gran parte delle case. Infine, disperse un po’ tra altre vie del centro storico, ai margini di esso e nelle zone più nuove della cittadina, si rinveniva il resto delle famiglie. *** Ai fini della nostra narrazione è utile menzionare che ai margini del centro storico, non troppo distante dalla casa di Radjo, abitava per esempio Ismet, nipote di Radjo e Ferida, ovvero figlio di Cato e Hava, cugino di primo grado di Esat.

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Ismet e Esat erano stati i miei anfitrioni, coloro che mi avevano introdotto al resto della comunità e che più di chiunque altro mi avevano aiutato a conseguire la fiducia dei rom e degli altri stranieri presenti in città. Discuterò a lungo di loro, perché è pressoché naturale che in una etnografia di matrice riflessiva figure a cavallo tra il “mediatore”, il “gatekeeper” e l’ “informatore” abbiano uno spazio adeguato alla centralità del loro ruolo.10 Ma in questa fase discutere di loro ha senso perché la differente collocazione delle rispettive famiglie permette di introdurre alcune importanti differenzazioni riguardanti i progetti di insediamento e di vita dei diversi nuclei e i mezzi impiegati per conseguire i fini desiderati.

Le famiglie dei miei giovani amici, Ismet ed Esat, sono infatti tra loro abbastanza differenti e, per quanto siano apparentemente caratterizzate da un identico passato di marginalità e da un presente egualmente duro, sono esemplari di almeno due strategie di adattamento presenti nell’area: quella che propende verso la “concentrazione” e quella che tende alla “dispersione”. Come abbiamo visto, la famiglia di Esat visto vive nel centro storico a ridosso di altri nuclei (per lo più parenti, ma non solo); quella di Ismet, invece, risiede appena fuori.11 Non è una strada troppo distante da quelle dove una buona parte dei membri del clan abita, ma è in ogni caso esterna all’agglomerato “etnico”. I vicini sono più facilmente italiani che stranieri e in casa apparivano abbastanza spesso degli italiani piuttosto in avanti con gli anni.

Si trattava per lo più di anziani mazaresi, vedovi e con i figli lontani, che passavano il loro tempo con quella numerosa famiglia slava, composta a quel tempo da due genitori, quattro figli di età compresa tra i 19 e i sette anni, e una giovanissima nuora. In generale, erano più numerose le famiglie “disperse” che quelle “concentrate”. Tra le prime, quelle che giocavano una qualche importanza per noi erano soprattutto quelle di Nijat, Aferdita e dei loro due bambini, Dilji e Sonja; e poi quella dello “zio di Castelvetrano”, una figura dai contorni leggendari, nei confronti del quale tutti alternano in generale sentimenti ambivalenti: da un lato rispetto per la sua ricchezza, dall’altro sprezzo per la sua distanza affettiva, spregiudicatezza e avidità che lo spingono non soltanto a non aiutare i parenti, ma a ordire speculazioni a loro danno.12 10

Per una disamina veloce su tutti questi ruoli e la loro centralità nella pratica etnografica, v. Gobo (2001).

Come si vedrà, a causa di sopraggiunti eventi, la famiglia di Ismet abbandonerà questa casa e andrà ad abitare nel centro storico nell’insediamento B. 12 Lo zio, infatti, dispone di proprietà immobiliari e in un caso non ha esitato a sottrarre una casa a parenti che vi abitavano in affitto e che intendevano acquistarla nel momento in cui avessero avuto abbastanza liquidità. Inoltre, lo zio ha pensato di riaffittarla a loro a un prezzo doppio rispetto al vecchio proprietario. Questo genere di comportamenti lo rendono inviso a tutti, come è comprensibile che sia; ma al contempo la sua ricchezza suscita ammirazione e, probabilmente, lo si continua a frequentare perché da un lato lui non lesina le visite e, dall’altro, si ritiene che sia meglio disporre di un parente ricco e potente per i tempi di crisi.

11

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Il resto delle famiglie “disperse” era costituito da parenti naturali o acquisiti, con i quali i rapporti non erano quotidiani e che io, come probabilmente la maggior parte dei miei interlocutori prossimi, incontravo occasionalmente sul lungo mare nei giorni del mercatino o in occasione delle feste.

Come accennato più su, nella comunità osservata, a questo punto del processo d’insediamento, il fatto di essere “concentrati” o “dispersi” è una scelta in massima parte razionale. Ma la razionalità di questo corso d’azione non è, per così dire, originaria. Piuttosto bisogna interpretarla come parte di un processo che, al proprio punto di partenza, ha soprattutto il carattere di vincolo ed è, nella prospettiva dei rom, subita e passiva. La razionalità che rinveniamo in questa stagione iniziale (iniziata nella metà degli anni novanta) non è infatti quella degli attori sociali, ma quella delle istituzioni.

Queste ultime, infatti, si ritrovarono a un certo punto del decennio scorso alle prese con un problema sociale rilevante: quello di ritrovare nel proprio territorio, e in una successione alquanto veloce (di non più di cinque anni), un numero considerevole di famiglie poverissime e affollatissime, presenti stabilmente, ancorché residenti in alloggi eterodossi come le roulotte, con un gran numero di minori a carico, con tassi di natalità “terzomondiali”, impossibilitate a inserirsi nel normale mercato immobiliare, prive dei requisiti giuridici necessari per l’inclusione nelle graduatorie per gli alloggi residenziali pubblici, non espellibili dal territorio per ragioni legali o semplicemente de facto.13 La soluzione ideata – che cela un carattere anodino e una logica umanitaria paradossale – fu quella di assegnare a queste famiglie alcune case abbandonate del centro storico (vestigia di emigrazioni lontane e terremoti passati), dagli interni malmessi ma dalle mura ancora erette. Case, insomma, che non andavano più bene per la comunità dei nazionali, ma che potevano servire come rifugio d’emergenza per questo gruppo di profughi precipitato nel territorio. Era una soluzione pragmatica, che soprassedeva sugli aspetti etici, giuridici e, forse, anche sanitari; lontana anni luce dalle questioni formali e di “principio” (di legalità, di dignità dell’uomo, etc.) che dalla seconda metà dello scorso decennio hanno preso a caratterizzare città ben più grandi e centrali come Bologna o Roma, alle prese con insediamenti abusivi ben più ampi, favelas e baraccopoli “neopasoliniane”.14 Nei centri metropolitani questi insediamenti erano diventati il pretesto

13

Molti di loro erano in attesa del riconoscimento dello status di rifugiato (una procedura lunghissima, come testimoniato, tra gli altri, da ICS (2005)) e, dunque, legittimati a gravitare nel territorio. Gli altri, quelli che ancora abitavano in roulotte, potevano essere espulsi, ma bastava loro spostarsi di pochi chilometri per ottemperare i divieti e restare comunque nell’orbita del territorio di Mazara del Vallo. I rom, insomma, erano destinati a restare.

14 Sulla nuova geografia della periferia e della marginalità romane, cfr. Caudu e Coppola (2006); Mudu (2006).

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per una campagna tendente a disperdere15 gli immigrati, poco interessata al problema del loro “ricollocamento” (e per questo invisa alla sinistra più o meno “radicale”), che impiegava i concetti di dignità umana, faceva riferimento all’impossibilità di accettare l’esistenza di condizioni di vita disagiate (sugli argini dei fiumi cittadini, sotto i ponti delle tangenziali, all’interno di case di cartone, etc.) e che per questo le rimuoveva coercitivamente dalla vista, un po’ come i poveri dalle strade di Londra ai tempi della prima rivoluzione industriale.

Riassumendo grossolanamente, sicurezza, “estetica urbana” e dignità della persona sono i temi principali che caratterizzano la questione sociale contemporanea in Italia. A Mazara del Vallo – probabilmente in ragione di un’estetica ampiamente rovinata per effetto congiunto dell’incuria degli uomini e della furia degli accadimenti naturali, oltre che di una condizione di degrado dell’uomo e del lavoro che può definirsi atavica e strutturale – gli ultimi due di questi grandi temi sono rimasti per anni meritoriamente estranei alla gestione della questione sociale.

Si tratta, naturalmente, di un merito stravagante e dai tratti assurdi, che, tuttavia, nella logica forse ideologica dell’autore di questa etnografia, presenta una straordinaria “umanità” di fondo. Una umanità fondata sul rifiuto ipocrita e perbenista di tracciare un distinguo tra forme di povertà e degrado accettabili e inaccettabili. In una condizione di miseria diffusa, dove il lavoro nero costituisce la norma nei settori dell’agricoltura, delle costruzioni ed è presente persino sui pescherecci (esposti a maggiori controlli che le campagne o i cantieri) o nel terziario commerciale e in cui le catapecchie abbondano ad ogni angolo, rifiutare l’accoglienza all’interno di quelle stesse stamberghe in nome della dignità e del decoro dell’uomo sarebbe infatti suonato ridicolo e grottesco. A causa della mia incapacità di trovare dei testimoni oppure i “responsabili” di questa strategia di risoluzione, non saprei dire se questa “logica umanitaria” affiorasse in questi stessi termini alla coscienza delle autorità che concessero le case; oppure se essa vada letta, à la Levi-Strauss, in termini 15

La questione è ben nota ed è anche attuale. Ma per rinverdire la memoria, nell’oceano di pubblicazioni riguardanti le politiche “per la legalità” di Cofferati a Bologna, di Veltroni a Roma, Domenici a Firenze (ovvero le punte dell’iceberg della questione sicurezza così come essa s’impone sul finire degli anni duemila), cfr. M. Imarisio “Sulla legalità la sinistra sbaglia. Io continuo con gli sgomberi”, Il corriere della sera, 22 giugno 2005 (http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Politica/2005/06_Giugno/22/imarisio.shtml); V. Varesi, “Cofferati contro i lavavetri. ‘Irregolari spesso aggressivi’”, La Repubblica, 11 ottobre 2005; Giuristi Democratici di Bologna, “I bisogni primari sono diritti fondamentali” in http://www.giuristidemocratici.it/what?news_id=20051020131548); G. Carmosino, “Il razzismo di Veltroni straripa a Ponte Mammolo”, Carta, 20 dicembre 2007 (http://www.carta.org/campagne/migranti/12359); M. Vanni (2007) “Firenze dichiara guerra ai lavavetri. Fino a tre mesi di arresto”, La Repubblica, 28 agosto 2007 (www.repubblica.it/2007/08/sezioni/cronaca/lavavetri/lavavetri/lavavetri.html). Inoltre, per un riassunto efficace delle posizioni in campo che hanno preceduto e dato vita al discusso “decreto sulla sicurezza” all’indomani dell’efferato omicidio di una donna italiana di nome Giovanna Reggiani in una stazione metropolitana di Roma nel Novembre 2007, v. S. Nella, “Il decreto sicurezza arriva in senato”, Carta, 6 novembre 2007 (http://www.carta.org/articoli/11767).

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di “inconscio strutturale”, ovvero di un sentire collettivo che non lasciava spazi di manovra differenti e che, infatti, non sembra neanche oggi scandalizzarsi per la presenza di simili anfratti nello splendido centro storico di Mazara del Vallo. 16 Sta di fatto che i rom hanno iniziato con l’insediarsi negli interstizi della casbah, rivitalizzando col proprio lavoro quegli edifici prossimi a crollare, privi di servizi e apparentemente inabitabili. Incredibilmente, essi hanno dato luogo al miracolo della “rinascita”. Una rinascita che nello sguardo “borghese”17 di chi coltiva un’altra idea dell’abitare, malamente sintetizzabile nell’idea di un’abitazione non maleodorante, dallo spazio adeguato al numero delle persone che vi abitano, igienica e priva di muffe, potrà apparire come un aborto o un parto difettoso. Tuttavia, per dirla con Heidegger (1991), se la crisi degli alloggi è più vecchia della guerra e delle distruzioni e se abitare significa essenzialmente avere cura, allora i rom di Mazara del Vallo hanno saputo davvero trasformare queste pietre in case.

La qual cosa, per inciso, sembrerebbe confermare quanto notato da Kendall (1997, 75), la quale afferma che le case abitate dagli ex-nomadi sono in genere dei “siti di resistenza”, stabiliti ed eretti in opposizione alla società dominante. Inoltre, per dirla con Shields (1991), questi siti (ivi inclusi gli insediamenti di Mazara del Vallo) sono da considerarsi degli “spazi marginali”, lì dove con questa espressione occorre intendere quei luoghi che la società dominante è incapace di controllare fisicamente e culturalmente.

Ma queste ipotesi, suggestive ancorché solo parzialmente vere, non rendono pienamente giustizia al fatto che i siti e luoghi di cui parliamo non sono esattamente occupati, sottratti al controllo della società dominante. Essi, piuttosto, sono stati graziosamente concessi da questa stessa società. E il merito di questi rom non sta tanto nell’averli trasformati in spazi marginali di resistenza quanto di averli 16

Nei circa sei anni di lavoro sul campo non ho mai sentito un riferimento alle condizioni oggettive di vita degli immigrati rom o tunisini nelle case del centro storico. I nativi possono lamentarsi della loro presenza, riferirsi ai problemi della sicurezza sorti negli anni, rimpiangere gli anni in cui la città era più omogenea da un punto di vista culturale ed “etnico”, ma essi non fanno davvero mai riferimento alle condizioni delle case. Probabilmente perché un numero ampissimo di nativi ha abitato in quelle stesse case sino a non troppo tempo fa e perché i problemi legati alla mancanza d’acqua o alla scarsa pulizia delle strade caratterizza gli italiani allo stesso modo degli stranieri.

17 Si potrebbero citare numerosi libri e raffinati ragionamenti circa l’abitare, le sue trasformazioni e i significati assunti in ragione della classe sociale, ma qui preferiamo fare riferimento a un indicatore più “oggettivo” della sensibilità dominante, come per esempio la legislazione in materia di condizioni abitative, i vincoli che essa impone per stabilire quali spazi siano agibili, la relazione esistente tra il diritto giuridico a risiedere in un posto e il possesso di un alloggio adeguato.

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rivalorizzati, di avere mostrato lo straordinario potenziale di trasformazione di cui sono capaci, rendendo nuovamente abitabili quelle macerie nonostante la povertà di mezzi a disposizione e potendo contare unicamente sulla propria forza lavoro.

Riepilogando, accettare di vivere in questi spazi è stata dunque una scelta razionale ma pressoché obbligata e non una scelta attiva e voluta in prima persona dalle famiglie. Non a caso, alcuni abitanti dell’isolato A confrontano queste case con quelle concesse in Germania e mettono seriamente in discussione l’idea che sia possibile parlare di una qualsivoglia forma di umanità celata dietro questo “dono”. Ed è francamente difficile dissentire dalla loro interpretazione dei fatti, a meno che non si abbracci una logica paradossale e si accetti l’ipotesi da me ventilata che, in presenza dei vincoli attuali, questa scelta fosse l’unica a disposizione delle autorità: quella di concedere uno spazio franco, che non avrebbe suscitato le reazioni furiose dei diseredati locali, libero dalle legittime pretese dei proprietari, esentasse, compatibile con la legislazione in materia di migrazione (si trattava dopo tutto di clandestini senza diritti).

Se questa logica tutta interna al diritto ha un senso (ed è una cosa che francamente non saprei affermare con certezza) non vi è vero scontro tra la logica delle istituzioni locali e quella dei rom: entrambi, al di là dei ruoli formali, sono vittime di un ordine superiore e di una struttura di vincoli che può essere superata solo a costo di un trade off informale, fondato sulla concessione di spazio in cambio di lavori di rinnovamento autogestiti. A distanza di anni possiamo dire che si è trattata una forma di scambio accettabile, che, pure avendo consentito la riproduzione della miseria ed essendo sostanzialmente invisa a molti dei soggetti coinvolti, ha nello stesso tempo posto le basi per un graduale processo di stabilizzazione. Queste persone, infatti, sono ritornate stanziali e, a differenza di quanto è avvenuto nel mondo anglosassone, lo sono ridiventate per propria scelta e non perché le istituzioni hanno implementato delle misure dissuasive o coercitive orientate a questo fine. 18 Ciò non di meno, questo processo è stato tutt’altro che univoco e scevro da ambiguità. Come notato poc’anzi, esso ha riprodotto la miseria. E lo ha fatto non soltanto affermando implicitamente l’idea che chi è “ultimo” deve dimorare in case adeguate alla propria posizione sociale, ma limitando di fatto l’interscambio e creando uno spazio che, pur non essendo isolato da barriere fisiche o distante dal centro, è distaccato simbolicamente da esso. E non parliamo di simboli troppo astratti la cui interpretazione necessiti di chissà quale attività ermeneutica: piuttosto, mi

18

Su questo punto, cfr. Hawes e Perez (1995).

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riferisco all’odore di quelle strade, all’aspetto poco invitante di quei vicoli malfermi alla vista e sporchi.

Vi è forse un che di impressionistico in questa descrizione, ma da membro interno (sia pure “dissidente”) della cultura dominante, non fatico a distinguere in quei vicoli i caratteri tipici di uno spazio che la componente integrata media della società italiana definirebbe facilmente “poco rassicurante”, “squallido”, “pericoloso”, “pericolante”, “infido”, “covo di delinquenti”, “quartiere di poveracci” e così via lungo questo registro. In altri termini, per quanto fosse indubbiamente curato e “domestico” (relativamente agli insormontabili vincoli strutturali), questo spazio non ha davvero contribuito a modificare le rappresentazioni esterne sui rom (e quelle dei rom sugli italiani). Tutti sanno che essi sono stanziali e non più nomadi, ma nonostante questo essi rimangono sostanzialmente “eccentrici”, diversi. Suggerivo precedentemente che nessuno parla normalmente delle loro case (anche perché in pochi vi sono entrati) ma ciò nondimeno quasi nessuno si aggira in quei vicoli, con l’eccezione regolare del postino, quella più occasionale dei poliziotti e quella più frequente degli italiani interessati a comperare un po’ di fumo o a piazzare un telefonino rubato. Gli Isolati A e B, insomma, sono spazi pressoché deterritorializzati: quartieri “slavi” e nulla di più, che gli italiani non impegnati a trattenere relazioni lecite o illecite con i rom non hanno ragione di frequentare.

Questo degrado “oggettivo” dell’ambiente è evidente agli abitanti dei quartieri allo stesso modo degli italiani. Essi non amano veramente quelle strade e quelle mura vecchie. Essi non amano essere identificati con la povertà. Le donne detestano combattere con la polvere che cade continuamente dalle mura e con quegli spazi insufficienti. Tutti vorrebbero andare e quando ne hanno la possibilità, infatti, lo fanno. *** “Quando un rom cambia è sempre in meglio”. Si tratta di una affermazione falsa, naturalmente. Ma non troppo. Difatti è questo quello che i rom intendono dare a vedere ogni qual volta comprano una nuova auto, una nuova tastiera o cambiano casa.

Tutto quello con cui entrano in possesso è quasi sempre migliore di quel che avevano prima (fa naturalmente eccezione il caso di chi sia passato da una BMW semi-nuova a una vecchia Fiat. Ma anche in questo caso è possibile trovare chi proverà a spiegare le ragioni della superiorità della seconda). Questo è un tratto che definiremmo culturale e che caratterizza certamente i modelli conversazionali e la gestione del Sé nel corso delle interazioni pubbliche quotidiane. Ciò nondimeno, è vero che andare

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via dagli isolati A e B alla volta di altri quartieri si accompagna di solito un miglioramento della qualità di vita.

Ma questo movimento non va spiegato in termini puramente materiali: case migliori, più nuove, meno umide, dai servizi meglio funzionanti. Né, tantomeno, può spiegarsi unicamente con l’ambizione di sottrarsi allo stigma derivante dall’abitare nelle case vecchie del centro storico. Piuttosto occorre pensare ai vantaggi “relazionali” che questa scelta comporta. Trasferirsi permette soprattutto di sottrarsi parzialmente alla sfera di influenza della comunità e di accedere a nuovi contatti con soggetti ritenuti in fondo migliori.

Questa prospettiva ci spinge a ribaltare in parte i presupposti classici su cui si fondano molti studi di comunità e la letteratura sui rom.19 In sintonia con questo repertorio classico, riferendomi ad altri gruppi nazionali e ad altre “comunità”, in passato ho mostrato come la creazione di quartieri connotati “etnicamente” in Sicilia e in altre aree del Centro Italia servisse, tra le altre cose, a mitigare le condizioni di deprivazione derivanti dall’insufficienza dello stato sociale e si configurasse come una condizione essenziale per la formazione e il funzionamento di un welfare state alternativo (Saitta e Sbraccia 2003; Saitta 2007). Questi quartieri sono certamente il frutto di vincoli imputabili al mercato immobiliare, che spingono i gruppi stranieri in aree dismesse oppure inadatte ad ospitare le popolazioni per la quali erano state originariamente ideate (gli studenti, le famiglie di classe media italiane, etc.). Ma col 19

La letteratura sulla “comunità” come concetto teorico è vastissima ed è arduo ripercorrerla per intero. Peraltro, essa è tutt’altro che omogenea dal punto di vista degli approcci e delle valutazioni. Sintetizzando brutalmente la mia posizione, credo che la “comunità” svolga in genere una funzione ambivalente e che sia interpretabile un po’ come risorsa e un po’ come un vincolo. Diffido pertanto dagli approcci “neo-comunitaristi” e non credo all’idea che “più comunità” significhi automaticamente “maggior benessere” (tanto per gli individui e i gruppi “integrati” della società che per quelli “marginali”). Inoltre, penso che vi sia un uso spropositato del termine “comunità” e che occorra una certa dose di discernimento nell’impiegarlo (ad esempio, il discorso scientifico statunitense, di cui sono in generale profondamente debitore, fa un uso forse eccessivo di questa parola. Questo è probabilmente meno frequente nella pratica scientifica italiana, ma abbastanza frequente nei discorsi ordinari. Raccomando dunque parchezza nell’impiegare il termine “comunità” come concetto analitico). Nel caso in oggetto, ad ogni modo, ritengo che ci troviamo dinanzi a una comunità. Impiegando le classicissime categorie di Tonnies (1979) mi sembra infatti che ci si trovi innanzi a rapporti reciproci avvertiti dai partecipanti, fondati su di una convivenza durevole, intima ed esclusiva. Ma in sintonia con gli studi di comunità più recenti, credo anche che ci troviamo dinanzi a una forma di prossimità che genera, oltre a sentimenti di appartenenza e identità, una tendenza “centrifuga”, un bisogno di evadere dal sistema di obblighi, aspettative e dalla riproduzione delle forme tradizionali di vita. Più precisamente, non ritengo che ci si trovi dinanzi a quella che Thomas (1923, 44) chiamerebbe una comunità “non tipica”, dallo scarso potere conformante, propri dei contesti urbani, che solo con molto sforzo è possibile chiamare “comunità”. Ma non credo neanche che si trovi dinanzi a una comunità “chiusa”, ammesso che tali comunità siano davvero mai esistite. Se non avessi timore di apparire eccessivamente “sistemico”, direi che quella osservata è piuttosto una comunità nell’accezione tradizionale del termine, che è aperta ed esposta agli stimoli disgreganti provenienti dall’ambiente esterno. Di seguito elenco altri autori che, nel tempo, hanno orientato la mia prospettiva sulla “comunità”: Mauss (2002), Durkheim (1962) Weber (1961), Park et al.

(1925), Zorbaugh (1929), Lynd e Lynd (1937), Warner e Lunt (1941), Whyte (1943), Wirth (1956), Banfield (1958), Polanyi (1983), Montaldi (1960), Abrahms (1970), Bayley (1971), Sahlins (1972); Block (1974), Boissevain (1974), Stack (1974), Etzioni (2001), Wacquant (2007).

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tempo, malgrado l’elevata mobilità degli stranieri che vi abitano, questi spazi tendono a riprodursi e a continuare ad esistere nel tempo perché sono funzionali alla riproduzione delle migrazioni, a prescindere dal fatto che siano fondate su una “catena”, ovvero su delle reti transnazionali in senso proprio o meno.

La loro funzione primaria è quella di fornire alloggio a buon mercato a soggetti dalla capacità di spesa limitata, ma all’interno di essi si sviluppano reti di solidarietà fondate sulla circolazione di informazione e sulla “reciprocità”, intesa come obbligo implicito di dare e ricevere. La qual cosa può sembrare troppo semplicistica o radicale, ma nelle dinamiche quotidiane attive in uno scenario di precarietà diffusa, sottrarsi a questi obblighi, non prestare attenzione alla reputazione e, dunque, non interagire secondo le regole, può costare molto caro in termini di opportunità e isolamento.

Tali quartieri non producono, ad ogni modo, “comunità” in senso stretto.

Queste forme associative presentano un carattere coercitivo, sono fondate su aspetti “identitari” (dacché vedono la prevalenza di uno o pochi gruppi nazionali), tendono a diventare delle “istituzioni” (naturalmente in senso improprio e in modo informale.

Per quanto al loro interno vi possano essere dei personaggi o delle organizzazioni che rappresentano istituzioni e sono istituzioni essi stessi, come gli imam o le sedi di associazioni). In particolare, quello che caratterizza questo genere di quartieri e conferisce loro questo status di comunità atipica, è il fatto che possono essere penetrati da individui molto differenti e non necessariamente correlati da vincoli di parentela o amicizia originaria.

A Mazara del Vallo, gli isolati abitati dai rom non svolgono questa funzione.

Essi non sono spazi aperti, non attraggono abitanti esterni al gruppo, il capitale sociale a disposizione degli individui è stagnante e si può dubitare che la prossimità svolga la funzione di ammortizzatore della miseria così come avviene invece negli altri quartieri “etnici”. Certo, qualcuno potrebbe notare che, considerato che i rom di Mazara del Vallo abitano una micro-area in un quartiere più vasto abitato prevalentemente da stranieri e che ha dunque in generale i caratteri sopra descritti, sia fondamentalmente un errore trattarlo come se fosse un quartiere a sé, distinto dal resto. Ma questo modo di guardare all’area deriva dal fatto che gli isolati dei rom sono, per quanto ristretti, separati ed esclusivi. Se accettiamo questo punto di vista vediamo dunque che questi rom producono forme di comunità disfunzionali sul lungo periodo, che spingono i membri a disperdersi. Le forme comunitarie dei rom, in tal modo, sono essenzialmente dipendenti dai vincoli economici e meno solide di quanto si possa pensare. La qual cosa aiuta certamente a spiegare i processi disgregativi di questo gruppo nel corso del tempo, ma mostra anche la differente mobilità sociale esperita dai diversi nuclei.

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La storia degli isolati, in tal modo, diventa un modo per introdurre il tema della differenzazione. Una differenzazione legata ai differenti destini economici delle famiglie ma anche alle diverse forme di progettualità. La qual cosa ci permette di rimarcare qualcosa che è ovvio, ma che vale sempre la pena di ricordare in questo genere di studi e discorsi: l’impossibilità di dare luogo a interpretazioni troppo generaliste, che pretendano di spiegare una cultura in modo univoco. La dimensione individuale, malgrado tenda ad essere persa di vista quando osserviamo gruppi per noi troppo diversi e per questo informi, gioca un ruolo fondamentale e rende le generalizzazioni un puro esercizio accademico. Premesso questo, possiamo certamente mostrare come i percorsi individuali e nucleari differiscono tra loro. *** Abbiamo già notato che Radjo, il pioniere, e Cato, suo fratello, sono sposati con due sorelle: Ferida e Hava. Il caso di questa doppia coppia di coniugi e fratelli/sorelle germani/e è interessante perché consente di mostrare come la cultura interna alle famiglie possa essere differente e come soggetti che condividono retroterra culturali e vincoli possano rispondere in modo diverso alle sollecitazioni ambientali. Il loro caso, insomma, pone delle interessanti questioni connesse essenzialmente alla teoria dell’azione e all’influenza della cultura sui corsi d’azione individuale.20 In particolare, crediamo che il caso oggetto di studio sia interessante perché permette di mostrare come un milieu sociale altamente strutturato,21 che ben si 20

Le teorie dell’azione sono una componente costitutiva della sociologia. Si può infatti dire che la sociologia non sia altro che un’unica, grande riflessione sull’azione (per quanto autori come Archer (1995) non concordino su questo punto). Sintetizzare le posizioni teoriche e la letteratura in materia è, pertanto, sostanzialmente impossibile in questa sede. Qui mi limito a rinviare il lettore alle sintesi e alle discussioni di Crespi (1985) e Goldthorpe (2007).

21 Il lettore che abbia una certa confidenza con gli studi sociologici sulla devianza, troverà questa nota superflua.

Tuttavia penso che possa essere utile ricordare come, a partire dagli anni venti, la ricerca sui gruppi devianti, gli slum o i ghetti urbani abbiano messo in luce la generale rilevanza degli apparati normativi informali nella vita di queste comunità. Cfr. Whyte (1943), Andersen (1961), Bourgois (2005). Peraltro, gli studiosi di ziganologia potranno trovare discutibile l’accostamento tra questo filone di studi sulla devianza e la criminalità in ambienti urbani e la questione rom.

Gli italiani, i lavoratori stagionali senza dimora o gli spacciatori portoricani discussi da questi autori (per non parlare di Lemert, Sutherland, Cloward e Ohlin, per citare solo alcuni degli autori la cui opera mi orienta) sono infatti portatori di tratti e storie collettive peculiari, oltre ad essere essenzialmente stanziali (certamente non gli hobos). Di primo acchito, dunque, si tratta di soggetti malamente accostabili ai rom, che sono una popolazione resa nomade, perseguitata dallo stato con modalità molto diverse da quella dei membri delle gang o dei rampolli ribelli della borghesia. Tuttavia, pensare i rom esclusivamente come soggetti peculiari, presenta il problema di riprodurre una insostenibile immagine di alterità. I giovani rom, infatti, sono parte dello scenario urbano nazionale da anni. Sono certamente dei devianti di tipo diverso, hanno una storia che per molti versi li accomuna agli ebrei e di cui occorre tenere conto; ma ormai da decenni essi sono anche parte della società europea. Membri marginali ma titolati di essa, per così dire. Guardare ai loro comportamenti con le stesse prospettive riservate ai devianti “nazionali”, serve a riconoscere la loro condizione di confine, la loro relazione con il resto della società. Per questo ritengo che il discorso su di loro sia compatibile con gli approcci etnocentrici, ma classici, sulla devianza.

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presta ad essere interpretato in chiave “funzionalista” in ragione dell’ordine normativo e delle gerarchie su cui sorregge, lasci invece ampi spazi d’interpretazione e movimento ai soggetti. Seguendo la critica di Bourdieu (1980) al “soggettivismo” e allo “struttural-funzionalismo”,22 credo infatti che la struttura non vada intesa unicamente come insieme di vincoli e condizionamenti che determinano i corsi di azione (per quanto in gran parte lo sia), ma debba essere interpretata anche come una risultante dell’azione individuale. Allo stesso tempo, non penso che sia possibile guardare all’individuo come a un semplice produttore di decisioni volontarie o a un libero costruttore di significati, senza tenere in conto che la coscienza individuale viene prodotta all’interno di formazioni sociali e culturali strutturate e che gli individui vivono all’interno di un apparato normativo preesistente e vincolante.

Vorrei dunque accantonare tanto la prospettiva “oggettivistica”, che guarda alle strutture materiali e culturali come ad una realtà sovraordinata e stabile e che non tiene in conto i processi generativi messi in moto dai soggetti, quanto la visione “soggettivistica”, che conferisce agli attori sociali una autonomia illimitata senza riflettere sui vincoli che ne restringono la libertà d’azione. Credo dunque che il rapporto tra individui e strutture sia, in genere, un “rapporto circolare di interdipendenza” (Crespi 1985, 261) e mi sembra anche che la plausibilità di questo modello sia dimostrata, tra l’altro, dall’esperienza dei rom di Mazara del Vallo, i quali diventano così qualcosa di più che protagonisti di un semplice caso di studio e ci offrono degli spunti per riflettere su questioni teoriche più ampie.

Appare infatti plausibile che la mobilità dentro il territorio comunale (per non parlare di quella di lunga distanza, verso altre città o nazioni) vada letta esattamente nei termini di un tentativo degli individui di contrastare o moderare tanto gli effetti della struttura dei vincoli esterni (di natura economica, lavorativa, giuridica) quanto dei vincoli interni (la fedeltà alla famiglia, gli obblighi di cura dei figli verso i genitori, le aspettative della comunità riguardo il comportamento dei membri in determinate circostanze, il rispetto dell’età e dei ruoli). Sottolineare questo aspetto è 22

Potrà sembrare inconsueto riferirsi allo struttural-funzionalismo, in un’epoca in cui questo paradigma sembra essere fuori moda, e molti altri approcci lo hanno sostituito. In realtà sappiamo che gli approcci “sistemici” degli anni ottanta, così come un certo “realismo” successivo, o derivano direttamente dalla Grand Theory parsonsiana o presentano delle forti analogie con essa. Il riferimento allo struttural-funzionalismo serve dunque a ricomprendere quegli approcci che, a prescindere dall’etichetta assegnata, enfatizzano il ruolo delle strutture e sottovalutano il ruolo creativo dei soggetti.

D’altra parte, sono consapevole che anche molti approcci più o meno fenomenologici da cui sono profondamente dipendente (come l’interazionismo simbolico di Mead e Goffman o l’etnometodologia di Schutz e Garfinkel) presentano implicitamente il rischio di una deriva funzionalista nel senso qui inteso (Giglioli 1973; Crespi 1985).

Tuttavia, mi sembra che questi approcci offrano degli appigli metodologici utili a svelare il rapporto che unisce i singoli individui al “mondo della vita”, inteso come “terreno della vita umana nel mondo” (Husserl 1961, 182). Infine, faccio notare che sono poco interessato a recenti teorizzazioni su micro-macro link o integrazione azione-struttura, che mi sembrano al momento caratterizzati da un livello d’astrattezza insostenibile e che, malgrado le buone intenzioni, fatico a coniugare con l’approccio empirico che coltivo.

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importante anche al fine di destrutturare quelle immagini, proprie del discorso comune o giornalistico, che tendono a ritrarre la cultura rom come composta da tratti stabili, fissati nel tempo e, soprattutto, come una struttura sociale coesa a priori.

Per quanto queste rappresentazioni monolitiche della cultura siano ormai abbastanza desuete nelle scienze sociali, anche grazie al lavoro di autori come Geertz (1973), Said (1979), Anderson (1983), Clifford e Marcus (1986), che hanno ragionato sul “divenire” della cultura e destrutturato abilmente i discorsi intorno alle identità, le analisi sui rom tendono spesso a incepparsi su questo punto. L’enfasi sul nomadismo,23 per esempio, tende a far perdere di vista il fatto che spesso le famiglie si fermano nei campi nomadi di una città per anni e che questi spazi, dunque, non solo ospitano una popolazione che non è veramente itinerante ma giocano forse la stessa funzione dei trailer park negli Stati Uniti.24 Allo stesso modo, e questo ci interessa maggiormente, tale enfasi non riflette sul fatto che un numero oscuro ma certamente importante di rom è impegnato in processi veri e propri di insediamento in appartamenti.

Allo stesso modo non si discute adeguatamente sul fatto che tali modalità di insediamento alterano quelle intense relazioni comunitarie che, nella prospettiva monolitica sopra menzionata, caratterizzerebbero quella “cultura tradizionale” a cui i rom non intenderebbero rinunciare. Inoltre, non si mette in luce il fatto che questa alterazione dei rapporti tradizionali origina direttamente dai soggetti interessati, per quanto essa sia verosimilmente anche la risposta ad una struttura politica, giuridica, economica che disincentiva il nomadismo.

In questo senso, volendo volare alti, tale adattamento sarebbe il segno più tangibile del ripiegamento della cultura rom ad opera della società dominante. Questo movimento verso la stanzializzazione andrebbe letto, dunque, come il prodromo del definitivo successo delle politiche per la normalizzazione e l’assimilazione.

Tutto questo è naturalmente plausibile e possibile, ma anche in qualche modo indimostrabile. In considerazione di quanto detto sinora, i rom, molto più probabilmente, non stanno facendo altro che tentare di risalire la china e sfidare 23

Un approccio che non riguarda solo il discorso comune o quello giornalistico e che, anzi, orienta le politiche pubbliche riproducendo la marginalità “morale” e abitativa. Su questo punto si veda il severo monito della European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI 2006, 29).

24 I Trailer Park, ovvero parcheggi per roulotte, costituiscono lo spazio di contenimento di una popolazione spesso costituita da nativi, dal bassissimo reddito, impossibilitata ad accedere al mercato immobiliare vero e proprio (per quanto vi siano agenzie di real estate che si occupano di affittare proprio le roulotte). Questi parcheggi non sono comunque tutti uguali e ve ne sono di relativamente “lussuosi”. È pertanto vero che l’immagine di questi spazi possa risultare inappropriata o che l’impiego del termine trailer park nel linguaggio comune risulti essere ingiustamente dispregiativa. Tuttavia, malgrado i cambiamenti che questi spazi hanno conosciuto nei decenni, essi continuano ad essere soprattutto luoghi di contenimento di una popolazione marginale, per lo meno con riferimento ai redditi e al mercato del lavoro. Cfr. Hoyt (1954), Ehrenreich (2001), Salomon e MacTavish (2006).

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quell’apparato ideologico, normativo e materiale che li ha erroneamente etichettati come nomadi e che ha messo in essere azioni razionali rispetto ai fini dei nativi (le istituzioni), ma inadeguate rispetto alla logica degli soggetti da contrastare (i rom).

Radjo e gli altri, in questa prospettiva, diventano incarnazione della critica schutziana alla teoria dell’azione di Weber.25 Nella prospettiva di Schutz (1967) occorre infatti distinguere tra i differenti significati che una azione ha per chi la compie (l’istituzione) e per il suo alter (i rom).

In altri termini, per essere razionale e dotata di senso, un’azione dovrebbe basarsi su una comune base esperienziale e su un comune accordo sul significati dei segni (dimensione verbale, non verbale, simbolica, etc.). Prendendo per buona questa definizione, il corto circuito delle politiche e dei discorsi emergenziali intorno ai rom (razzisti o meno, rivolti all’accoglienza o al rigetto, etc.) ha origine nel fatto che gli attori sociali nel loro insieme non hanno condiviso un universo di significati. Le istituzioni, i partiti politici e i comitati civici, fraintendendone le intenzioni, hanno agito per anni come se i rom fossero dei nomadi impenitenti e questi ultimi, da parte loro, miravano spesso alla stabilizzazione senza però essere compresi. Le azioni dell’uno e dell’altro, insomma, non erano inseriti all’interno di un flusso comunicativo che potesse risolversi nell’intesa reciproca.

In altri termini, se la polizia o lo “stato” trattavano Radjo da nomade e con le proprie azioni lo spingevano via dai confini cittadini – di Foggia, Cagliari, della Germania, etc. – cos’altro restava da fare a Radjo se non fuggire?

Una risposta pragmatica potrebbe suggerire che, anziché scappare, Radjo dovesse cercarsi un lavoro salariato qualunque, smettere di mendicare o rubare, e dimostrare di volersi integrare. La qual cosa era resa comunque impossibile dal fatto che Radjo non sentiva di poter accedere a quel mondo perché la gente come lui non lavora. Nella sua prospettiva, 26 infatti, nessuno dà lavoro agli zingari e a questi non resta dunque che perpetuare le tradizionali pratiche “parassitarie” e “predatorie”. Non è un caso, dunque, che tale circolo vizioso s’interrompa nel momento in cui gli attori sociali (istituzioni e rom) trovano un punto d’intesa nell’ambito di pratiche informali (la concessione sostanziale degli stabili decrepiti nella casbah).

25

Una ben nota riflessione intorno al modello di Weber, ma dai tratti questa volta apologetici è quella di Boudon (1985, 43 e sgg.). La sua analisi è quasi convincente nel mostrare la “universalità” della teoria weberiana. Tuttavia, dato che la sua analisi fa perno sull’“individualismo metodologico”, a me sembra che la visione Schutz in proposito sia più sofisticata e che la sua riflessione sia più “comprensiva” di quanto non sia di per sé quella di Weber. Per Schutz, com’è noto, i punti di vista da tenere in considerazione per comprendere un’azione sono tre anziché due: quelli dei soggetti impegnati nell’interazione e quello dell’osservatore. In una prospettiva “riflessiva”, del genere da me perseguito, l’approccio di Schutz appare dunque utile anche in ragione di questo “pluralismo ottico”.

26 Una prospettiva certo non di comodo o personale, a giudicare dalle conclusioni dell’European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance, che descrivono una situazione di discriminazione diffusa per quanto riguarda il lavoro (Ecri 2006).

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Questa intesa al di fuori oppure al confine della liceità giuridica – il solo spazio possibile – è quel momento topico che segna l’inversione della tendenza e la lenta risalita della china, come l’abbiamo definita prima. In questa prospettiva, assistiamo alla messa in moto di un lento processo di mobilità sociale che non riesce a tutti allo stesso modo, ma che è ciò nonostante la condizione indispensabile per la trasformazione dei modi di vita e che non può che svolgersi nell’illegalità. L’illegalità dei rom e quella dello Stato.

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Spinelli, A.S. (2003) Baro Romano Drom. La lunga strada di rom, sinti, kale, manouches e romanichals, Meltemi, Roma.

Stack, C.B. (1974) All our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community, Harper and Row, New York, 1974 Staiti, N. (2000) “Gli zingari in Italia: cultura e musica”, Africa e Mediterraneo, 1-2.

Thomas, W.I. (1923) The Unadjusted Girl with Cases and Standpoint for Behavioural Analysis, Little Brown & C., Boston.

Tonnies, F. (1979) Comunità e società, Edizione Comunità, Milano.

Trumpener, K. (1992) “The Time of the Gypsies: A ‘People without History’ in the Narratives of the West”, Critical Inquiry, 18, 4.

Wacquant, L. (2007) Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality, Polity Press, Cambridge.

Warner. W.L., P.S. Lunt (1941) The Social life of a Modern Community, New Haven, Conn.

Weber, M. (1961) Economia e società, Ed. Comunità, Milano.

Wheeler, T.C. (1992) (a cura di) The Immigrant Experience. The Anguish of Becoming American, Penguin, New York.

Whyte, W.F. (1943) Street Corner Society. The Social Structure of an Italian Slum, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

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Zorbaugh, H.W. (1929) The Golden Coast and the Slum, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

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CARMELA CUTUGNO

TDR, THE DRAMA REVIEW: A SCRIPT FOR THE “GESTATION” OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES TDR, The Drama Review, is the first and most important Performance Studies journal. It has existed for more than half a decade, it testifies to the birth of this field of research and its following main developments. By going through the history of the journal, this short overview shows how TDR is engaged in a genuine mutual osmosis between what appears on its pages and what is happening in the world of performance practice, studies, and research.

Performance Studies is an area of research that has expanded so much that I cannot (and in fact I would not even) exercise a form of control over it.

There are departments, or, anyway, courses in Performance Studies everywhere, and everyone is free to write what feels more right and to draw his or her own line within this field of research. I have my own tool through which I choose and I spread my Performance Studies and that tool is TDR, the major Performance Studies journal. Reading TDR means to be continually updated on further developments that occur within this discipline. By reading the various issues of TDR, from the beginning to the present day, it is possible to reconstruct the story of what happened inside the PS27.

During a conversation in Canterbury, while working on Imagining O, his last performance created during his visiting professorship at the University of Kent, Richard Schechner used these words to explain me the way TDR has always been the review that offers up evidence of the state of the art in the field of Performance Studies, at least in the NYU tradition28. In fact you might almost 27

Interview with Richard Schechner, Canterbury, UK, July 2011.

R. Schechner, Performance Studies. An Introduction, second edition, New York, Routledge, 2006, p.5.

Here Schechner explains that the discipline of Performance Studies has developed in many diffent ways in many different departments, but he also mentions “two main barnds”, New York University’s and Northwestern University’s.

NYU’s performance studies is rooted in theatre, the social sciences, feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, poststructuralism, and experimental performance. NU’s is rooted in oral interpretation, communications, speech-act theory, and ethnography. But over the time, these two approaches have moved toward each other sharing a common commitment to an expanded vision of “performance” and “performativity”.

28

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speak of a relationship of genuine mutual osmosis between what appears in the issues of TDR and what is happening in the world of studies of, research into and theories of performance. The two spheres appear to influence each other, as specified again by Schechner in a special issue of TDR, which came out on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the review and which is dedicated to the history of the journal.

The positions taken—explicitly in editorials and implicitly in the selection of materials and special issues—reflect the worldview, or at least the discipline view, of the editor. […] I believe TDR has affected scholarship, performance theory, and—especially during my first editorial term from 1962 to 1969— what actually went on in the worlds of performance. Later, and especially since 1985/86 when I became editor for the second time, TDR influenced the development of performance studies as an academic discipline.29 And in fact by reading the issues of TDR, and trough them the history of the journal itself, you can find within them the visible traces of how the first department of Performance Studies came to be founded at New York University30.

TDR, The Drama Review, is today considered to be the quintessential journal of Performance Studies in the industry, or at least one of the undisputed "leading academic journals " in this field. Indeed, the name itself reveals how, originally, when it was founded in 1955 as Carleton Drama Review by Robert W. Corrigan, the review was not concerned with performance in the strict sense of the word.

Rather it was initially conceived as a place for some lecture series to be published, and afterwards, by the joint action of the then founding editor Corrigan and his advisory editor, Eric Bentley, it was transformed, in all respects, into a proper scholarly journal. The name of the journal was changed for the first time in 1957, when Corrigan, moving to Tulane University, decided to bring it with him from Minnesota to New Orleans, renaming it Tulane Drama Review.

But the real turning point in terms of growth and influence came when Richard Schechner in 1962 was appointed director of TDR. Under his leadership, TDR 29

Richard Schechner, TDR and Me, in TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 50, No. 1 (T 189), Spring 2006, p. 9.

As summarized below, regarding the publishing history of TDR resulting from the research I carried out at Princeton University Library, in particular from consulting the Series 1: TDR, 1962-2001, box 1-91, of the Richard Schechner Papers and The Drama Review Collection, in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections of the library, as well as from careful reading of specific issues of TDR dedicated to the story of the journal: TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 50, No. 1 (T 189), Spring 2006.

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started to become a showcase for non-traditional playwrights and for experimental ideas, and, in particular, it began to widen its lens to focus on a variety of other types of performance, without limiting its scope of investigation only to dramaturgy. The editorial choices made by Schechner led the journal to deal extensively with forms of political and experimental theatre, with happenings and no longer exclusively with Western theatre, as well as to make the important shift to reach out towards the social sciences and critical theory; this led, in about a decade, to the much clearer metamorphosis into Performance Studies.

Looking back, I wanted the improbable if not the impossible: a theatre journal that was about more than theatre; an “engaged” theatre (something I learned from my reading of Sartre and Camus); a connection to the emerging youth revolution in the U.S., which was tied to the movement against the Vietnam War; an equally strong participation in the black Freedom Movement. (I was active in both these movements.) But could all this happen inside theatre?

Obviously, given the pallid commercial theatre of Broadway, the nascent regional theatre movement, and the entrenched conservatism of the academic theatre, what eventuated for TDR was a program that exploded the boundaries of theatre—that went beyond the theatre. I had some Artaud in my blood, along with a big dose of Brecht. […] My first editorship of TDR work was partly formed by my education at Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Iowa, and Tulane. Not finding what I was looking for in orthodox theatre or lit-crit texts, I turned to Sigmund Freud and to Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), and R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self (1960). I began to read deeply in social anthropology and ethnography. In 1966, I was simultaneously introduced to structuralism and poststructuralism […] to […]

Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan, among others. […] It took a while for me to warm to Derrida et al., but I was instantly drawn to Claude Levi-Strauss’s ideas. The link between the social sciences and what I would soon dub “performance theory” was made. I wanted TDR to become more concerned with theory. But I was just as influenced by what was happening all around me.31 In 1967, following a series of frustrations accrued in respect of Tulane University, Schechner decided to join a group of other theatre professors in the 31

Richard Schechner, TDR and Me, in TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 50, No. 1 (T 189), Spring 2006, pp. 7-8.

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same department and resign; but this happened also because, in the meantime, he had received a job offer from the School of the Arts at NYU, which was founded and directed in 1965 by Bob Corrigan, Schechner’s friend, former mentor and thesis supervisor, and also the first author of TDR32. When moving to New York University Schechner took TDR with him, changing the name from Tulane Drama Review into The Drama Review. During the years in New York the journal took on a more evident political commitment; yet only two years later, in 1969, Schechner preferred to leave the editorial guidance of TDR to devote all of his time, apart from teaching, to his work as theatre director of the Performance Group.

Throughout this time, I continued to teach at NYU—not only because I love teaching but also because NYU was/is my bread-and-butter. However, I discovered that I could not give myself fully to TDR and to The Performance Group at the same time. I chose TPG over TDR.33 The editorial direction of TDR passed to Michael Kirby in 1971, and it remained in his hands for the next 17 years, until 1986, when Schechner returned firmly to the helm, a position that he still holds today. At that point, the emergence of Performance Studies had already taken place and TDR officially became The Performance Studies Journal, resting its magnifying glass more and more not only on theatrical phenomena (even if avant-garde forms) but on the much broader "spectrum of the performative phenomena”.

I, TDR, and performance studies have been accused of being “antitheatrical.”

It’s not true. What is true is that I have argued vehemently for the restructuring of theatre departments, the expansion from theatre into the broader field of performance studies, and for the serious study of as many of the world’s theatre and performance practices as possible. But at the same time, I know that the “aesthetic genres” of theatre, music, and dance are part of the larger world of performance. Within my own department at NYU, I work as hard as I can to maintain some distinction between performance studies and theatre studies.

32

Richard Schechner, What is Performance Studies Anyway?, in Peggy Phelan, Jill Lane (edited by) The Ends of Performance, New York University Press, 1998, pag. 357-358. [In 1965 Robert W. Corrigan founded the New York University School of the Arts. Corrigan had been at Tulane University, where he was my dissertation advisor/mentor.

He was also the founding editor of the Carleton Drama Review, later the Tulane Drama Review, presently the Drama Review (TDR), which I edited from 1962 to 1969 and again since 1986] […] [In 1967 Corrigan invited me to head the Drama Department in the NYU School of the Arts. I came with TDR, but declined the headache of administration, suggesting instead Monroe Lippman, who had resigned as chair at Tulane].

33 ibid, p. 10.

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And most of the courses I teach are theatre courses. In terms of performance theory, as far back as Goffman (1959) and Turner (1974), and on to Jon McKenzie (2001), Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait (2003), and Diana Taylor (2003), among others, all use theatre, theatricality, and drama as their core model. On a much more personal level, how can I be “antitheatrical” when I have spent most of my life working in the theatre? […]

Before I was a scholar, I was a theatre director. Before I wrote theory, I wrote plays. […] This personal history impacts TDR because I work hard to make the journal about “performance” without forgetting the theatre. This reflects the contradiction that my most intense artistic work takes place onstage, while my most probing theoretical thinking includes theatre but also goes beyond it.34 Mantichora, the journal for which this brief overview of the history of TDR has been conceived, has shown, since its first issue, a specific attention towards the field of Performance Studies. Each story is a story in itself, of course, but I think it is interesting to look at the way the first and still most important Performance Studies journal was created and then developed, sometimes following sometimes anticipating, yet always testifying the changes within this discipline. In the most recent years, the Italian academic context has been manifesting a clear interest in Performance Studies and, although a specific Performance Studies department does not (at least yet) exist, a lot of research, including mine, has moved towards that field of interest and investigation. As Marco De Marinis had pointed out in an article recently appeared on TDR, there are many points of contact between a certain tradition of Italian theatre studies (which he calls New Italian Theatrology) and the work done by American Performance Studies35. Being aware that these points of contact can be translated into an open and fruitful dialogue, we wish that Mantichora will keep following, anticipating, and testifing the next coming developments within this adventure. Good luck!

34

ivi, pag. 11-12.

Marco De Marinis, New Theatrology and Performance Studies. Starting Points Towards a Dialogue, translated by Marie Pecorari, in TDR (T212), Vol. 55, No 4, Winter 2011.

35

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JOSELLA CALANTROPO - MICHELE FANNI - FRANCESCA LATEANA - CARLOTTA MENCHICCHI - VERLENE MESQUITA - ANNA SALUTATO

THE GREAT REFUSAL MIRRORED SEMBLANCES IN VATICAN This paper is the result of a thirty hour seminar on Performance Studies, taught by Dr. Carmela Cutugno at the University of Bologna, as part of a Master course in Theories and Cultures of Representation held by Professor Marco De Marinis. The idea for the chosen topic, as well as part of the readings were suggested during the seminar by Dr. Cutugno, who assisted us for the entire process of thinking and writing about this issues. The seminar was conceived and realized as a performance studies analysis workshop and the final paper was presented and performed as the result of the course.

This essay is a synopsis of that work, and its object deals with Pope Benedetto XVI's resignation, in particular with his transformation from Pope to Emeritus Pope. We investigated such phenomenon through five different perspectives: ethical-psychological, media, theological, moral, economic. Finally, we inserted a survey concerning the reaction that this event has aroused in Brazil.

Introduction: an attempt of performance analysis Our analysis is a result of our own research and will examine only the parts of our study that comes from our research. Both our visual and written data were analyzed and our conclusions will be included in this work, the fruit of our own personal research.

One may ask, "Why include an introduction"?

We concluded that it would be useful to include for the reader some interpretation of key facts that can be used as a compass to navigate the rest of the analysis. These key facts will also serve as points of reference, an outline of sorts, to organize our thoughts, interpretation and research into a linear cohesive work.

Before we consider the "how" of this analysis, we must first identify and give place to the "who", Pope Benedict XVI; and the "what", his recent resignation as pope.

Now that we have established the full object of our research and boundaries in which to work, we must clarify a few other thing before proceeding. We found during our research that we were not working with a both a starting and ending point. We began our research for this project at the time of the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, but the true conclusion of this research cannot be attained until all the facts are made public. We cannot reach a perfectly delineated ending point because certain facts are

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not yet public and will not be made public until the death of the pope emeritus. Only then will a true conclusion be able to be reached.

With this in mind, we have focused our analysis on a particular phenomenon - the "transformation" of Benedict XVI from Pope, or the 'Vicar of Christ", to ex-pope or Pope Emeritus. This change of socio-cultural status has a specific "rite of passage" that led Pope Ratzinger from point "X" (Pope with all the rights and responsibilities which that position entails) to the point with which this work concerns itself, or point "Y" (Pope Emeritus with, at best, an ambiguous and job description and transitional phase of life).

This work shows three distinct phases of the ritual process as delineated in the studies of scholar Van Gennep. These are: Separation - Verified at the moment in which the "Holy Father" resigned; Transition - The phase which began at eight p.m. on February 28, 2013 when the service of Benedict was officially concluded. This phase continues even now.

Re-aggregation - A "return to the norm" if you will, which will occur only at the death of the Pope Emeritus leaving only "on the scene" the current Pope and returning to the normal succession of the Papal line.

This is more richly articulated and defined in the Transition : The second stage that the rites of passage begins is a period of transition in which the "passenger" finds himself neither in the old life, nor in the new; this period of absence of role and ambiguity is perceived as a danger.36 Understanding the parameters of our subject of study, we have decided to undertake this analysis, giving light to six different points of view. In this way, we reveal six particular focus points that, like magnifying glasses, reveal all of the individual details that make up the entire picture of this phenomenon to be examined, understanding that it is not a mathematical matter of "2+2=4" but more like a kaleidoscope made up of points of light and shadows.

Our analysis is therefore divided into these particular lines of thought: Ethics/Psychology, Media, Theology, Moral, and Economic. As we study media in particular we will also examine what kind of response this phenomenon provoked in

36

Emily A. Schultz, Robert H. Lavenda, Antropologia , Bologna, Zanichelli 2010, p. 161

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Brazil (The most catholic country in the world with 126 million professing Catholics).37 Ethic/Psychological point of view Via this point of view, we would like to clarify certain cardinal points about the conduct of Benedict, presenting him not only as pope but as a human being, a "men among men", called to fill an enormous role (in the etymological sense - "out of the norm").We will, therefore, re-examine the facts and actions that defined his passage of status to reveal some doubts, "cracks" so to speak, that were problematic and that demonstrate what were the difficulties for the man Ratzinger. Was he able to face the responsibility laid upon him? What masks was he forced to wear and what actions was he forced to take or not take in order not to become a victim of his own circumstances? Beginning with these points in mind, we will try to bring to light its articulated and contrasted human nature often put into crisis by the need to show unique and granite spokesman for the word of God, an indivisible representative of "one holy" Church, a figure who was absolutely unable to experience his natural diversity. We will also attempt to analyze how this tension was due to the truth he must have had to come to terms with and the dynamics of his theatrical life (for this issue we referred in particular to the study of Erving Goffman). This is made all the more apparent in light of what trends will be triggered from the day of his "resignation" when the splitting, or multiplication, of his person made real tangible realities. This only served to call into question his identity, thereby denying his "being" even existed, leading him in a transitional state, a place of ambiguity, where the quest to build himself as One led to a total break and dragged him to the brink of chaos.

A Pope incapable of filling the role?

When Benedict was made pope, he represented a paradox. On the one hand he was intellectually ruthless, on the other, he was as many other scholars, timid and totally lacking the vigor necessary to reform a continuously changing clergy38 The report presented by the international press relating to almost eight years of the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI (19 April 2005 - 28 February 2013) provides the vast majority of testimony was very negative judgment. Reports accuse him of 37

See Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life of Washington (2012) John Hooper, The Guardian, in Internazionale, A. 20, n. 987, February 15/21, 2013, p.21

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chronic shyness, an inability to take an air necessary to impose the long-awaited reforms, an insufficient force in proceeding to take place in the proposed projects, a management of the Church marked by gestures without real influence, an inadequacy of dialogue and confrontation. He was accused of being solitary, austere, isolated, weak - in short, he was accused of being an in-competent (in the etymological sense of the term) - as a result of having failed to complete the task to which he was called.

According to many, Benedict XVI was not the charismatic and decisive leader the Church needed in order to renew itself and solve the many problems which it currently faces. Joseph Ratzinger was introduced to the “masses” by the media as an educated theologian, an intellectual (prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Church and president of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and of the International Theological Commission since 1981). He was an essayist, responsible for the preparation of Catechesis internationally.

He was profiled by newspapers as a philosopher "with his feet firmly planted in the clouds”, and very distant from the problems plaguing reality. This portrait is however very simplistic and superficial, it creates a picture of a Pope who is wearing a suit that is already pre-assembled, ready to use, and useful to clarify and justify in a very narrow-minded way the causes of the problems that afflict the Church institution. To get closer to understanding this mechanism the words of Goffman seem illuminating in order to relate to one's use of facade when it turns into collective representation: The facade becomes a "collective representation" and a reality in itself. When an actor takes on a particular social role, it usually turns out that he has already been assigned a particular facade. [...] In addition, if an individual takes on a task that is not only new to him, but it is also unprecedented in that given society, or if he tries to change the point of view from which his task is considered, he will most likely find that already exist well-defined fronts from which he can choose. Therefore, when a task is given a new facade, rarely we can say that this is in itself original. Since these facades are chosen and not created, it is likely that difficulties arise when those who perform a given task are obliged to choose a suitable one among the many available and diverse choices presented.39 This brings to light, at least a little, the figure painted by the media, so that we "the audience" are too easily inclined to accept it as truth. So, ignoring the actual, true and 39

Erving Goffman, La vita quotidiana come rappresentazione, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1969, p. 39-40

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tangible conduct of the resigned Pope, the audience (and the media, for that matter), regardless, place him in a particular position, in a precise role from which he can no longer withdraw (it is, in fact, more difficult now that he is no longer what he was, to recognize his true current status).

It is this sort of extreme simplification that allows the viewer to understand the portrait through the use of a few well-tested and literary keys that, because of their being so universally effective, unfortunately, every detail and every nuance is sacrificed and offers a conclusion which is standardized and convenient. This allows a great saving of intellectual energies, but is hardly very useful in helping one to understand of the phenomenon under consideration.

In this case, as before, Goffman's work is helpful in understanding idealization: When the individual presents himself before others, his performance will tend to incorporate and exemplify the social values already accredited, even more than it involves the actual entirety of his behavior.40 So Benedict XVI had already been assigned a role that simply required interpretation, without ever losing sight of what the "public" demanded of a figure in his position. A bleak character, devoid of great sympathy, not prepared to dialogue, old and conservative, German (with an indelible past in the Hitler Youth), an adversary of relativism which was interpreted as a move away from truth and faith, a worried observer of the transformations that were a result of global dynamics, and nostalgic admirer of the past (so much so, that he resumed wearing some of the official attire "in vogue" at the time of Pius IX, the last ruler of the Papal States in office from 1846 until 1870). A character almost of a romantic nature, who lived for years in the Vatican in the shadow of John Paul II, a sort of evil advisor to the Pope who was made "a Saint" almost immediately. He represented the power of a dark and menacing sort present in the Catholic Church. The comparison with his predecessor, so deeply loved and revered, weighed on the formation of the character of "Benedict XVI" so as to erase any defect (or murky impairment) characterizing the Polish Pope and, indeed giving the newcomer the responsibility and the heavy burden of scandals that stained the perceived immaculate conduct of the Vatican. Cardinal Ratzinger had to assume, despite himself, this new identity that was not consistent with what he had been for seventy-eight years. It was precisely because of this need for classification and standardization that the flexibility inherent in the articulation of the human 40

Ivi, p. 47

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psychological version of the man - Ratzinger, that it appeared so difficult for him to accept the renunciation of the papal ministry. This is an act that disorients the viewer, suggesting the doubt, upsetting his point of view, stumbling upon "a mistake of Nature, something that does not ring true, a disentangling thread that finally put us in the middle of a truth".

In this regard, analysis on the "resignation" offered by Enzo Bianchi, prior of the Monastery of Bose, seems particularly interesting. It is in this analysis that the decentralization process put in place by the Pope with his gesture is emphasized, a kind of voluntary exit from the characters of the character, to return to his humanity: Thus the Catholic is invited to look more to the Papal ministry than to the person of the Pope. This is certainly revolutionary and, I believe, even more evangelical.

Whoever carries the episcopate or service bureau in the Church, does so in communion with Christ the Lord in measure of the degree in which he was placed, but once ceased the exercise of the ministry, another can continue it and the person who has previously exercised disappears, diminishes, retires.41 Understanding, in the words of the prior, "greater depth of analysis" and a much more polished ability to unveil the dynamics of the real compared to the many (too many) easy accusations made by the media about the conduct of the Pope, it appears unsatisfactory to solve this phenomenon with a simple "out of character". Put in these terms this resignation seems almost a "painless" scene. As if it really Benedict XVI after years on the papal throne peacefully decided, to abandon his post as Vicar of Christ and return to a quiet and serene life of theological study and prayer.

The pope would not "go back to being Cardinal Ratzinger,"42 but would take on the new and ambiguous role of Benedict XVI, Pope Emeritus.

Before examining this new and complicated condition, we believe it is necessary to deal with some thoughts regarding the "genealogy of the waiver," or, in other words, we'll try to answer the question: What could have prompted the Pope to make a decision so radical?

In his official statement on February 11, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI, explaining the reasons for his choice, reveals that:

41

Enzo Bianchi, Benedetto XVI ora è piÚ che mai il successore di Pietro, in La stampa, February 12, 2013 Ibidem

42

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my strength, advanced age, are no longer adequate to exercise properly the Papal ministry. (...) To steer the boat of St. Peter and proclaim the Gospel, you must have vigor both in body and soul, vigor that, in recent months, has diminished in such a way that I must acknowledge my inability to well administrate of the ministry entrusted to me.

This "confession", though it seemed unsatisfactory to many - if not false and misleading - in our analysis, is a perfect link to the path that we are trying to illuminate.

By our point of view, the biggest factor that led the Pope to abandon his position depended crucially on his glaring "failure as an actor" or better said, by his inadequacy to play a role pre-established and conceived by others (collective representation). One could possibly recognize in this alleged inability, a tenacious will to evade all types of simulation and remove any deceptive behavior. It is not for nothing that the motto of Pope Benedict XVI (since the time of his appointment as archbishop of Monaco and Freising) was Cooperatores veritatis (Cooperators of truth). He may have made a mistake by his dramatic conduct to cover his role, thus denying the presence of the theatrical nature in his position, recognizing himself as an individual, free from imposed schemes, even though he was constantly called to choose between fixed and tested paradigms of behavior, in brief adoption of a character who wears a costume (in this John Paul II was proven much more aware and prepared, however, do not forget that the young Karol Wojtyla was, among other things, an actor and playwright).

Goffman, explaining the description of a "sincere actor", distinguishing him from that of a cynic, cites Park: Everyone, always and everywhere, more or less consciously plays a part ... And it is in these roles that we know one other, and it is in these roles that we know ourselves.

In a certain sense, this mask represents the concept that we have of ourselves - the role of which we try to live up to - this mask is our true self, the "I" that we want to be.43 "Our" unconscious actor, not accepting this necessary step becomes completely absorbed by his acting, does not distinguish between himself and the character played resulting in "being sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages, 43

Erving Goffman, La vita quotidiana come rappresentazione, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1969, p. 31

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is, in fact, the reality".44 It is in this way, in sociological terms, that we recognize Benedict XVI as a sincere actor. The condition of sincere actor has some important consequences that endanger the psychological state of the individual who experiences this condition: adequate importance is not given to the division between the stage and backstage, "geographical" areas which are of fundamental value in the conduct of every human being. They delineate on the one hand the scope of the "stage" with its accompanying rules to be observed so that the representation is satisfactory and consistent, on the other hand is delineated the location suitable for the preparation of the representation, where the actor is allowed to relax, stop playing the part, quit the role in which he is called onto the stage. The backstage is thus a place of intimacy, the manifestation of his "authentic" nature. This second area offers the actor security, putting him at ease by denying access to that space to the public, thus allowing the transgression of rigid precepts that govern the representation or "act": the absence of this space and time overloads the individual and most importantly, cause a denial of his identity, bringing him more and more towards a total self-identification with the character played. The boundaries between reality and artifice blur, and the actor loses control over the representation or "act".

This maneuver of self-deception is continuous, and psychoanalysts have provided interesting data on this phenomena which they indicate by the term 'repression' and 'dissociation'. It is perhaps from this that the term "distancing himself" comes, that is, the process by which a person is to feel estranged from his "I" (self-perception).45 This "pathology" in our case reveals even more critical characteristics: The higher the place held in the social pyramid, the smaller is the number of people with whom one may be familiar and even less time one has to spend backstage.46 All of these symptoms are also understood, in our particular case, in the light of a crucial event that has profoundly marked the last days of the pontificate of Benedict XVI (having already been beset by scandals linked especially to the IOR and the protection that the Church would exercise in respect to some priests accused of pedophilia): his shocking loss of confidence in the circle of collaborators, which had as its maximum and the final epilogue the "betrayal" of Paul Gabriel (aka "the crow"), chamber assistant in the papal rooms, one of the rare familiar figures of 44

Ibidem, p. 29 Ivi 46 Ibidem, p. 154 45

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Ratzinger. Gabriele, by stealing from the pope's own suite secret papers relating to the "vatileaks" case" and selling them to journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, compromised the already very fragile, intimate dimensions of the German Pope.

One could say that this scandal was "the straw that broke the camel's back", because it only represents the culmination of a much more deep-rooted and threatening problem. Before beginning, however, we need to clarify some terms that will be useful in our analysis of this particular case (again borrowed from Goffman): Team of representation or "any group of individuals who work in the staging a single routine" and "participating in "preservation of a certain definition of the situation" or the collaboration team: A person who is depend upon for a collaboration on the drama, in order to define the situation that proves insensitive to informal sanctions and insists on betraying the representation ("act") or desires to give it special emphasis, is part of the team, ,and it is in fact because he is part of it that he can cause this kind of trouble.47 If one tries to recognize the narrow circle of Ratzinger's collaborators - the structure of his "team", and one thinks of the Pope as an undisciplined actor, the collaborator of the scene that does not comply with the rules and breaks the representation threatening the consistency of the performative situation, one can (at least partly) clarify this radical transformation that has occurred in the Vatican. Franco Buffoni in an article on Alfabeta 2.28 emphasized the very low confidence the pope had in his collaborators that had proven "capable of unleashing huge scandals in order to harm one another".48 This outlines the profile of a team unreliable, inconsistent, inadequate to the task, incapable of achieving a coherent situation: on the one hand Benedict XVI, not accepting the rules required of a dramatic actor, proves to be a difficult coworker, and on the other hand the team itself does not appear cohesive and conscientious of a bond of mutual interdependence that should bind its members.

But something still is not right in this scenario: by this explanation the current Pope Emeritus seems to have abandoned his post because of the excessive pressure to which it was subjected, and, as a result his obvious inability to understand the facts and circumstances that revolved around him wildly, and then failing to react appropriately. It is too simplistic to reduce the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the Inquisition), "God's rottweiler", as he was affectionately labeled by the press, to a provincial illiterate and myopic 47

Erving Goffman, La vita quotidiana come rappresentazione, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1969, p. 101 Franco Buffoni, Le mani lunghe di Ratzinger in Alfabeta2.28, April, 2013, anno III, n. 28, p. 15

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interpreter of Vatican dynamics. After thirty years of hard work and study at the Vatican in the shadow of John Paul II, away from the limelight television, but very much present in the conduct of the political line of the Church, it would seem very strange that he would have such a resigned attitude and even more strange would the implied lack of discipline with regard to a very well-known role!

It is again Buffoni who offers a hypothesis that fits perfectly with our analysis by introducing a new and essential character: Georg Gaenswein, already Ratzinger's private secretary, now appointed prefect of the Pontifical Household, in short a kind of powerful minister who escapes the authority of the Pope's secretary (the hostile Cardinal Bertone) and does not decline, therefore, remains the in his role with full power even during Bergoglio's time.

So let's review the scenario: Ratzinger retires with Georg three hundred meters from the Apostolic Palace, Georg crosses the garden every morning to carry out his nine to five job with the new pope, then reporting back for dinner. [...] No retreat, therefore, only a deadly blow to the absolute sovereignty of his successor.49 The clarifying link is discovered: yes, Ratzinger was a bad performer, an undisciplined actor, but this is perhaps because in reality he was aiming for something else, a far more ambitious role, namely that of director.

The former Pope knows very well the dynamics that underpin the work of his team of representation, and has very clear ideas about what he believes to be the role that the director plays in the team: reposition the members within the representation when their interpretation becomes inconvenient and distribute the parts in the staging, attributing with precision the individual facade needed for each part.

What has this resignation been, if not a radical repositioning of the members and a strategic re-allocation of roles? Directing a first class operation, which reveals the exceptionally fine dramatic abilities of the Pope emeritus.

In conclusion Goffman seems to rush to our aid again by offering two categories that seem to perfectly establish our case and allows us to slide away from this intricate staging: the concepts of expressive leadership and directive leadership. It seems illuminating (and in some ways disconcerting) to conclude with this long quotation which seems to us to complete the analysis discussed in this chapter: 49

Franco Buffoni, Le mani lunghe di Ratzinger in Alfabeta2.28, April, 2013, anno III, n. 28, p. 15

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It is important to note that actors in a position of clear leadership, are often only symbolical leaders, chosen on the basis of a compromise, or as a means to neutralize positions potentially threatening or to strategically hide the power behind the scenes, and therefore also the power behind the power behind the scenes. So every time the holder of a temporary responsibility without experience, is vested with formal authority over subordinates experts, we see that people who are officially in possession of power are often lured with a part that is only dramaturgical while it is the subordinates who are actually running the show.50 The Media Perspective @Pontifex_it On February 11, 2013, the anniversary of the signing of the Lateran, and the anniversary of the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Lourdes, a holiday at the Vatican, at 11:46 the Vatican archivist Giovanna Chirri released the first notice that shook the world "Pope leaves pontificate".

The declaration of resignation of the Papal ministry, according to rumors, handwritten by Benedict XVI himself only a few minutes before with the help of second secretary Monsignor Alfred Xuereb, was pronounced during a consistory for the canonization of the martyrs of Otranto. The Consistory, as usual, had been announced well in advance, and for the Vatican, appeared to be a routine event. The words of the Pope, underscored by a simple but definitive gesture of the hand, left the College of Cardinals frozen in silence. No one would have suspected that this would happen.

That same day, in the morning, some journalists from TGR Puglia had insistently, but vainly, tried to obtain from CTV, the Vatican Television Center, images of the event, but to further confirm the low media profile that the papal information officers had ascribed to the event, the CTV did not foresee any of this coverage. If the coverage had been accessible to journalists from the beginning of the Consistory, they would have realized that it in fact was not an occasion like any other, starting from the detail of the dark glasses in which the Archbishop Georg G채nswein, prefect of the pontifical household, as well as secretary of Pope Benedict XVI, had presented himself in the Throne Room, covering his eyes.

50

Erving Goffman, La vita quotidiana come rappresentazione, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1969, p. 120

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The visual memory given to the world is only those few minutes, thanks to the purchase request of journalists from Puglia who eventually found a partner willing to listen to them. From these images, in fact, one is able to capture the look of terror on the face bishop Guido Pozzo, chaplain of the pope for a little over a month, positioned to the right of Benedict XVI, where also (off-camera) Monsignor G채nswein was sitting. The secret intentions of the Pope were, for once, well guarded.

As soon as the news was leaked, a "virtual tsunami" engulfed thousands of servers bouncing from one side of the globe to the other in search of confirmation. The first reaction was that of disbelief. The two words "advancing age" contained in the announcement made the rounds of the web. Among the very first caustic comments was that of Dagospia: "Ratzinger has fooled them all!" After only a few minutes, the news on Twitter took first place in the global trends with the hashtag "dimissioniPapa", "Pope", "Benedict XVI", "28 February" (the date when he would leave the papacy), "priest", "Father Lombardi, the spokesman of the Holy See". In less than three hours there were 700 thousand tweets relayed by the United States, Europe and Asia, through the Middle East, dedicated to the resignation: "Pope" was the word most used, cited in 92% of posts (estimates of Reputation Manager, a company that tracks Twitter). "Ratzinger changes history", "his is a great lesson" were a couple of the most common phrases in the post relayed on social networks. At 2 pm Facebook completely locksup: a black out probably due to the huge amount of comments, posts and photos published by users to comment on the choice of the Pope. Dozens of groups created in a few minutes, entitled "Resignation of the Pope.

It was out of "respect" (one of the words most clicked by the commentators of the network) that Ratzinger made such a decision. He is a Pope who" recognizes his limits." "All of the Popes had health problems." "Resignation seems a gesture of freedom is destined to change the Church". It was said on Twitter again and again: "the resignation of the Pope clearly shows his great humanity and an extraordinary attachment to the good of the Church".

For a few seconds the Pope's Twitter profile (@Pontifex_it) was unreachable because of too heavy an avalanche of clicks on the page created on December 12, which saw for the first time in history a pope "chirp" with his own tablet. After a few hours the social network also filled up with spam, junk messages that use popular keywords to advertise sites that had nothing to do with the Vatican.

The "tweets" and the posts of celebrities cannot be missed. Even the leaders of the political spectrum, the Quirinale (presidential palace) and vertices of the European

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Union commented on the web with deep respect the choice of the Pope: all realizing that February 11 will forever be a historic day.

That same night, a lightning strike was captured by a photographer and ad hoc in a video. It struck the dome of St. Peter's, becoming the symbolic image of the collective shock.

The following day the online sites of agencies and newspapers as well as the newspapers themselves, recorded and amplified the general surprise at the decision and the announcement, pointing out on the front page, with titles in nine columns, the epochal character of the event: "The Pope leaves", "A Historic Goodbye" stated La Repubblica. An elusive photo stands out in the middle. Space dedicated to the event was not only in the Italian newspapers, which have always devoted considerable space to the ecclesiastical affairs (The church is so influential on Italian society and politics as to have led to the emergence of the professional figure of the "Vaticanist").

One can just browse through magazines all over the world to get an idea of the impact of the papal decision and the different attitudes with which it has been received. The lightning strike on the dome of St. Peter dominated the entire front page of El Espectator of Bogota, Colombia, and also appeared in the The Guardian in London, with certain ironic comments such as, "Bolt from the blue", alluding to the proverbial lightning a clear sky.

Decidedly irreverent, if not mocking, are LibĂŠration in Paris and Die Tageszeitung in Berlin. Particularly in the German newspaper the front page was almost completely white, no photo of the Pope, only his red moccasins51.

In the following days, the satire of many newspapers became even more offensive. In the U.S., The New York Times declared that as a result of the resignation of the Pope, the Church was put "at a crossroads" and the main article was titled: A Turbulent Tenure for a Quiet Scholar, obviously referring to a situation of internal disturbance to the Catholic Church, which was also mentioned in the Independent in London, using the term "turmoil" (tumult) and coming to a precise conclusion : New Leader Wanted. In Germany, the influential Die Welt pointed out the "weariness" of Benedict XVI, overturning with this term a fact and putting in its place an ambiguous allusion of a psychological nature desired and exercised.

On the front page of The Daily Telegraph in London, a merciless photo pointed a finger at the fragility of the Pope. In Madrid, El Pais focuses on his lack of energy, 51

Roberto Rusconi, Il gran rifiuto. PerchĂŠ un papa si dimette, Brescia, Morcelliana, 2013, p. 9.

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making it impossible not to notice the comment below which quite clearly is stressed that the "retreat" of the Pope would reopen the struggle for power in the Vatican. In Madrid again, the conservative El Mundo noted that Benedict XVI, with his gesture, interrupted the tradition of the Pope who "dies on the cross". The phrase in the title was in quotation marks, whereas the subtitle was in bold print showing the heavy criticism by the cardinal of Krakow, former secretary of John Paul II, who had stated that the pope "does not come down from the cross." The Canadian National Post and The International Herald Tribune and especially, but not only, the Anglo-Saxon press, dwelt immediately on his successor.

In most of these newspapers, once gone beyond the effective headlines, the comments in the articles are still disputable, reflecting a broad spectrum of attitudes.

These further differentiated and faded in the following days, when, truthfully, other news stories regained their space and the events of the summit of the Catholic Church received less attention. On the first day their pages are thick with statements and assessments of prelates, often subtly and vaguely suggestive, especially when it comes to characters lapped by a possible candidate for the succession.52 Nanni Moretti, director of the film We Have a Pope in 2011, had simply "changed the air" by bringing to the cinema the dramatic resignation of a cardinal played by Michel Piccoli. The latter, panicked after being elected Pope, first attempts to disappear on the streets of Rome. Later, after being brought back to the Vatican, when giving the blessing to the faithful he exclaims: "I ask the Lord's forgiveness for what I am about to do... I understand now that I am unable to sustain the role that was entrusted to me." - the dramatic resignation of one who considered himself inadequate to a role deemed too great. In this regard, the journalist Natalia Aspesi wrote: "The pope, as interpreted by Michel Piccoli - old, depressed and lost - escapes to the throne, feeling inadequate, thus provoking a new and profound emotion to the shocking words and gesture made by the actual pope, Benedict XVI." In the end, a white helicopter lifted off the background of the eternal city. It is with this scene that we finally and symbolically bid farewell to Pope Benedict, turning the last day of his pontificate into a big media event with every detail properly in place.53 A true rite of passage (one with a "fellinian" flavor) - one cannot help but recall the opening scene of La Dolce Vita, with the helicopter carrying Christ over Rome - by which is completed the temporary transfer of the Pope to Castel Gandolfo and the 52 53

R. Rusconi, op. cit., Brescia, Morcelliana, 2013, pp. 10-11.

February 28, 2013 [A/N]

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consequent abandonment of the Vacant Residence. In this, many have seen a sinister metaphor of the empty tomb. An event that, as written by Dario Morelli, despite its historical importance, could pass quietly from a media point of view, yet instead by design and details has been deeply engraved in the collective memory. It is further evidence of a skillful use of the media on which the Catholic Church continues to improve day by day, and that is inscribed in the reflection on the communication that the Church itself has carried out in recent years. This causes one to question the impact that this has on one's perception of reality, of ourselves and our relationships.

Is the Church, therefore, able to recognize the signs of the times? In the last five years of his pontificate, Benedict XVI had shown a great deal of attention to the changing reality of digital media and its significance for humanity and for the Church. He is the first Pope on Twitter, the first one that was open to new technologies and amazed the whole world with the announcement of his resignation in Latin seen by thousands of users. He had already defined these new communication technologies a "gift to humanity" (Post, 2009), how they are changing not only the way we communicate, but communication itself (Post, 2011). In his message for the 47th World Day for Social Communications, the Pope used the metaphor of the door to define social networks, indicating it as a way to understand a space and inhabit it. The door is not a tool to pass over, but a transitional place. Not a closed border (a limes, from which we draw the word "limit") but a threshold, an access point (from the Latin limen).

The door also tells of a discontinuity that draws our attention to differences of the spaces that it both separates and unites. This change in attitude is not without meaning: Pontifex is the Pope, not a subject that speaks on his behalf. This does not mean that Benedict XVI has actually tweeted without availing himself of some help.

But the birth of a virtual alter ego puts the Pope on a much more interactive plane than has been made possible by other types of technologies. Perhaps behind all this was a concealed attempt to close the distance between the people and a Pope said to be too rigid, cold and distant, too "German". On the other hand, to say that it also gives "His Holiness" influence seems rather simplistic. One might then wonder, then, why Twitter and Facebook? The reason is simple: Facebook is a more spirited platform, almost passionate, and "friends" are not only a question of terminology, but are different from the followers. Either way, if only for semantic reasons "friends" rather than the "fans" best suited the Pope's interests54 However, according to the Reputation Manager, - an agency specializing in techniques to improve online reputation - the Pope's presence in these mediums is 54

URL: www.Libertiamo.it, April 20, 2013

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considered mainly to be negative by the users, unlike the Dalai Lama, perceived as closer and closer, his presence on Twitter has been branded as communicative catastrophe. Perhaps this is because the communicative dynamic of Pope Benedict has remained unidirectional and centralized? The network 2.0 represents a place of mediation, but there can be no "dialogue" if the language remains centered solely on self both on and outside of the network. The Pope on Twitter is follows only himself, offsetting the social aspect of the medium in question. One therefore cannot underestimate the risks of weakening of Church mediators.

Antonio Spadaro - a Jesuit theologian and director of The Catholic Civilization, an influential Jesuit magazine, and oldest Italian magazine ever - even spoke of cybertheology on a homonymous blog, a point of reference for all those responsible for dealing with the media and religion in Italy. The basic theme is the relationship between digital thinking and understanding of the faith.

The American theologian Dwight J. Friesen predicted an evolution of the ecclesiastical institution towards a model of decentralized and interconnected Church, a Church that calls for networked structures of individual local churches. They would become Christ-Commons in this context, with the primary purpose of developing a connective environment where people can congregate in the name of Christ. This version though is rejected by Spadaro, who denies the sociological drift (seemingly losing the understanding that the Church is 'mystical body'). Though one can appreciate the attempt to enhance the horizontal dimension of the Church as a community, the People of God. In addition one must also acknowledge his opposition to the liturgy of the so called online "Eucharist telematics." The lesson that comes from the use of these digital connections, he says, if anything, is about the rediscovery of the missionary nature of the Church. The network - as reported by Alessandro Santagata in an article in the Huffington Post - can be considered as a stimulus to strengthen the pastoral nature of the Church which cannot ignore the new demand for connectivity. This can also be used as an open source of theology (Justin Baeder/Andrew Perriman), whose source code is The Revelation. Spadaro concludes, recalling the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his theory of Christ as the "Omega Point", that the network is not an alien means to the Christian program.

In the most Catholic nation in the world Contextualization

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Brazil, as is well known, was "born" Catholic: this is because the first travelers to that land were Spanish and Portuguese explorers reaching it not only with the intention of conquering lands and natural resources economically, but also with the dream of millenarian Christian salvation, caressed by the imaginary European desire to find an earthly paradise, an idea based on the book of Genesis and re-created from the Edenic imagination for centuries. The Iberian expansion, therefore, also meant the expansion of Catholicism in Brazil by the union of the cross and the sword, the throne and altar, which has not changed over the decades and centuries even with the establishment of nation-states within the continent , since many countries have legally adopted Catholicism as the official religion. This results in the absence of restriction of religious freedom in the region. Over time, however, the situation has changed depending on the country, and today one can see a certain heterogeneity of positions regarding official relations between religion and politics, church and state.

Brazil is the country with the most professing Catholics in the world: 126 million.

Despite the relativity of the statistical data presented, the importance occupied by the Catholic Church in the country is notable. It is, in fact, not just a numerical importance, but also political and social, as is attested by authors such as Brett (1993) and Smith (1998). 55 Other religions in Brazil are indigenous ones such as Judaism, Eastern religions, African American and new religious movements.

A first find, resulting from the numbers of the Christian presence in Brazil, with the consequent reduction of religious diversity, was made in 1997 by Antonio Flavio Pierucci, who argued: I believe that there is still very little religious diversity in Brazil [...]. Of those called 'great religions' or 'world religions', which ones are those that have grown in their ideas or institutions that have shaped us? We have only Christianity and none other [...]. They used to say, jokingly, that the (religious) fate of the religious Brazilian national is not at all enviable - is that of conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism. (Pierucci, 1997a, p. 259-260).

A second point of observation comes from a double religious phenomenon, as observed in Latin America, which is strengthened with each new census. It is, namely, the decline of individuals calling themselves Catholic, accompanied by an 55

From Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life di Washington (2012)

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increase of religious affiliations to evangelical segments , especially the Pentecostal movement. This also differs from country to country. In any case, the increase in Pentecostalism which has occurred in Latin America in recent decades has caused a social scientist to propose the idea of a "new religious reformation" (Martin, 1990), and another to wonder if these countries were not experiencing a " Pentecostalization of Latin America" (Stoll, 1990). Now, if these assumptions seem exaggerated, one cannot help but notice a diversity in Pentecostalism regarding the diversification of social subjects affected by its religious message. The diversity of theologies and new expressions religious Pentecostals, is called, in the absence of better terminology, neo- Pentecostalism (Gold; Seman, 1997). In addition to this, evangelicals, and especially Pentecostals, are very involved in Brazilian politics.

Patterns of separation of church and state In Brazil, there is legal separation of Church and State, and religious freedom is guaranteed for all citizens, as well as equality between the various religions. Article 19 of the 1988 Constitution confirms the separation between Church and State, but it does so indirectly. 56 The article cited reads: It is forbidden to Union, to the States, to the Federal District and to the municipalities: I - establish religious cults or churches, subsidize them, prevent operation or maintain them or their representatives, dependency relationships or alliance, except in accordance with the law in collaboration of public interest.

Article 5 of the Constitution proclaims freedom of conscience and belief as follows: - Freedom of conscience and belief is inviolable, being guaranteed the free exercise of religious worship and being guaranteed by law, the protection of places of worship and their rites; - No one can be deprived of rights because of religious, philosophical or political beliefs unless he pleads to exempt himself from any legal obligation imposed on all, and then refuses to perform an alternative obligation established by law.

Having understood this, the country has presented itself legally as a secular state, modern and liberal, characterized by the separation of Church and State, which remains neutral in relation to religions as long as they do not interfere in public affairs. According to this paradigm, the state gives the same legal status to all 56

For a current and historical analysis about the separation between State-Church in Brasil, see Oro (2006)

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religious

groups,

by

equal

treatment

of

religious

organizations.

The Brazilian Perspective The following attempt, regarding response that the waiver of Benedict XVI has provoked in Brazil, is that of a performative analysis , carried out in the form of Brecht (German writer and playwright)of the phenomenon, focusing on the ritual perspective - to Performance Studies. Since the February 11(2013) announcement to the day he left office at 8pm, February 28, Pope Benedict Pope had become only the pope "emeritus", having left the Throne of Peter vacant until the cardinals elected a new pope. Among the other "actors" in the performance and the "audience" represented by the Catholic world (and others) who have witnessed this drastic change, you will find the thousands of people of the Brazilian nation. The Brazilians reacted to each other with emotion and attention detail, attentive to the media, the principal means of communication. Because of the geographical distance, the media was the key element of "approach" to the Brazilian faithful by the "main character".

Since this is the main point of our analysis, we can analyze the phenomenon of the resignation of Benedict XVI as an object of performance, which can be defined as: Performance - that which consists of a double behavior exercised, encoded and transmitted. This double behavior is generated through the interaction between game and ritual. In fact, a definition of performance can be: ritualized behavior conditioned/permeated by the game. Rituals are a way to remember the people.

Rituals are memories of action, encoded by action. The rituals also help people to deal with difficult transitions, ambivalent relationships, hierarchies, and problematic desires that exceed or violate the norms of everyday life. The game gives people a chance to try temporarily what would normally be taboo, excess or risky. Both the rite and the game bring people to a "second reality", separated from every-day life.

This is actually where they can become different from what they are every day. When one temporarily "becomes" another, he performs actions other than that which he used to do in every-day life. For this reason, ritual and game transform people, permanently or temporarily. These are called "rites of passage". 57 Speaking of this as a drama, we can establish a relationship between the main actor, in this case Benedict XVI, and the other spectators of the performance. We can retrace the route in its end, as it was "played out" by Ratzinger who became Pope and then Pope Emeritus, and how his performance was closely linked to the "religious 57

Richard Schechner, Performance e Antropologia, organização: Zeca Ligiéro – Rio de Janeiro: Manual X, 2012..

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world", where the "sacred" and the invocation of God are present, where the rituals characterized by masses are celebrated as a form of ritual for people (audience). It is the protagonist himself who must understand the processes of transition, in which the ritual is the game where people are transformed, in this case, temporarily, as it happens for the Pope Emeritus who will end this phase with his death.

In Brazil, the news of the resignation generated a series of questions for the Brazilian people, thanks to the persistent dissemination of news about it, almost as if the news itself was still waiting to be confirmed, because of its unusual content, yet little by little the inexorability imposes itself on the Brazilians' minds: it is true, Benedict XVI has decided to resign!

The biggest surprise, however, is not due to the irregularity of situation, but the personal circumstances of the Pope, the true protagonist of this event, and the many repercussions he faced. To the Brazilian people this was seen as a great sense of detachment, not taking advantage of the personal benefits that his station guaranteed him. He was serene, seemed to understand the consequences of his actions and declared that he acted freely, after obtaining the personal guarantee that this decision was congruent with what had grown in his conscience and with his commitments at the time that he was elected Pope. To Brazil, a very religious country, where the most population is a practicing Catholics, apart from the non-religious and evangelical Protestants, in short a "Christian" nation, the criticism from the newspapers against Benedict XVI for his conservative concepts are many. There are differing opinions regarding the ideas of the church today.

In addition to this, he showed above all, a great deal of responsibility. He gave ample termination time for the Church to have time to assimilate the new situation, and completed of all the formalities derived from his act. Setting a time limit of 17 days, since the announcement to the actual validity of the waiver, by the authority acquired by his gesture, set a reasonable pace that was observed for all the measures taken. It is within this period that there was a Mass in St. Peter's Basilica, celebration, farewell to the priests, his last prayer of the Angelus, following various rituals. According to Schechner rituals are normally divided into two main types: the sacred and the secular. Sacred rituals are those associated with the expression or the promulgation of religious beliefs. It is intended that this religious belief system involves communication, a prayer, if not an invocation of supernatural forces.

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Schechner also emphasizes that rituals can be understood, from at least four perspectives: • Structures - such as the rituals are seen and heard, how they use space and time, who performs them and how they are performed; • Functions - rituals that are carried out by groups, cultures and individuals; • Processes - the dynamics underlying the creation of rituals, like how rituals promote and deal with changes; • Experiences - how to be "in" a ritual.58 Starting from the fact that there is a large number of spectators who observe this ritual that is translated into all the languages in a participatory way and that even the Brazilian faithful perform acts of faith and gratitude to Benedict XVI, the news affirmed that: 59 Benedict XVI is no longer the head of the Catholic Church on Thursday from 8pm (4pm in Brazil). Bells around the world announced the official resignation and the end of his papacy. When the helicopter carrying Benedict XVI to his place of retreat, Castel Gandolfo, flew, at the Vatican, the bells of the church of Rome were made to play in homage to the pope who was passing now to the position of "pope emeritus".

The Archdiocese of São Paulo celebrated a mass in the Sé Cathedral, officiated by Auxiliary Bishop Tarcísio Scaramussa.

In Rio de Janeiro, a city that hosted what would be the next World Youth Day in July of this year, On the next Friday, (the 22) a Mass of thanksgiving was celebrated for the services rendered by the Pope.

Churches all over the country prayed special prayers in honor of the Pope in the last Mass of the day. In several cities this act was repeated with gratitude, respect, acts of faith and devotion.

It should be noted, as well, the participation of a people so far away geographically.

Thanks to the media, churches located in the country were able to participate in this ritual as a listeners and observers, split into groups scattered throughout Brazil.

Beginning with the four aspects of the ritual stated before, according to the author this performance should be explored from many points of view such as: ethnologists, 58

Ivi http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mundo/1238358-sinos-marcam-fim-do-papado-de-bento-16.shtm

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anthropologists or neuropsychologists, in order to investigate the theoretical performance of the inherent ritual processes through related workshops, essays and performances. According to Richard Schechner: from the vast literature on ritual, only little is relevant to studies of performances. He identifies seven key themes for exploration, but we want to focus on just two: Rituals as performance The authors cited here by Schechner, indicate some particular features of the performance of Benedict XVI, since he first began to contemplate resignation, until the announcement followed by various actions, until the final "detachment", becoming Pope Emeritus. In this aspect Durkeim recognized a similarity in which the rituals are thoughts and actions. 60 This is one of the qualities that make ritual similar to theater.

At this point we are able to bring to mind the images of the scenes of announcements and statements, quotes, such as on a stage with the "acts" always well prepared, processed, with all the scenic elements on stage. These scenes include the "protagonist" and all the other performers that make up the scenes seen around the world, announced, with many spectators.

Arnold van Gennep (1873 - 1957) has also recognized the ritual/theatrical dynamic.61 In his study of "rites of passage", van Gennep has proposed a three-stage structure of the ritual: preliminary, transitional and post-transitional. He points out that life is a succession of transitions from one phase to another, and that every step of the way is marked by a ritual.

The life of Joseph Ratzinger is precisely divided into different phases, accompanied by rituals, beginning with his pontificate April 19, 2005, who had a history of eight years, this period is characterized by several facts with many repercussions, until the conclusion of this phase, a self described "simple pilgrim", in a speech given to the clergy of Rome in the 14th of February. Then we will continue to analyze this fact, focusing in the middle phase - the transitional.

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Émile Durkheim (1858-1917): French sociologist, one of the founders of sociology, anthropology and psychology.

Author of The elementary forms of religious life (1911, Eng. 1915).

61 Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957): French ethnographer and folklorist, author of Rites of passage (1908, Eng.1960).

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Ritual as Transitional Performance Van Gennep understood that these rites of passage consist of three stages - the preliminary, the transitional and the post-transitional. The middle phase is transitional - a period of time in which a person is "alien (or "foreign to) and between" social categories or identities. It is during the transitional phase that takes place the real work of the rites of passage. At this point, the transitions and transformations take place in specially marked places.

The work of the transitional phase is twofold: first, to reduce those entering the ritual to a state of vulnerability, so that they are open to change. People who are stripped of their old identities and places determined in the social world, enter into a time-space where they are neither-this-nor-that, neither here nor there, in the middle of a trip from one social standing to another. During this time, they are literally stripped of power and, often, of identity. Second, during the transitional phase, people internalize their new identity and begin to experiment with their new powers. There are several ways to perform the transformation. People can make oaths, learn traditions, wear new clothes, perform special actions, be religiously "sacralized" or circumcised.

On April 19, 2005, Joseph Ratzinger began a transitional phase and in the process became Benedict XVI, posing as a "laborer in the vineyard of the Lord", he himself said on the 27th of February in his last speech to the faithful of how he felt with a life "without private space" with the heart that had to be "enlarged" to the world by making mention of the fact that he felt the responsibility of being spiritual leader of the world. Now He has stopped "being" that Spiritual leader and has become Pope Benedict XVI emeritus. From this point of view does he "relive" the transitional period? Only in reverse? But he did not return to being a Cardinal as he was before he became Pope. Can we say that he is in a phase in which there is neither-this-nor-that?

At the conclusion of the ritual transitional phase, actions and objects carry and radiate meanings above their practical use or value. These actions and objects are symbolic of the changes in space as well. That which becomes "accepted" is a change in condition, identity or baggage - a transformation that is takes up space. Ratzinger accepted this continual transition despite his being Pope Emeritus until his death.

This was the choice made by Ratzinger and in his speech, he said that he understood the gravity of his choice, but that in his examination of conscience was not able to fulfill his task, as Pope, he felt his strength decreasing, feeling fatigued and tired.

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The Theological Perspective Theologically correct?

The Resignation of Benedict XVI from a theological standpoint Dear Brothers, I called you this Consistory not only for the three canonizations, but also to communicate a decision of great importance for the life of the Church. After repeatedly examining my conscience before God, I came to the knowledge that in my lack of strength and advanced age, I am no longer fit to exercise properly the Papal ministry.

I am well aware that this ministry, for its essence spiritually, must be done not only with works and words, but also suffering and prayer. However, in today's world, which is subject to rapid changes and agitated by issues of great importance for the life of faith, to steer the boat of St. Peter and proclaim the Gospel, one must also have strength both for the body and soul, strength that, in recent months, was depleted in such a way that I must acknowledge my inability to administer well the ministry entrusted to me. For this, being well aware of the seriousness of this act, with full freedom, I hereby renounce the ministry of the Bishop of Rome, the Successor of St. Peter, entrusted to me by the hand of Cardinals April 19, 2005, so that, from February 28, 2013 , at 8pm, the See of Rome, the seat of St. Peter, will be vacant and shall be called, by those who have competence, the conclave for the election of a new Pope.

Dear Brothers, I thank you from my heart for all the love and the work with which you have carried the weight of my ministry with me, and I ask forgiveness for all my shortcomings. Now, we entrust to the Holy Church to the care of her Supreme Shepherd, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and implore His Holy Mother Mary, that she may assist with her motherly kindness, and the Cardinals in electing the new Supreme Pontiff. As for me, in the future, I want to serve with all my heart, with a life dedicated to prayer, the Holy Church of God. The object of the studies which we identified is culminated by the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, we are planning, however, to analyze the behavior, the relationship between Joseph Ratzinger, the other actors and spectators of the performance represented by the Catholic world (and the others) who assisted in the bringing in of this new era.

The present condition of the Pope Emeritus seems to coincide perfectly with the "notnot-not-situation," the concept of transition (put forth by Schechner) and suspension,

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and this is doubly transitional. We experience this when we look at and suspend our value system in order to embrace something 'other' than that to which we are accustomed. This was also experienced by Ratzinger himself, who is no longer Pope, but in a position in which he cannot even go back to being the cardinal before without any implication, even if only a linguistic one. "He will float" in this transitional condition until he leaves this world.

The Performance Studies, in addressing issues related to this particular performance, on the basis of theories by post-structuralists, leverage on the concepts of marginality and marginalization, discrimination and a desire to undermine and subvert. It is perhaps a culmination of everything - the act of a pope who refuses a "task" that should be entrusted to him by God himself?

The question we ask here is, "what is the relationship between the resignation of Benedict XVI and theology?" Is it possible, first of all, that a pope can give up the Papal ministry of his own volition? According to the Code of Canon Law, yes. The report below delineates the steps from Book II, Part II, Section I, Article I, canon 332, paragraph I-II: The Supreme Pontiff obtains full and supreme power over the Church with legitimate election, with his acceptance, together with episcopal consecration. Consequently, with the election to the supreme pontificate, he already has already obtained in an episcopal manner, this power from the time of acceptance. If the chosen one was not already a Bishop, he is immediately ordained Bishop. In the event that the Roman Pontiff resigns from his office, it is required for validity that the resignation is made freely (not under duress) and properly manifested, it is not required then, that someone must previously accept said resignation.62 The waiver, therefore, does not itself offend canon law, in fact it is covered by it.

Apparently this has already occurred historically over the centuries, as evidenced by the case of St. Celestine V, elected July 5, 1294 and resigned in December of the same year, not considering himself to be of the height of the assumed office.

Moreover, Cardinal Ratzinger, in his book-length interview of 2010 "Light of the world", told the German journalist Peter Seewald that if a pope realizes that it is no longer able 62

Codice di Diritto Canonico in www.vatican.va

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"physically, psychologically and spiritually, to discharge the duties of his office, then he has a right and, under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign". 63 Despite the media's insistence on the 'unexpectedness of this decision, one can see, how he has behind him a long "gestation period", and the theological world knew already, and is not totally surprised.

Indeed, part of it (the theological world) was pushing for this to happen, some Spanish theologians, joined with these words to the "Open Letter to the Bishops of the whole world" of the Swiss theologian Hans Küng, in 2010: We believe that Pope Benedict XVI is exhausted. The Pope is not of the age nor the mindset to respond adequately to the serious and urgent problems that the Catholic Church is facing. We think, with all due respect for his person, that he should resign from his post.

The gesture appears, therefore, legitimate, if not theologically right, as stated by Enzo Bianchi, from the perspective of evangelical theology and canon law. However, on the historical level, it is not in continuity with the tradition and practice of the Church. Perhaps, though, it makes sense to want to oppose tradition and prominent life as the two poles of a relationship past and present? Has not the tradition, the prominent past, present and, might we even say, the future, already been formed?

Either way, the opposition to the glorious past and unyielding church is deeply felt by more traditionalist theologians, who see the pope is not a man, but as a long standing institution, not a single pope, but the papacy, the uninterrupted series of vicars of Christ, from St. Peter's onward.

The Catholic philosopher Enrico Maria Radaelli, insisting on the ontological and moral plane, says, referring to chapter 21 of the Gospel of John, that "the cross is the status of each Christian" and that to "rebel against one's status, to reject the grace received, would seem to be negligence against a Christian virtue of hope, against grace and supernatural value, against the acceptance of the human condition, all the more serious if the one in the condition holds roles 'in sacris', as is the condition of the pope."64 63

Peter Seewald, Benedetto XVI, Luce del mondo. Il Papa, la Chiesa e i segni dei tempi, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2010 64 Perchè papa Ratzinger-Benedetto XVI dovrebbe ritirare le sue dimissioni. Non è ancora il tempo di un nuovo papa perchè sarebbe quello di un antipapa in Aurea Domus, www.enricomariaradaelli.it

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And yet, this philosopher also said that the resignation of a pope, although theologically permissible, is not metaphysically and mystically permissible, because metaphysics is tied to "being", which does not allow such a thing as "being" and "not being" at the same time. Mysticism is tied to the of the Mystical Body which is the Church, for which the vicarious oath, taken with election, draws the elect to be on an ontological plane substantially different from the plane he has left: on a metaphysically and spiritually higher, the Vicar of Christ. From this point of view, one cannot regress from the ontologically divine plan to which he was elected to become merely human, therefore, he cannot even resign, because the pope who would later be his successor would be also, despite himself, an "anti-pope".65 But are these concepts are in step with the process of secularization that the Church is presently experiencing?

Perhaps the gesture of the Pope 'emeritus' is of a more political wariness than a spiritual wariness: could it be a symbol of adaptation of the Church to a changing world? In his official speech, Ratzinger's words, "in today's world" seem to stand out.

It is here that it is linked to the concept of tradition. This was all before though, says Vito Mancuso, including why he was standing as an "employee" from on high.

Today, tradition is no longer a regulative force of life, and this forces is the individual to be stronger. There can no longer be forced way that seeks to govern the lives of human beings in a deductive fashion, or from "top to bottom". The Catholic philosopher, Jean Guitton says that we currently live in a regime where there is no longer precise tradition.66 Has, then, the crisis of tradition caused the crisis of authority? Can one see this crisis as something positive and necessary? Can it be seen, perhaps, as a march of humanity towards freedom? It is in this setting that the papal institution must be reconsidered; Mancuso says that if the Church does not adapt to change is destined to become as extinct as paganism.67 It is, however, inevitable that the act of ex-Pope Benedict XVI seem so subversive of the tradition, and even more so from him in particular because he has always been considered a "formidable conservator of the system of pre-conciliar doctrine and

65

Ivi Vito Mancuso, Il mestiere di Pietro, in La Repubblica, March 4, 2013 67 Ivi 66

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theology."68 We may say, therefore, that in addition to being subversive towards tradition it is also subversive in relation to doctrine. If one should analyze the speech of his resignation, one would notice how he said there was a "diminishing" of his strength both "physical and spiritual", not psychological, emotional, or mental. The Pope Emeritus lacked the strength to exercise the sacred power to impose the obedience due to him as head of the Church. With this statement, it is as if he confessed that his "spiritual weakness" was due to God Himself, that God would not be close enough to him and that he would be deprived of the strength necessary to carry out a task of such importance. Is it perhaps an admission before the entire Christian world that God may not give one the necessary strength to fulfill one's duty to the end?

However, it is also true that Ratzinger said that he was resigning "for the good of the Church". Is he admitting, therefore, that it is for the good of the Church that God has "caused" him to lack the strength and that he had to therefore renounce the mandate given him? This could really be read in terms of a powerful theological and doctrinal revolution.

It seems to be, at this point, useful to relate our object of study with some of the seven functions of the Performance that Schechner intended: to entertain, to make or change identity, to construct or expand a community, to heal, to teach, to have to do with the sacred or with the demonic. If one reflects, one may notice a strong link between the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and these functions. With this act of renunciation of the Pope Emeritus entertained a large audience, the entire Catholic world and beyond. He has also definitely changed identity, taking on another still undefined and indefinable. With his choice, he has helped to 'break' the community of the faithful. With this waiver, he intended perhaps to make a step toward healing from the corruption of the Church? Is it considered a way to teach? The link with the sacred seems obvious, but there are those who oppose this gesture that would consider it to be something demonic rather than sacred.

The resignation of Benedict XVI, has, in fact, sparked a debate thus generating, in turn, a somewhat "apocalyptic" climate. One could insert here the figure of kathecon (from the greek: what holds or is he who keeps) extensively analyzed by theologians 68

Gilberto Squizzato, Due o tre cose a proposito del nuovo papa (e di quello uscente), in www.minimaetmoralia.it February 22, 2013

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and philosophers (Massimo Cacciari has devoted a long and thorough study of the matter also from a political point of view).69 It is the object of numerous blogs and Catholic publications. What is kathecon? The main source of knowledge of this word in a theological sense is from the Second Letter of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, which speaks of kathecon as something that "holds", which prevents the manifestation of the mystery of iniquity. The kathecon is, in essence, the force that prevents the manifestation of the Antichrist or Anomos, i.e. "The son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is worshiped as God, so that he himself will sit in the temple of God claiming to be God."70 Before the antichrist is made manifest, the one who holds the mystery needs to be removed. St. Thomas identifies this force as the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, his heir and successor. But for Catholics today, the most fervent and sensitive to the prophecies, the kathecon is identified in the figure of the pope himself, who, as Vicar of Christ, has the task of curbing the spread of lawlessness in the world.

How can one link the resignation of Benedict XVI to this point of view? Ratzinger, by giving up his power, also gave up the force that precedes the release of the Antichrist into the world? does sis gesture announce the future occurrence of iniquity and of perdition?

With the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, the first thing to be questioned was the DNA of the figure of the pope in itself. The figure of Pope will now be viewed as an office limited time and no longer an eternal appointment. The figure will also change in the eyes of the faithful, who are used to seeing this office as irrevocable. There comes a diminishing of the identification between person and role, which until now has "reigned" in most of the Papal predecessors: the prevalence of sacral dimension , of "being pope" regardless even of one's own body. Just think of the choice of John Paul II to "drag himself on", ill, until the end of his term. The Pope Emeritus has, in his own way , placed his body in the foreground, so much so that he named it as one of his main motivations within his resignation announcement - "the impossibility , physical fatigue" keeping him from continuing "to drive the boat of Peter alone".

Now "function has got the better of the essence (...), and the secular has got the better of the sacred. 71 A sacredness that, in this case, vanishes and that, perhaps, 69

Massimo Cacciari, Il potere che frena, Ed. Adelphi, 2013 Lettere di San Paolo, Seconda lettera ai Tessalonicesi, The Holy Bible, Old Testament, CEI 71 Vito Mancuso, La Chiesa entra nell'era dei due papi, l'ombra di Ratzinger sul successore. Per la prima volta una “coabitazione�, in La Repubblica, February 12, 2013 70

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could cause a metamorphosis even the traditional image of an omnipotent and omnipresent God. As many argue, the ministry, or the role, takes priority over the identity of the person, and this helps one in one's study, from a performative point of view, understand that it is not the person in whom one should be interested, but his actions, the behavior.

Enzo Bianchi points out that Catholic doctrine does not allow the person to be more determinant than the ministry that he has been called upon to perform. Cardinal Ratzinger would never forget the Benedictine rule of "nothing but the love of Christ", for it was the love of Christ which would surpass his own person called upon him to perform the arduous task of Papal Minister. What emerged was the ability to decentralize himself when compared to the figure of Christ, and the ability to assert his own, miserable condition of man, "humble servant of God".72 Thus the concept of infallibility is related to the ministry and not the person, the penultimate of the dogmas declared by the Catholic Church (Vatican Council 's Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus - of Pius IX, 1870). The Pope was infallible, Cardinal Ratzinger was not. This dogma would have previously led to a desire to centralize on the figure of the pope and of his primacy, justifying thus the sensation sparked by the news of his resignation. The previously cited theologian Hans K端ng, in his book, Infallible? A Question (1970), cast doubt on the infallibility of the figure of Pope and as a result he was stripped of the status of Catholic theologian by Pope John Paul II. 73 Should one now, in the light of the incessant changes which are being witnessed every day, doubt the truth of a divine appointment? Is the concept of infallibility feasible today?

Perhaps Ratzinger has given a definite answer and showed the world his answer with his actions. On the other hand, according to those who tend to justify the act of Ratzinger while not questioning Catholic dogma, infallibility does not necessarily coincide with the indefectibility. The Church, being part human, can make mistakes, and as stated Leo XIII, mistakes can be committed by its ministers, as well as its children .

That the papacy is considered a "judicial office of the Church," not joint indelibly to the person who occupies, is related to the fact that the apostolic hierarchy exerts two types of powers united in the same person: the power of order and the power of jurisdiction. Both are aimed at achieving the specific purposes of the Church, but they are very different and, perhaps, contradictory to each other: the potestas Ordinis is the right to distribute the means of divine grace and refers to the administration of the 72

Enzo Bianchi, Benedetto XVI e il monachesimo, in Avvenire, February 24, 2013 Ibidem

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sacraments and the exercise of official worship, the potestas iurisdictionis is the power to govern the ecclesiastical institution and the faithful individual. Another way in which it is different is the way in which these powers are granted. The power of order is given by consecration, by means of a sacrament, and was therefore a of sacred nature and to whom it is invested will be so forever and no human authority may remove this ontological condition. The power of jurisdiction, however, is not permanent, but temporary, revocable, its offices end with the termination of the mandate. This power rests with the pope and the bishops, however, is only the first that possesses it in its fullness. Progressive theology supports reform in the sacramental sense, and opposes the power of order over power of jurisdiction. The episcopal structure, though, resembles that of a monarchy: the pope would expect to be required only for ethical and religious function, not for government. In this perspective, Hans Küng suggests a pontificate that can end and not for life, as a form of government required by the rate of change in the modern world: Can the Church have an 80 year old Pontiff, who is no longer fully present from a physical and mental standpoint as "Eternal Pope"? As a theologian, the author can say that the Papal ministry, which was introduced in the Middle Ages, is not a sacrament.

One can be ordained a priest, may be ordained bishop, and remain a priest forever.

But the Pope cannot. There is an order to be Pope, not sacrament.74 There are those who, as the Christian historian Roberto De Mattei, see a contradiction in this: if you believe that the essence of the papacy in the sacramental power of order and not in the power of jurisdiction, then the can the Pope resign? If he did lose something it would be only the exercise of power, but not the power itself, given as indelible. He who admits the hypothesis of a resignation, would also have to admit that the Pope's summa potestas derives his jurisdiction from exercising and not from receiving the sacrament. For the same reason put forth by De Mattei, the possibility of "two popes" could not even coexist even if one is "pope" and the other is "emeritus". Ratzinger is back simply to being a cardinal who is no longer entitled to exercise any prerogative, even that of infallibility.

Then who, now, is Joseph Ratzinger? Theologically, what role does he now play in the Church? From a visual perspective, can he still be considered the main actor of this performance? While we cannot define his precise role, he is, on the other hand, back to being, in fact, Cardinal (note the etymology from cardo_inis = a pivot, the 74

Dimissioni Papa, Hans Küng:”Ratzinger sarà pontefice ombra. Possibili ingerenze pericolose” interview with theologian, in www.huffingtonpost.it

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pivot around which revolves a door and, in a figurative sense, a pivot on which it is claimed that one turns anything whatsoever). He himself says that his life will, however, be given to prayer, a presence of intercession, mediation between God and humanity.

His presence in the Vatican, from a theological perspective, is problematic; after the election of Pope Francesco I, they would have to, in some way, coexist, only one pope de facto, but both de jure? We have already mentioned how some thinkers have not fully contemplated all that the resignation of Benedict XVI implies and, consequently, have not fully contemplated the existence of a new pope (antipope).

According to Mancuso and Bianchi, the problem is not truly present, from the moment that being pope means above all to be bishop of Rome. The Bishop of Rome is only one person - the Pope, and Ratzinger is the retired bishop of Rome.

The former Pope in the Vatican, has caused the theologian Hans Küng to conceive the concept of "Shadow Pope".75 Küng underlines the fact that Ratzinger will have and want to remain constantly in contact with the cardinals and the Pope. He will still have the opportunity to speak continuously (due to the presence of Father George Gaenswein, as has been already pointed out in the development of this thesis) and will be considered an alternative to which to turn in case one is not in accord with the decisions of the current Pope. Ratzinger himself said: "I am out, but I am still at the heart of the Vatican". Can one then assume that he might be a "secret, uncontrollable interference"? Has our actor really turned into a director?

It is said that when the deer migrate in groups or make their way to new lands, they support the weight of their heads on each other mutually, so that one goes and the one that follows rests its head on the one before it ... the head alone bears the weight of another, and when he is tired, it then moves into the queue, for in its place is another to carry the weight of the "head of the line", thus resting from his weariness, resting his head the same as the others (Commentary of St. Augustine on Psalm 41).76 The Moral Perspective The teaching of Pope Benedict XVI at the service of the Truth: sex scandals and pedophilia 75

Ivi Enzo Bianchi, Ora più che mai è successore di Pietro, in La Stampa, February 12, 2013

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What has happened? Why Pope Benedict XVI left the Papal throne? Is there anyone that drove him to this choice or was it of his own free will? There is perhaps a silent director behind all this? Is the resignation of the Pope the final act of a script that Benedict XVI is no longer able to follow? What, then, is the canonical script? How did cardinal and theologian Ratzinger choose to interpret the role of Pope Benedict XVI, the "face of the Church"?

Let's take a step back and go back to 2005, the year of the election of Pope Benedict XVI. All the teachings of his pontificate are supposed to be at the service of Truth which is described in two ways - either as divine (referring to the dogma that Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life ) or as human (that is - transparent in value). How does the pope act out this well- structured script? Well, It must be played out in two different theaters: the rigid, institutional, official window at which the man, Ratzinger does not appear, but appears the character of Benedict XVI, metonymy of the Church. Understanding the gap between actor and character has already given us one of the problems of analysis. From the window, we see only a pope who shows us only the front of himself, a half-length, with an attitude of strict justice to emphasize the firmness of the spotless face of the Church. Truth is the theme in his speeches that returns again and again. It has been thought that Ratzinger probably uses the technique of identification or perhaps maybe imitation of a role that he has very clear in his mind in order to act out the character Benedict XVI. This is definitely not an intrinsic characteristic, since it is the result of various types of human beings that are encountered in everyday life. The peculiarity of this particular scenario is that the actor in question has chosen to perform his character in truth and that for him (the actor) it has utopian worth, some would say divine, but certainly super-human.

However, he acts out his role on another stage also, A place where he is loved by young people, and where and on WYD, Ratzinger, from the pope-mobile, knocked down the fourth wall and invaded the public, showing his "human" side - the unofficial, soft side of the Church. This is a typical attitude of famous people (heads of state, Miss Italy, journalists, Olympic athletes, singers and more generally all idols) which at times are made to act out of context: for example, a politician who goes onto a show for teens, or an Olympic athlete who is forced into a dance contest, or a model who is assigned a role in a drama. The audience enjoys the show, and does not expect the interpretation to be flawless, but enjoys the fact that its darling in a context that is not his own, and to see then, how he copes. This is a kind of parenthesis because the audience of the faithful know that the context of Benedict

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XVI is normally at the window, between books to write, paperwork to sign, and psalms and hymns to be recited in Latin ( because that is how the Church wants the public the images private life of the actor ), the parenthesis this time is that the darling is immersed in an environment that is not his own. This makes him a bit more "human" and therefore more accepted, especially if he is a "grandfather" celebrating the World Youth Day. Even so, the pope acts out Truth by reintroducing the Latin language for official ceremonies (Eucharistic celebrations, hearings, just to name a few) which are universally shared by the people of God. It is clearly the language of the Fathers of the Church, and thus the "true" language that all the faithful should understand, but instead, they perceive it to be strong and authoritative as the basis for the foundation of the dogmas of faith. The effect was instead a withdrawing from the people in order to reaffirm that the Church is another thing, it is different, does not fall into the category pettiness of ordinary men.

But all this is a time bomb for Benedict XVI, which exploded in 2008 a cloud of dust decades old, in the USA . From April 15 to the 21, 2008, the Pope went to the United States, just as the storm of the pedophilia scandal continued to rage.77 A Problem that has plagued the American Church since 1989 after revelations of the" Boston Globe" on the case John Geoghan, the priest (later defrocked and sentenced to ten years in prison) accused of molesting more than one hundred and thirty children in thirty years, during which his superiors, instead of denouncing him, transferred from one parish to another. Later, other complaints were added to involve a hundred priests. It was the obligatory theme, then, and the pope knew this and dealt with it in a press conference on his plane: Never again are there to be pedophile priests, we are deeply ashamed and we will do everything possible to see that this does not happen again; pedophiles are completely excluded from the priesthood.78

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To understand the American context in which are the facts, we have borrowed the analysis and research of Ann Pellegrini, Associate Professor at the University of California, collected from the book Love the Sin. From these we know that the absolute values preached in the U.S. are Christian values about crimes involving sex but do not extend for example to the death penalty is still enforced in some parts of the USA. The researcher then asks why in a country that proclaims religious freedom, people should be judged by the standards of a particular religious tradition. The American situation is therefore paradoxical at best.

78 Aldo Maria Valli, Benedetto XVI. Il pontificato interrotto, 2013, Arnoldo Mondadori, Milano, p.150,

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On May 10, 2008, Ratzinger addressed the participants in the International Congress promoted by the Pontifical Lateran University on the fortieth anniversary of the encyclical Humanae Vitae of Pope Paul VI. He explained why this encyclical is still valid and current: If sex becomes a drug, and if the sole purpose of sexuality is to become the possession of the other, it is not only the true concept of love that is at stake, but also the dignity of the person himself.79 Also in 2008, July15-20, Benedict XVI was in Sydney for World Youth Day. An Australian television journalist of the SBS raised the thorny question of whether he would apologize for sexual abuse committed by priests. Ratzinger replied: "There are things that are always bad, and pedophilia is always bad. (...) We will do everything possible to clarify the teaching of the Church and to help in education and preparation for the priesthood, and we will do everything possible to heal and reconcile the victims. I think this is the fundamental meaning of apologizing".80 "Benedict XVI, ready for "lying in wait" by the local media for the Australian issue of sexual abuse by priests, was clear and unequivocal: he said that those responsible would have to be brought to justice, and he urged the bishops to do everything possible to eradicate a phenomenon for which he confessed shame. At the beginning of 2012, the Catholic Church was driven by revelations coming from some European countries, of sexual abuse committed by priests against children. Cases in Ireland were discovered where two committees of inquiry brought to light more than two thousand cases (from 19752004) concerning the diocese of Dublin. The spring of scandal does not stop there, for cases in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Italy were also discovered; and Pope Benedict XVI, for perhaps the first time in the history of the Church, calls the abuse " sinful and criminal acts". The Pope expresses shame and remorse, and indicates the line of action he had decided to follow: to carry out a thorough investigation, to identify all liability in abuse and cover-ups, and to take strict measures that would contribute to the rebirth of the Church. Unfortunately, the turbines of pedophilia are not yet finished turning.

Although Pope Benedict XVI, during the nineteenth plenary assembly of the Pontifical Council for the Family, remembered and adopted the harsh words of Jesus against those who offend "one of these little ones" (Mark 9:42), the New York Times, with a few articles on the abuses of the clergy against children, sought to engage 79

Ivi, p.157.

Ivi, p.162.

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Ratzinger directly by accusing him of silence and cover-ups during the time that he was head of the Congregation for the doctrine of the Faith. The Vatican vocally by way of Father Lombardi with the help of "Osservatore Romano" and Vatican Radio stated, "Cardinal Ratzinger has never hidden cases of which he was aware, and indeed has worked with the utmost severity and transparency to clean up this problem."81 However, the storm continues, because new cases of pedophile priests are reported frequently around the world.

The pedophilia scandal is an ugly one for the Vatican. The pope is at the center of the news and journalists from all over the world flooded Benedict XVI with the same question: What is the truth? Why has it been silenced for so long and all those who knew did not lift a finger to stop the abuse?

Sunday, May 16, 2010 in St. Peter's Square, Pope Benedict XVI said, "The sin within the Church is the real enemy we must fight." A few days before he had explained in Fatima "Forgiveness does not replace justice. The sufferings of the Church are part of those announced in the third secret of Fatima." Has the Pope done enough to establish the truth and punish those responsible in cases of pedophilia within the Church?

Corrado Formigli, a journalist for Anno Zero, produced a report aired May 20, 2010, where were interviewed some of the demonstrators who were protesting in front of the cathedral of Oakland, California. Here are some quotes from these interviews: - They do not want the truth, do not want the victims speak to the media. The truth is their worst enemy! The Vatican does not possess the truth. We are the true people of faith.

- I do not understand, why the hell are you protesting? The pope is cleaning up other religions are doing the same?

- I was abused by a lousy Catholic priest.

- I'm so sorry.

- You are with a pope who has defended him , and the pope has covered up for Stephen Kiesle a rapist what do you have to say about that?

- You cannot come here and talk to me about situations of which I know nothing and then tell me that the Pope is a criminal. Who are you? Who knows you?

- The Vatican protected pedophile priests for decades trying to blind the eyes of all.

- But the Pope is now apologizing.

- It is not enough, he should resign.

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Ivi, p. 258.

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The script has definitely changed, but there's more. Where is the truth for which Pope Benedict XVI is searching? In the rooms of the Vatican? It is from there that the scandals started. Or maybe it started in the body of the Church, or in any practicing Catholic? Is man not a sinner? What is in those rooms, the shadow theater, surrounded by light? Are they whited sepulchers? What a drama that unfolds! From the moment of his resignation, Pope Benedict XVI will leave those rooms forever, but before leaving, however, he tried to discover the truth.

Was there an unexpected change in the script to cause the resignation of Benedict XVI? Or was it the scandals of pedophilia? Was he no longer able or no longer willing to "perform" the new script? Although we cannot know, what we do know is what Pope Benedict XVI told cardinals assembled in consistory on 11 February 2013.

We have nothing else on which to go. How heavy truly is his silence?

The Economic Perspective The Legacy of Ratzinger "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." Benedict XVI thought of these same words before leaving the Papal ministry, and deciding to carry the weight of the cross alone, withdrawing to prayer. This is perhaps a plausible hypothesis.

Exposed to too great an ordeal, and left alone to struggle, Pope Benedict chose to abdicate in favor of someone younger and more "holy", a new "messiah" who can revive the fortunes of the Church, a boat adrift at sea in a storm.

To some this was a risky choice. To others, it seemed heroic, and still to others it is the sum of faith. Either way, it still a humungous choice, which has rocked, for better or for worse, the foundation upon which sits the entire structure of Christianity.

It is certain that to leave is not a minor thing. The legacy of the Holy Father, in fact, is not only a fixed place at a window looking out to where the urbi et orbi blessing, but a veritable Pandora's box that, if opened, could unleash forces beyond any human expectation.

Benedict XVI passes on to his successor, as a witness in this "relay" of faith, the "baton" of great responsibility. Starting with the man and finishing with him as well.

The Church is made up not only of doctrine and prayer, but also, and above all, men.

So, from 8 pm, February 28, 2013, Pope Benedict was effectively "retired". A spiritual father who, from the vicar of Christ on earth, comes to be a man among

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others, and delivers to the next Pope a Church ripped by intrigue, deceit, scandals and machinations.

The figure, that of the Bishop of Rome, has a split, multiple identity. A Pope who put off His Blessed Person and was in line to go down in history as simply a great religious leader who, because of the great strain, physical and mental, left the chair of the Son of the Father, and retired into seclusion, while continuing to dress the white dress, a symbol of the supreme pontifical. It is that dress white that is so distinctive when compared to the black of the "Crows" by which he was surrounded during the years of his papacy.

This is a weighty legacy for the new Pope. A legacy that can be summed up (perhaps trivially) in the two volumes of over 300 pages that make up the secret dossier that three cardinal investigators submitted. These investigators that were appointed by Pope Benedict XVI to clarify within the Vatican, submitted this dossier to the pope that resigned; who, in turn, left it and the throne of Peter, to the new pope, Francis I. Nobody, except the investigative "007" cardinals, the Pope "emeritus" and the new Pope, knows the secrets enclosed in these volumes. But, from what has been leaked and from what we already knew, there has definitely been a flood of beautiful words for a substantial handful of cardinals.

The social drama displayed by media around the world, who for days, pointed their cameras at the windows of the Vatican, has as its main protagonist Joseph Ratzinger, theologian and cardinal before, and Pope and Pope "emeritus" after, but revolving around his person is a constellation of very diverse characters, who, in one way or another, whether it be acting in the shadows or in the light of the sun, helped to draw an often murky and indistinguishable landscape around him.

The Church, of which Ratzinger was the most authoritative expression (in spite of himself?) Appears to be a true institution of ministerial employees, officers, directors and top management. And it's not that far from being associated with a multinational or a real company, complete with asset management, real estate and church property.

However, at its core, has a grueling division of curates and a crisis of confidence in Church leaders.

Underground alliances, secrets, scandals and strictly private leaks were on the agenda for a long time, fueled by news of new discoveries, interrogations, unclear internal

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operations, dismissals, arrests, convictions, granting thanks and amnesties. All of this has deeply undermined the credibility of the Church, which is already struggling to find recruits in the various corners of the world. A very hard blow for an institution that is over a thousand years old and has as its public-client swarms of believers of all nationalities.

What were these sad events that sapped the soul of the elderly pontiff, no longer able to embody the role that the Holy Spirit through the court of cardinals had somehow imposed?

His soul, perhaps, would not have withstood the evils of careerism and the pursuit of personal power in the men of the church entrusted with responsibility. Too much corruption in the ecclesiastical institution would convince one, among many other reasons, to yield to human rationality, to uncover the role of the infallible Pope, and to entrust the work of Divine Providence, believing and hoping in someone more than adequate to support the Papal ministry.

The actor-Pope followed a precise script for nearly eight years, preaching the doctrine of the faith and exercising his "power" as best he could. He embodied the part entrusted to him with extreme caution showing the world what he himself, perhaps, wanted to see and then, with a flick of his hand, going against the "direction" that was imposed, he preferred to improvise, leaving the scene, retreating into silence full of separation and asceticism, the spotlight off, no more cameras trained on him.

A performative choice, becoming an active agent of change, that is, the eye with which society looks at itself.

The human-performer on the stage of life, of which Ratzinger himself admits shortcomings and pettiness is what, by the way, is the scaffolding material on which rests the Holy Church. Failing to be that "Holy" Church, all of the aura which surrounds it comes crashing down, and it loses its strength and holiness. It does an about-face. The misconduct and the thirst for power prevail over the message of hope, faith, justice and peace handed down directly from the tablets of the Ten Commandments. In fact, as much as they recite the sixth and seventh commandment, "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and "Thou shalt not steal", the Church and the Vicar of Christ on earth should be alien to these atrocities, but it is exactly from this highest bastion of Christianity, that certain uncomfortable facts have come to light.

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As a "pilgrim [who] begins the last leg of his pilgrimage on this earth" (these are the words of Ratzinger in his farewell speech in the world), Pope Benedict XVI says goodbye to what was his divine mandate, leaving a legacy of unresolved issues and relinquishing for the first time, after years of pontificate, his mission as Bishop of Rome to become just a humble faithful disciple in search of Christ as the Truth. A schism, which has certainly meant a great sacrifice, which showed the world the multi-identity of a pope, both holy and human revealing a contradictory backstory of an institution, the Catholic Church, the scene of another fission of what is lawful and what is not.

The lack of transparency within the internal and external affairs of the Church is abundantly emphasized by the papal resignation, and revolves around the sexual and financial scandals perpetrated on this side and beyond the Vatican halls, and through a convoluted map of locations both physical and spiritual.

The Vatileaks case erupted in early 2012 and has as its centerpiece a leak of confidential Vatican documents concerning relationships inside and outside of the Holy See. It has brought to light the power struggles at the Vatican and some irregularities in the financial management of the IOR (Institute for Works of Religion), as well as a range of concerns on the effective enforcement of the rules against money laundering, which added the Vatican bank in the list of countries monitored as potentially guilty of money laundering.

A "nice stew" from which emerges some relatively well-known names, uncomfortable for the Church itself because this demonstrates the presence of cardinals that by skilled manipulations of news and conscience have become engineers in the creation of "mud machines" in order to instill poison of doubt about some prelates.

The dossier-bomb that came into the possession of Pope Ratzinger on December 17, 2012, speaks volumes about the intrigue, the miseries, the fickleness of the curate, pressure groups and networks. The first stone laid by Peter himself to build the Church of Christ must have suffered a severe jolt following the telluric movement that is the basis of the various sub-sets within the framework of the Vatican.

So then, was the elderly pontiff wrong for not feeling that he was capable to administer his teaching? In light of this revelation anyone would pale and would be unable to revive the spirit to accept such a compromise as the papal throne.

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The Supreme Pontiff, then, rather than being a pastor of men and a guide on the journey of faith, might have to play the role of CEO of a major corporation, or manager of a massive company in order to maintain an earthly organization which is a matter of great scope. The Holy Father should be limited to dispense spiritual goods but if he finds himself having to be also general manager of an internal bank, can he manage the two tasks together without being liable to a "conflict of interest" and no matter what is going to compromise the proclamation of the Gospel? Apparently, theory and practice do not always agree.

The Church is thus faced with a chasm, which requires a change of course or at least a right turn to give her the opportunity to avert a catastrophic shipwreck. The papal resignation is only a first solution to the internal crisis that tears at the clerical structure. Too many secrets and cover-ups over the years have helped to create a magmatic mass that has violently exploded when the papal apartments have leaked strictly confidential information. The traitor, the butler Paolo Gabriele, so close to the Holy Father, stealing private documents and making them public news sparked a chain reaction that still continues to generate consequences. Sure, sexual and economic scandals had already jumped on the pages of newspapers around the world for some time, but the Vatileaks case was a real fuse. No secret was safe anymore, not even there where, for centuries, secrecy was a commonality of the house.

In the shadow of Bernini's colonnade it has thus created a task force specifically to contravene in the emergency situation in which it finds itself. An intervention of unprecedented resources and troops deployed and allowed to act with wide-ranging methods that involved inside detective work which, in turn, shared the data collected by the parallel intelligence carried out by the "Sherlock Holmes-like" three cardinals of Benedict XVI. Also in this case, an extraordinary amount of documents and acts was prepared about the (parallel?) lives of laity and clergy within the Leonine Wall and beyond. Other voluminous material, therefore, was left in the tired hands of Pope Ratzinger and the eighty boxes found in house of the butler were full of unconfessed sin.

Hot news, data which was certainly not encouraging, but has almost certainly had an impact on the nomination of the new Pope, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is from Argentina. A pope, in fact, that is the other side of the world could be a strong signal of recovery and questioning of principles, which are more or less questionable, which thus far has pursued the curate.

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"Replace" the old with the new, beginning from the ground up and from an entirely different perspective. The teaching that Ratzinger left, then, with his revolutionary act may have been understood. Even in the season of poisons it is possible that revenge would not follow.

The struggle between the angels and demons of the Vatican continues to the sound of spying and burying, and it is not to say that there are no twists worthy of a great drama.

There remain several questions that must be answered. Why still maintain a great secret of the empire that the Vatican was built with the money received by Mussolini in 1929 in exchange for recognition of the fascist regime by the pope? And why is the IOR so reluctant to adapt its actions to the rules governing the transfer of money and the control of suspicious transactions? And again, why does it seem that many prelates take advantage of the positions of responsibility with which they have been entrusted to do both good and bad, whichever is more convenient at the time? do we have to wait for a new book by Dan Brown to receive clarification? Beyond the countless questions, however, there remain, thankfully, the certainties.

The Church, while undermined in the community, has always had a distinguished spirit, and has survived schisms, holy wars, external competition and popes on horses who were not exactly shining examples of charity and faith. This crisis then, might be just another obstacle that the church must tackle in order to rise from its own ashes.

The third secret of Fatima, as can be risky, reads: "the angel pointing to the earth with his right hand, with a loud voice says, "Penance, Penance, Penance." Thus, perhaps, what we really need is an analysis of conscience on the part of all the curate and a mea culpa that extinguishes the sins of which the whole ecclesiastical institution is stained, from the lowest level to the highest level that holds the power.

Thus, Pope Ratzinger has rewound the ranks of his ministry and has traced with his latest actions a trail from which to re-begin.

The challenge was to give to his successor a chance to carry on operations in transparency. His resignation is a spiritual testament, a warning that something will change - a change for the better, for the good of the Church and the good of all Christians.

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With his subversive but decided gesture, Benedict XVI has shown that despite his age and ill health, the mind is lucid and aware - that he is conscious of being a "deputy God" on earth, but still a man who knows his own limitations and defects, who asks for forgiveness. Not an absolute ruler, but a pastor who exercises his power jointly aided and supported by the many actors in a drama that the Church is playing out.

Such a decision, therefore, relates, for all intents and purposes, to the man Ratzinger, as Pope, and influenced the last hours of his term and the future of the Holy Roman Church because from that moment on, any other successor to the throne of Peter will be burdened with an even bigger task, a conduit and a laborer to be seen by all, and judged by all whether he is worthy of the Vicariate of Christ.

Thus: Francis, for Benedict, eschatologically reveals the other half of the story: the pope that God wanted to but that would not have been possible without the other. And Benedict, for Francis, biblically outlines the other half of the road, that God had prepared for him, but before that preparation he would be unable to travel. Benedict was a prophet, like Elijah or Jeremiah, who in the era of secularization, perceives horizons that are distant, but real, of religious revival. Francis is instead the Patriarch, like Abraham or Moses, who has the strength, and especially the charisma to convince her and to lead her in the right path. Both, the one for the other, may eventually become, and occupy the other half of the heart. It is no coincidence that Bergoglio has received Ratzinger on the threshold of his house, in a deliberately intimate space. Besieged by the affection on the streets, Francis is discovering the effect of a solitude that remains: that of the court of St. Peter, from which it can bring out the Church, but not his own self. A solitude in which the man who has the power of binding and loosing is hopelessly bound, with no possibility of disengaging. Not even as emeritus. 82 In Short, Benedict XVI is a transitional figure, who was and is no more, but that continues to be in a different way and to "ensure" by his example and his actions concerning the spirituality (and not only) of the new pope and the whole curate.

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Piero Schiavazzi, Francesco e Benedetto, il Papa patriarca e il Papa profeta, insieme nel "giardino della Curia", in L’Huffington Post, May 2, 2013

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His current "lack of role" puts him - as was said - in a transitional condition, that does not guarantee a definite identity, but instead produces a shattering of his person.

Such an assumption puts him on the next threshold, not only in relation to his physical being, but also in relation to his soul. Ratzinger is a point through which pass endless lines - a goal that both unites and separates at the same time.

Abandoning the role of the protagonist has resulted in the surrender of a part that had already caused the performer to no longer distinguish the limelight from the backstage, not to mention the disappearance of the support of a team of designated to support the heavy role.

However, his resignation as problematic as it may be, has allowed us to highlight a subtle, yet more important detail, the fact that Joseph Ratzinger could refuse such an assignment, that he was not congenial, and unable to bear the heavy role assigned to him. However, though the appearances are to the contrary, the former Pope now finds himself occupying a position equally enormous: far from the spotlight and therefore not directly attacked or subjected to judgments, he continues, albeit discreetly (whether consciously or not is unknown) to direct a drama which will be on stage for some time and maybe, even before having even ascended to the throne of Peter, he was able to lead with great skill.

Just like a magician who, in spite of the public, puts on big show but never really reveals his tricks.

Bibliografia Bignardi Daria, Mentana Enrico, De Luca Erri, Lerner Gad, Dell’Arti Giorgio, Nuzzi Gianluigi, Il coraggio di dire basta, 2005-2013, «Vanity Fair» Bogliolo Laura, Dimissioni papa, Twitter e Facebook impazziti, web in tilt, «Il messaggero.it», 12 febbraio 2013 Bollettino N°0089, «La Repubblica.it», 11-02-2013 Brett Edward. The impact of religion in Central America: a bibliographical essay. The Americas, Washington, Academy of American Franciscan History, v. XLIX, n. 3, Jan. 1993.

Gennep Arnold van, Os ritos de passagem, São Paulo,Vozes, 2011 Goffman Erving, La vita quotidiana come rappresentazione, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1997 De Gregorio Concita, Sesso e carriera, i ricatti in Vaticano dietro la rinuncia di Benedetto XVI, in «La Repubblica.it», 21 febbraio 2013

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De Marinis Marco, Capire il teatro. Lineamenti di una nuova teatralogia, Roma, Bulzoni Editore, 2008 Di Giacomo Filippo, La rinuncia. Dietro la notizia che fa tramare il cupolone, «Il venerdì di Repubblica», 1 marzo 2013 Donadio R. e Higgins A., The New York Times, Stati Uniti, Mancanza di trasparenza, in «Internazionale», n. 991, 15/21marzo 2013 Durkheim Émile, As Formas Elementares da Vida religiosa, New York, Mac-Millan, 1915 Flores d’Arcais Paolo, Papa Benedetto, da vice Dio a Primate, in «Il Fatto quotidiano», 16 febbraio 2013 Grana Francesco Antonio, Vatileaks, rumors sulla “lobby gay” della Santa Sede che ha sconvolto il Papa, in «Il Fatto quotidiano», 21 febbraio 2013 Grana Francesco Antonio, Papa Ratzinger, ultimo atto: “Lascio le carte del caso Vatileaks al mio successore”, in «Il Fatto quotidiano», 25 febbraio 2013 Hooper John, The Guardian, La fine di un papato paradossale, in «Internazionale», n. 987, 15/21 febbraio 2013 Ingrao Ignazio, Dopo Benedetto XVI. Il dossier segreto condizionerà il conclave, in «Panorama.it», 25 febbraio 2013 Leigh David, The Guardian, Regno Unito, Il segreto del Papa, in «Internazionale», n.985, 1/7 febbraio 2013 Le Bars Stephanie, Le Monde, Il giorno del Giudizio, in «Internazionale», n.987, 15/21 febbraio 2013 Lillo Marco, Antiriciclaggio, stop al bancomat e il Vaticano cambia gli assegni in Germania, in «Il Fatto quotidiano», 4 gennaio 2013 M.A., The Economist, Regno Unito, Un manager in Vaticano, in «Internazionale», n. 991, 15/21 marzo 2013 Mora Miguel, El Pais, Hanno vinto gli ultra cattolici, in «Internazionale», n. 987 15/21 febbraio 2013 Oro Ari Pedro, Religião e política no Brasil. In Oro Ari Pedro, Religião e política no Cone-Sul: Argentina, Brasil e Uruguai, São Paulo, Attar CNPq/ Pronex, 2006. p. 75-156 Pellegrini Ann, Love the sin, New York, University press, 2013 Pierucci Antonio Flavio, Interesses religiosos dos sociólogos da religião, in Oro Ari Pedro, Steil Carlos Alberto (Org.), Globalização e religião, Petrópolis, Vozes, 1997a, p. 249-262.

Pontifex su Twitter, febbre #faiunadomandaalpapa:‘Buona ostia e mortadella?’, in «Blitzquotidiano.it», 4 Dicembre 2012 Rusconi Roberto, Il gran rifiuto. Perché un papa si dimette, Brescia, Morcelliana, 2013 Schechner Richard, Magnitudini della performance, Roma, Bulzoni, 1999 Schechner Richard, Performance e Antropologia de Richard Schechner; seleção de ensaios organizada por Zeca Ligiéro – Rio de Janeiro: Manual X, 2012.

Schultz Emily A., Lavenda Robert H., Antropologia culturale, Bologna, Zanichelli, 2010 Seewald Peter, Sono la fine del vecchio e l’inizio del nuovo, in «Corriere della sera», 18/02/2013 Smith Brian H., Religious politics in Latin America: Pentecostal vs. Catholic, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1998.

Tornielli Andrea, Tre anziani cardinali Sherlock Holmes, in «Vatican Insider», 27 aprile 2012 Trecce Carlo, Paolo Gabriele, opere e omissioni, in «Il Fatto quotidiano», 3 ottobre 2012

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Turner Victor, Antropologia della performance, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1993 Turner Victor, Dal rito al teatro, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1986 Valli Aldo Maria, Benedetto XVI – Il pontificato interrotto, Milano, Mondadori, 2013 Vicentini Claudio (a cura di), L’arte di guardare gli attori, Venezia, Marsilio, 2007 Sitografia http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=903c5JziUhY&feature=endscreen&NR=1 http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mundo/1238358-sinos-marcam-fim-do-papado-de-bento-16.shtm http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/94562 N.B. La presentazione multimediale che è stata presentata durante l’esposizione in classe del percorso di analisi performativa è disponibile su http://prezi.com/lzkighfjxcpb/untitled-prezi/

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GABRIELLA BIRARDI MAZZONE, GIOELE PERESSINI

VOGUING: EXAMPLES OF PERFORMANCE THROUGH ART, GENDER AND IDENTITY RAPHAËL BRANCHESI (TRANSLATED BY) This paper is the result of a thirty hour seminar on Performance Studies, taught by Dr. Carmela Cutugno at the University of Bologna, as part of a Master course in Theories and Cultures of Representation held by Professor Marco De Marinis. The idea for the chosen topic, as well as part of the readings were suggested during the seminar by Dr. Cutugno, who assisted us for the entire process of thinking and writing about this issues. The seminar was conceived and realized as a performance studies analysis workshop and the final paper was presented, performed and danced as the result of the course.

This essay is a synopsis of that work, focused on Voguing, firstly as artistic and cultural performance, and then upon the differences between the U.S.A. context and the Italian context, which were both supported by the dichotomy between artistic performance and “gender performativity”. The first part of this essay starts from this point to analyze the process of transformation, and differentiation of the voguing culture, paying particular attention to the Italian performative scene. In the second part a further analysis is carried out, taking into account all the topics connected to the ideas of identity and gender.

«Performances mark identities, bend time, reshape and adorn the body, and tell stories»83 R. Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction There was no better way to begin this paper, than to use this quote as an introduction to the analysis presented in the following pages, concerning the phenomenon of voguing and its penetration and reception in Italy. If it is true that voguing played a great role in the assertion process minorities in American metropolis underwent during the Sixties, it is also important to underline that it then changed and spread losing its original traits and becoming – in a chiastic way – more of an artistic expression, than a cultural one.

Voguing is a dance that takes into account the subjectivity of the individual as well as the culture of the minority it represents. As a matter of fact, it originated at the end of the Sixties in a period whose beginning had been marked by the well-known events of the Stonewall riots84, which involved the LGBT85 community, always struggling and fighting for its rights. In particular, voguing was a way of expression 83

Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, Routledge, London, 2002, 22.

The Stonewall Riots are a series of violent clashes between homosexual people and police that took place in the early morning of the 28th of June in 1969 at Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the Greenwich Village, New York City.

That day has been considered the founding moment of the Gay Rights Movement.

85 LGBT is an acronym that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

84

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used by the Afro-American and Latin-American homosexual communities of New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington, Miami, Detroit and Chicago.

These «minorities within minorities within minorities»86 had to face a potential and complete exclusion from society, hence the strain to emerge and escape from the threat of oblivion, which they did by mimicking and overturning the Uptown standards of beauty, primarily those promoted by the popular magazine «Vogue» – whose title inspired the name of the movement – that became in those years the «Bible of fashion»87. Intended as the manifesto of the high society of New York, as of December 1972 «Vogue» became a monthly, and was praised by every fashion victim in America. At the same time, it also became more accessible to a wider public, giving the lower classes a hope for emancipation both on a political and cultural level.

It was the posture, the gaze, the position of the arms and that of the hips of front-cover models from the magazines that first set the rules of voguing. With the use of feathers and sequins, voguers came from the outskirts of big cities with the will to express their personality, which they did by openly displaying their sexual identity. They used to meet in gay venues, clubs and discos, all places that would soon become the main center of that newborn philosophy, which was actually turning more into a lifestyle.

The movie Paris is Burning88 is an important record of life as it was inside ballrooms at the time, as well as the first real try at a visual record of the voguing culture. It allows the viewer to actually witness one of the so-called “balls” – contests focusing on style, appearance and the typical dance moves of voguing.

Balls were a parody and an overturn of the Haute Couture world with its catwalks, and the runway represented a stage where people had the chance to show themselves in all their effeminacy, vanity and narcissism – often bordering on prima donna behaviour89 – telling the audience their story and fighting for their rights at the same time.

86

«Ballroom includes society's most marginalized: minorities within minorities within minorities, for whom voguing and ballroom culture is an important resource. In a world where they have been rejected, ballroom not only accepts these people for who they are, it celebrates them, in a variety of unique and different categories. […] Voguing is not just a dance, and ballroom is not just a genre. It's a way of life that brings pride, peer recognition and selfrespect.». Cfr. Niall Connolly, Welcome to the Ballroom, where voguing is always in style, available on-line at: http://boingboing.net/2013/03/06/ballroom.html (November 2013).

87 Norberto Angeletti, Alberto Oliva, In Vogue, Rizzoli, Milano, 2008, 2-8.

88 Paris is Burning, a documentary by Jennie Livingston. With Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Willi Ninja, Octavia St. Laurent, Angie Xtravaganza, Venus Xtravaganza, Sol Pendavis, Freddie Pendavis, Kim Pendavis, USA, 1991.

89 Voguing has been inspired by the immortal beauty of Hollywood stars: Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe. The life of a voguer can be understood only as a continuous process of imitation of celebrities.

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Voguers would not have been able to go through with their project, without the support of the Mothers – progenitors of the Houses – which were actual families based on the criterion of belonging to the same social and cultural status. The socalled “children” were either orphans of both mother and father, people who had been abandoned because of their homosexuality, or simply outcasts, proud to give up their birth surname to accept that of the House they belonged to as their own. It could be stated that, from a performative point of view, the Houses represented an idea of kinship in the sense of «ability to build a scheme of alliances based on the need for exchange and mutual support among individuals»90, an actual «practical kinship»91, then, that brought the Houses – organisms led by transsexuals, drag queens92 or homosexuals – to embrace the “children” in a real domestic environment93 based on the idea of sharing culture, art and philosophy of life. In this regard, the life of a woman of the time can be seen as a prime example.

Her name was Ellen Stewart, she was an African-American woman who owned a café in New York where she hosted all the young promising actors of stage drama of the neighborhood. Her behavior could be defined according to what Richard Schechner called «restored behaviour»94, that is acting as a mother – with all the peculiarities of the role – in a theatrical context. The emotional and personal nature of this bond can also be inferred by the nickname Stewart went by, La Mama, that defined both the woman herself and the theatrical scene she had created. At the end of the Eighties, voguing started being commercialized, and this processed was helped by globalization – still in its early stages – and especially by the development of pop music and music videos. Credit for the opening of the voguing phenomenon to the general public goes to Italian-American pop star Madonna, for the release of one of her videos: Vogue.

The first part of this essay will start from this point to analyze the process of transformation, blending and differentiation of the voguing culture, paying particular attention to the Italian performative scene. In the second part, a further analysis will

90

Giulia Palladini, Com-memorare Ellen Stewart, La Mama: narrazione e custodia di una parentela, in Enrico Pitozzi (curated by), «Culture Teatrali», 21, 2012, 240.

91 Ibid., 241.

92 A drag queen is a man who dresses, sings and acts as if he was the caricature of a woman, with an ironic and entertaining purpose. The drag shows have increased in America during the 70s, with the birth of the Gay Liberation Movement. In such a cultural context, where the drag phenomenon overlooks the scene echoing strong socio-political signs, it is extremely simplistic to consider the drag as a simple phenomenon of cross-dressing.

93 The episode of the adoption of Venus Xtravaganza in Paris is Burning is explanatory: Venus, a young transsexual works as a prostitute to raise money for an operation of sex reassignment. When she is just thirteen years old, she is introduced in the House of Xtravaganza, where she is rescued from life in the street.

94 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 28.

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be carried out, taking into account all the topics connected to the ideas of identity and gender.

In conclusion, it is important to underline once again the focal point this study is based upon: the comparison between the U.S.A. context and the Italian context, which were both supported and corroborated by the dichotomy between artistic performance and “gender performativity”95. As a proof and an explanation of the presence of these two elements, Schechner wrote about the ideas of «twice behaved behavior» (concerning the artistic performance), and «behaved behavior» (in regards to gender performativity), stating that every action carried out by an individual is actually the result of a combination of attitudes and reactions had in the past. Thus, what is the difference – in terms of value – between a voguer’s pose and the cover of a fashion magazine, or between a black and white music video and a dance performance in heels? In the following pages, an attempt to answer these questions will be made.

The effects of voguing: artistic performances in today’s Italy Any study on voguing that pretends to be accurate has to focus on the singer Madonna and one of her most famous songs: Vogue.

The single, released in 1990, has sold over six million copies worldwide, and was presented at the MTV Video Awards later that year with an iconic performance in Marie-Antoinette’s style. With the help of her dancers, Madonna put on a show that was more of a hymn to escaping reality through imagination and dancing. In the song, the artist paid tribute to some of the great divas of the past, as it can be inferred by the lyrics and the music video itself. The great role the Italian-American singer played with her song for the promotion of gay and African-American culture is beyond doubt. Vogue is one of the pop hits that have contributed the most to the development of a reflection on gender and sexual identity, and it still has a huge influence today, whether acknowledged or not96.

For the purpose of this study97, the music video of the song Vogue plays a prime role. Through black and white sequences shot by David Fincher and accompanied by voguing dancers, Madonna paid a tribute to Hollywood’s golden age 95

Gender performativity is a term introduced by post-structuralist philosopher and theorist Judith Butler, firstly used in her book Gender Trouble. A central concept in Judith Butler's theory is that gender is constructed through the repetitive performance of gender. Gender performativity is a stylized repetition of acts, an imitation of the dominant conventions of gender, for example in drag performance. See: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 1990.

96 Madonna, hated and praised by feminists at the same time, is the subject of many post-modern studies for the use she made of her influence on the mass, to bring an underground movement to the general public.

97 I am grateful to Marco Argentina, young scholar and voguer, for the technical and choreographic advice and for the fundamental contextual analysis as well.

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divas. Fully aware of her accomplishment, it is beyond doubt that Madonna knew the impact – on a commercial level – that her choice was bound to have, and it indeed had such an influence, that the Vogue period also marks a turning point in the voguing culture itself, now accessible to the general public. The social and cultural process Madonna started was very clever, because through the use of a way of expression that was historically tied to the gay, the Latin and the African-American cultures, and of lyrics such as «it doesn’t matter it you’re black or white, if you’re a boy or a girl», she dissolved the borders between subculture and mainstream culture.

It was now no longer necessary to be gay to vogue, and everybody could claim the right to be themselves, to paraphrase the title of another popular song by Madonna, Express Yourself.

How did this process of opening to the general public work? The strength of the whole operation seems to lie in the way Madonna paid tribute to the underground culture: not a mere “copy and paste” or just a random summing up of its style, but by working on two different levels. The first was that of the choreography, put into the hands of professional voguers and the brightest exponents of the Houses and the ballculture. The second level was the one concerning Madonna’s gestures, with the popular pose – both hands held in front of her face as to frame it – to the words «strike a pose», inspired by the movements of the divas mentioned in the rapped second part of the song. Aware of the fact that the voguing way of expression was not her own, she paid great respect to it by not trying to copy it and just hinting to its characteristic movements. In doing so – using the general sense of the voguing moves and not strictly following their choreographic coding – she also simplified them and made them more accessible – almost as a commercial product.

For the sake of accuracy, there is another musical piece dated 2012 by Madonna it is important to mention: Girl gone wild. The song – chosen as a single from her latest album – was full of references to her early works, one of which was, of course, Vogue. Both songs share similar music videos, in terms of white and black photography, set design, references to the gay world and the worship of the male body, all things that reflect the singer’s tastes. The dance moves in the 2012 music video represented both the newest component in the album, and the most direct reference to all the choices mentioned above. Every pose, every hint of a voguing dance move, every triangle-shaped movement executed by muscular bodies on heels seems to remind of voguing. Everything is very inexact and extremely accurate at the same time. The choreography to Girl gone wild is the peak of the above-mentioned process of making the voguing movement accessible to the general public started twenty-two years earlier by Madonna. One could object that making a phenomenon accessible to everybody means letting it become mainstream, end up in pop-culture,

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and lose most of its original content, but that loss is the price to pay for the sake of a process of blending, renewal and mixing with other contents and ideas. If we did not accept that, then we could only talk of a mere “voguish expression” – which does not have much in common with tradition, other than the gestures.

The fact that Madonna asked the Kazaky – a young Ukrainian boy band – to take part in her music video is a clear sign that she knows that there is a difference between what she does and the movement she draws inspiration from. The Kazaky are known for their performances, which include a mix of dance moves, singing, a display of muscles, fashion and homoerotic choreographies executed most of the time in heels, with leather and studded clothes. According to sociologist Camille Paglia, there are two different types of male homosexuality98, depending on the way a gay man feels towards his mother. When gay men identify with their mother lifting her up to a peak of femininity and fertility, they become what Paglia calls «transvestite priests of Cybele», honoring and celebrating her in the orgiastic rituals of dancemusic, where drag queens and transvestites are the highest form of expression of religiousness.

The second type of male homosexuality is represented by those gays who refuse and revolt against their mother’s power, and it is expressed through the form of perfect manliness, with a reference to Ancient Greece and its standards of the male body, which was always depicted as perfect and statuesque. In this dichotomy, the Kazaky – exponents of promiscuity – could be seen as standing in the middle.

The clash between femininity and manliness helps to interpret every factor that draws inspiration from the voguing movement. The idea at the base of every performance by the Kazaky – the desire to express themselves – is similar to the one the manifesto of voguing is founded on, (the former act on the East European scene, and the latter was developed in the United States during the Seventies), and the only substantial difference lies in the planning and the way things are organized. As a matter of fact, the Kazaky became famous thanks to the internet – through Youtube – and have a very specific target, which does not only include homosexuals. The fact that they took part in a music video just as dancers – and as singers – despite being a band, makes their marketing strategy clear. In fact, the song is not considered a featuring, and the Kazaky only appear in the music video as dancers. They were chosen for their style – that people are now beginning to call «Kazaky style» – which is more of a mere copy of voguing, than a real tribute to it, and all there is of the voguing culture is the pleasure of cross-dressing (both in terms of attitude and clothing choice), leaving behind the battle over rights and focusing only on the 98

Camille Paglia, Homosexuality At the Fin de Siècle, in Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays, Vintage Books, New York, 23-24.

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display of the individual99. Further analysis reveal that the Kazaky’s approach to the original voguing culture is spreading, and it is starting to be used in gay clubs and discos – not just by drag queens, but also by boys dancing on heels100.

Following an unbiased analysis, free from personal judgments, all these expressions seem to be just a way for individuals to display their sexuality for the sake of a personal process of self-gratification in one’s own environment. There is no political inference there, just the rules of show business. Everything is focused on attitude and posturing, and there is no reference to the ambiguity and the otherness of the divas of the past, and pop-stars – well aware of using an artifice – focus on imitation in all its unheimlichkeit, often bordering on grotesque. In this regard, it is important to introduce the idea of “camp”101, that according to Susan Sontag is an aesthetic sensitivity springing from a love for artifice, exaggeration and the unnatural102. Looking at the world from a camp point of view, means seeing it in terms of style – an ironic, flamboyant, flashy, theatrical style. And that is what camp is based on: theatricality (both in the sense of factitious, and as a more complicated idea of a metaphor of life as a stage). This «Being-as-Playing-a-Role»103 attitude gives awareness of the fact that all the opposites – or binarisms, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick104 would call them – upon which life is based – like gender roles – are interchangeable. Camp, a frivolous approach not exclusively used by gays, feeds on the exchange and the opposition between the two genders, aiming precisely at overturning the widespread cultural standards of taste, attitude and language.

That’s why people who represent camp have an androgynous look, like Greta Garbo, mentioned in the song Vogue. According to Sontag, the thing that makes feminine women beautiful is their masculine part, and vice-versa. This signals the importance of sexuality: the exaggeration of one’s sexual characteristics and «personality mannerisms» goes hand in hand with the androgynous and the camp.

This is the reign of effeminacy, of the interchangeability between man and woman105.

Richard Dyer, an expert of Film Studies, goes even further stating that camp, by definition, isn’t butch or manly106.

99

Even nowadays self-ostentation is one of the fundamental characteristics of the voguing culture.

Names are not mentioned here because examples of that kind are extremely common and get exhausted in a very short time.

101 For a detailed discussion on camp see: Fabio Cleto (curated by), Camp: Queer Aestetics And the Performing Subject, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1999.

102 Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp, in Fabio Cleto (curated by), Camp, 53.

103 Ibid., 56.

104 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwik, Epistemology of the Closet, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990.

105 Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp, in Fabio Cleto (curated by), Camp, 56.

106 Richard Dyer, It's Being so Camp as Keep Us Going, in Fabio CLETO (curated by), Camp, 110.

100

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Going back to the artistic examples mentioned above, it is important to reiterate that they weren’t based on attitude in relation to voguing moves, but on a display of sexuality in a super-structured form, or better a «performative» sexuality, as Bruce LaBruce calls it, which can be decoded thanks to Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Britney Spears’ «drag queen» way of exaggeration, which is promoted as avantgarde under false pretenses, but it actually hides a «crudely obvious, unnuanced female sexuality, and even a vaguely pornographic sensibility which, unhappily, is post-feminist to the point of misogyny»107.

Once it is accepted that wearing heels is all it is needed to vogue, to prove that it is false to state that the voguing culture was not absorbed in Italy, if not just under the form of “voguish expression”, it suffices to quote the example of a well-known Italian talent show. In the beginning, there are two wannabe professional dancers who have to win a competition on heels in order to become part of the show108. The two contestants said more than once that the style they were using was called girling or girly style, a type of dance on heels that combined voguing dance moves and femininity. It is important to underline how Andrea Attila Felice, the dancer who won, calls his style street-jazz, and not girling, and states: To better explain my style, you just have to divide its name into two words: the first one – street – includes different hip-hop techniques, such as poppin, house, waacking and others like new style, voguing, L.A. style, girly, dance-hall. The second one – jazz – includes movements – like leaps and twists – that are typical of modern dance. So we can say that street-jazz is one of the most commercial dance styles, which combines a mix of hiphop techniques, but is also influenced by basics of the modern dance style109.

Although it would be impossible to carry on a thorough study on the reception of voguing in Italy, it appears that the dance culture in Italy is greatly influenced by trends that depend on the variables of demand and offer110. What is considered in at the moment? What does the audience want to see? What is there that can be reinvented? In a context of refusal of academic training, the idea of «crop and paste» is 107

Bruce Labruce, Notes on Camp/ Anti-Camp, the essay was first presented at the Camp/Anti-Camp Conference in Berlin in march 2012, curated by Susanne Sachsse and Marc Siegel, available on-line at: http://natbrut.com/notes-oncamp-labruce (November 2013).

108 Available on-line at: http://www.video.mediaset.it/video/amici/danza/367147/antonino-vs-andrea.html (November 2013).

109 Interview with Andrea Attila Felice, available on-line at: http://www.forumnews.it/?p=6445 (November 2013).

110 Surely the discussion may be expanded to food, cinema, music, etc…

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gaining more importance every day, and that could explain the nuances between the different terminologies of each style, which are an example of a choreographic apparatus that is increasingly becoming hybrid and indefinable. Thus, there is a question that arises naturally, which we include here for the sake of accuracy and not with a provocative aim: do styles exist anymore? And, above all, is research only based on aesthetics and form, or – speaking of content – is there also a hint of that spirit of social and political activism that is at the base of the voguing culture?

It is not true that voguing has not in the least been absorbed in Italy. Real examples of it, which we will mention further on, are rare – so rare that they can be counted on the fingers of one hand – but there are some.

Finally, to conclude this general overview of non-voguing examples, it is important to talk about voguing classes and courses in Italy. Well away from the Houses and the Ballroom scene, the voguing culture is now passed down in gymnasiums and dance schools. An overview through a research on a search engine is not accurate, but it gives the idea of the situation111. In schools where such classes are available, wrong notions are often given out. Descriptions of voguing on the web either say that it is a dance style originated in prisons, that it was invented by Madonna, or that it is a form of fitness dancing. During the 2012 edition of the Rimini Wellness fair, an important event dedicated to well-being, Javier Ninja – one of the best voguers on today’s scene – held some classes of Vogue&Fit, an activity useful for tightening the glutes and improve the circulatory system 112.

Among the «real examples» of voguing, as they have been called above, it is important to mention at least two: Barbara Pedrazzi, known as La B. Fujiko, and the voguing classes at the NABA - Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti di Milano.

La B. Fujiko is a dancer, a choreographer and a teacher as well as the main exponent of voguing and waacking113 in Italy. She has not trained just imitating the steps taught in some tutorial on the Internet, as is often the case with “club entertainers”. La B. Fujiko learnt on the field, traveling through America and North Europe, attending classes and becoming the apprentice of the best voguers around. Of course, she is not the only one to have gone in that direction, putting time, passion and money in her training, but she surely is a prime example. She has accomplished a lot, in terms of awards and satisfaction, and the quality of her work is recognized by 111

When someone looks for «voguing Italia» on Google the results are made of a list of sites, articles and references to the magazine «Vogue». Only after several pages, it is possible to see the first result that concerns the search, that is the definition written in Wikipedia.

112 Irma D'ARIA, Fitness, si Cambia!, available on-line at: http://d.repubblica.it/argomenti/2012/05/10/news/fitness_tendenze-1006927/ (November 2013).

113 Waaking is very similar to voguing with the only difference that this dance was born on the West Coast of the U.S., in the county of Los Angeles.

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the legendary House of Ninja, which invited her to become part of its “family”. La B. Fujiko also created her own group, called B-Fuji, which she follows in several contests – both on a national level and worldwide – in which the ball-culture spirit is still alive.

The classes at the NABA - Nuova Accademia delle Belle Arti di Milano, on the other hand, are part of an academic institution, included in the study plan of a three-year course in Fashion Design. The perspective from which the phenomenon of voguing is taught there is yet of another kind, focusing more on the creative process of reconstructing the original context and tradition that were essential for the creation of the phenomenon. In line with the purpose of the course, the main focus in these classes is on the creation of stage costumes (with the use of recycled materials), but it is interesting to analyze the initial process and how everything is plannes. At the beginning of the term, students are asked to divide themselves into “families”, taking the “Houses” as model. Once groups have been formed, a surname for each “family” is chosen, and finally roles are assigned – the leader of the group, the Mother, and then all the others. Then, students start designing costumes – which have to reflect the family they represent – that will be displayed at the end of the course with an actual fashion show.

This example is interesting because of the questions it arises. First of all, can a culture be taught? And why exactly voguing? Is it an expedient to expose students to a different reality, or better still, to help them develop a complete new working process? It would also be appropriate to question if despite the change of time and geographic coordinates, voguing still has part of the spirit of social and political claim that characterized its origins, or rather if now people just focus on its aesthetics.

In conclusion, there is yet another doubt that arises: if a real culture of voguing was to be absorbed in Italy, would it be useful for the redefinition of the ideas of gender, identity, equal opportunity and rights for the minorities?

The reception of voguing and reactions in Italy: a connection with the gay identity In what way do the codes of transformation analyzed so far contribute to organize or disorganize our society? And what are the effects the fictitious approach of building one’s image has on society and the individual? It is quite difficult to analyze the various processes that lead the public to perceive the phenomenon of voguing – considered in its performative sphere – in a certain way. As has been said, this artistic expression in Italy has completely lost its original traits typical of the socalled “LGBT world”, and has only spread in the dance field. Yet, the ignorance shown towards this type of performance says a lot.

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This research poses a fundamental question: is it possible, in Italy, to “restore” voguing to its original form, in all its effectiveness in the process of assertion of a minority – that formed by homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals – still long overdue in our country. To carry out a thorough analysis on the phenomenon from the point of view of culture, politics and aesthetics, it is essential to take into account the prime role played by gay identity and style, which do not usually express their peculiarity through an erotic act, but through a combination of customs, both physical and mental, that in the confrontation with the main values of the cultural establishment, lead to a social conflict, more than to a confrontation. Italy there is still no law defining discrimination based on sexual orientation as an aggravating circumstance, in addition to article 3 of the Italian Constitution114, despite the large number of homophobic attacks of a very violent nature, and the high rates suicide among bullied gay teenagers has reached. The media have often drawn attention to this matter creating intense debates, but not leading to any significant solution.

Recently, however, there has been an event that must have been subject to a certain degree of obscurantism: in Nardò, a town in the province of Lecce, in the South of Italy, a man put up a sign on the door of the bar he owned stating that homosexuals could not enter the place115. An unbelievable act somewhere in the middle between unreason and the terror engendered by a totalitarian regime. It makes clear that the models promoted by our society must be negative. It is as if every gay teen had the whole world against him or her. Episodes of physical and verbal abuse are made possible by the tolerant atmosphere that prevails in schools – and society in general – which minimizes the gravity of such conducts, almost justifying them by judging homosexuality as negative. On the other hand, European countries are promoting the creation of television commercials speaking out against homophobia and bullying to raise awareness amongst the people. There is one in particular, shot in Portugal, that is worth mentioning. It shows two old ladies knitting on a bench in a park. Then two gay boys holding hands pass by, and they start whispering in shock.

Next one would expect to hear a derogatory comment, but the two grannies were just complaining about the fact that the boys were wearing t-shirts in «such a cold

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Article 3 of the Italian Constitution: «All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinion, personal and social conditions. It is the duty of the Republic to remove those obstacles of an economic or social nature which constrain the freedom and equality of citizens, thereby impeding the full development of the human person and the effective participation of all workers in the political, economic and social organisation of the country».

A controversial bill has been passed in the Chamber of Deputies over the past few months. It goes against the homo-and trans-phobia, but it only affects acted offenses and not any incitement or discriminative propaganda.

115 Available on-line at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWsc-tDwYPI (November 2013).

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weather»116. In Italy there has never been a campaign of such an impact. On the contrary, Rai – the Italian public television company – blocked a commercial by the Ministry of equal opportunities which stated «Sì alle differenze. No all’omofobia.» (say yes to differences, and no to homophobia). The reason is very simple: it contained the words «gay» and «lesbian», which were judged discriminatory117, almost like a dog is chasing its own tail. After all, it is important to remember that in 2011 Ikea created a campaign that provoked a huge scandal. The ad showed two men holding hands with the motto «we are open to every family». Undersecretary Carlo Giovanardi stated it was offensive towards the Italian Constitution, and the gay community started a protest. A «free kissing» performance was organized. It consisted in a minute-long display of affection in front of the Ikea store in the North of Rome118. The two men in the ad were not in a provoking pose promoting lingerie, but they were visibly fully clothed and just holding hands. This event was followed by a much steamier campaign against homophobia promoted by the independent province of Trento and organized by two LGBT Italian organizations called Arcigay and Arcilesbica. The banner displayed two men and two women dressed as Schützen119 in the act of kissing. After long discussions, institutions approved the campaign120. What was so shocking that could upset the public? What there something that could be judged «out of the norm» or subject to exploitations? The next question to arise would be why the huge billboards hanging everywhere, showing girls in lingerie or half-naked men in explicit attitudes are not subject to discussions concerning their appropriateness. Our hypothesis is that no artistic form – movies121, art pieces or dance expressions – dealing with homosexuality can break the deep-rooted stereotype of the «different», unless combined with a deep knowledge of the mechanisms at the base of the creation of a stereotype, which is nothing other than a response to the need – necessary to the individual – to categorize reality as is perceived through experience. Studies on gender teach us that the mechanism of validation of a stereotypical notion is strictly applied also, and especially, to sexual identity. In the confrontation with another person, the brain starts 116

Available on-line at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgfZDi-ps68 (May 2013). TV commercial agains homophobia, Per il diritto all'indifferenza, 2008.

117 Available on-line at: http://tv.fanpage.it/stop-a-spot-contro-omofobia-in-rai-contiene-le-parole-gay-e-lesbica/ (November 2013) 118 Available on-line at: http://www.queerblog.it/post/11048/carlo-giovanardi-contro-la-pubblicita-di-due-uominigay-mano-nella-mano-per-ikea-e-una-violenza-e-un-attacco-alla-nostra-costituzione (November 2013).

119 Also known as Tyrolean shooters, Schützen has formed for about three centuries (from the XVI to the IXX century. D. C.) a voluntary military corp used to defend the territory of the province of Tyrol. Today their clothes are simply folkloristic.

120 Available on-line at: http://www.spotanatomy.it/2013/34180/ (November 2013).

121 The filmography of Ferzan Ozpetek is focused on this topic and on the issue of homophobia in Italy.

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a process of automatic classification of the sex of that person, labeling her according to two categories: male or female122. As Flavia Monceri wrote in her essay called Pensare multiplo. Oltre le dicotomie di sesso e di genere: None of us usually asks others if they are male or female, postponing the answer for a later time, after the observation of the combination of attitudes and behavior. […] The decision to label an individual according to the M/F dichotomy is in fact caused by a combination of elements that, not having been negotiated, must be considered as mere prejudices whose validity depends on the fact that they are normally not questioned, because they actually work – at least apparently. These elements are firstly physical appearance (one’s anatomical configuration, so to speak), a combination of physical attitudes, the tone of voice, etc123.

Sex is assigned to newborns just after their birth, and individuals are divided into two gender categories before the evidence of their naked body: male and female.

On the other hand, nature seems to eschew from any dual definition, and offers the possibility of a third gender (still not considered as such)124: intersexuality. The socalled “hermaphrodites” – the use of this commonly used term is incorrect – are people «who are in a state that is not completely masculine or feminine»125. They are therefore in a liminal situation between the two genders, which – without any physical damage – could remain unchanged. Regrettably, as Catherine Harper wrote, «[…] even with the proof of intersexuality just before our eyes, medical science keeps perpetuating a system based on two genders, establishing that also children who cannot be classified as belonging to either one of them, have to be defined according to that system anyway»126, subsequently to an essential surgical procedure.

The matter is subject to another problem, is we where to talk about what could be called the cross-dressing effect, as in a psychological and social implicit effect that is not just local or historical. One of the cultural roles of cross-dressers is in particular that of marking the shift from class to gender, and from gender to race or religion. In cross-dressing the dualism between male and female – an apparent ground of 122

Cristina Gamberi (curated by), Educare al genere, Carrocci, Roma, 2010.

Flavia Monceri, Pensare Multiplo. Oltre le Dicotomie di Sesso e di Genere, in C. Gamberi (curated by), Educare al Genere, 73.

124 When this paper was written, Europe didn’t have any official recognition of this gender. In November 2013, Germany enacted a law that provides for an optional declaration of sex on the birth certificate, admitting the possibility of a “third sex”. Without any doubt it was an isolated case, but an important step was done.

125 Flavia Monceri, Pensare Multiplo. Oltre le Dicotomie di Sesso e di Genere, in C. Gamberi (curated by), Educare al Genere, 74.

126 Ibid., 74.

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distinction between “this” and “that”, “him” and “me” – is questioned and exposed to the risk of obliteration, so the cross-dresser, will always act as a sign of overdetermination – that is a mechanism of disorientation from a vague limit to the other. Camouflage causes disorientation, leading perception to drift from common sentiment. Norms – the subject of a study by Michel Foucault – are overturned. The French philosopher noticed that mechanisms of power were involved in the elaboration of these norms – applied to the so-called “body discipline” – with the purpose of institutionalizing them in the frame of a highly-regulated code127.

As a matter of fact, children grow in a social and cultural context ruled by a predominant idea – which defines the relationship between two people of different sexes as the only right form of love, calling it «normal» – and a minor one that approves of love between people of the same sex, but contextualizing it in different forms that are also changing and not institutionalized. Boys spend most of their teenage years – if not their whole lives – building their own sexual representation, a model of who they are, by working on a personal and creative level. But putting the development process undergone by homosexual on the same level of that undergone by heterosexuals is not that simple: besides the similar processes of psychic identification and social differentiation, the development undergone by heterosexuals falls into an accepted cultural establishment with well-defined reference models of behavior, connected to the biological and symbolic reproduction of society, while the development undergone by homosexuals, in lack of pre-defined models, forces the individual to invent or to research his or her own way of expressing, or better, his or hers multiple configurations. Thus, on one side we find society – whose power is based on and strengthened by stereotypes – and on the other LGBT people in their marginality, clashing against a compliant power that does not seem to include them.

At this point, it would be important for our society to reconsider the construction of masculinity by the use of a new point of view, which should no longer be rigid, patriarchal, misogynous and homophobe, but wider and more open.

Beyond performance The study carried out in these pages does not only focus on social changes and different trends, and it is not about the clash between America and Italy, the old generations and the new ones. On the contrary, its purpose is to understand how the change of focus that has occurred, has led to an overturn of the purpose of performances (not only considered from the artistic point of view, but also as «action, 127

Michel Foucault, Volontà di Sapere. Storia della Sessualità, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2001. In reference to the analysis of intersexuality, I refer also to Michel Foucault, Gli Anormali, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2002.

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interaction and relation»128 amongst individuals). Performance – when «it isn’t “in” anything, but “between”»129 – finds its reason for being in connection. This position it has, between, is in the sense of threshold, line of border, a place of infinite potential and possibilities that we have tried to contextualize. Schechner’s theories were of great help as a support to the process of definition of the macro areas where voguing, in its dual performative nature, finds its expression.

Setting deliberately aside the category of everyday life, root container of all the other categories, the cultural dualism of America in the Seventies and of contemporary Italy is based on the peculiarities of business, popular entertainment, sex, rituals and arts130.

So, voguing has not disappeared, and it keeps manifesting itself in sever aspects of everyday life, but with completely different ranges, purposes and degrees.

One can no longer talk of ritual or collective participation, which is every day less explicit in relation to the demand of leisure by society. What is left, then, of the original American claims? A brief but effective analysis can be found in Schechner’s idea of the purpose of performances: «to entertain, to make something that is beautiful, to mark or change identity, to make or foster community, to heal, to teach, persuade, or convince, and to deal with the sacred and/or the demonic»131. Where is voguing rooted? What were the places where it used to manifest itself in America?

Where does it still appear today?

If at the time the main goal was that of constructing an identity through which one could recognize himself or herself and let others know him or her, the shift in the timeframe caused a change in the original purpose of the phenomenon, which has kept most of the time the same characteristics, but with a completely different aim.

This is why this research talks about cross-dressing, camouflage and strategies processes used to manifest one’s own belonging to a gender, far from that primordial need of expressing one’s identity132, or of creating and expanding a community, but rather just for a narcissistic133 need of displaying one’s self. The need for deliverance and self-expression through dance is not new, and as a matter of fact it endures still today, despite the changes in time and place. This original principle could be defined as a constant, since it remains unvaried despite the change on a geographic and temporal level. This constant, differences set aside, is filled with culturally shared 128

Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 24.

Ibid., 24.

130 Ibid., 25.

131 Ibid., 37.

132 To identify into a class is necessary what is different, ambiguous, alternative to the norm, anything that is considered as abnormal.

133 This term is not used in a negative sense, but it just defines a natural mental scheme of the observer.

129

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ideas on sex and gender. Feminist theorist Judith Butler reminds us that these ideas134 are simply cultural structures engendered by the repetition of acts performed through time, with the aim of using strict categories to label terms with very uncertain boundaries135. Hence, a «reassessment of the individual» seen «firstly as a body»136 would be necessary, where «body» stands for what individuals build in the social and cultural framework they live in, which is of course subject to schemes and dynamics of power: sex is the first criterion used to define a body and its identity, which is subject to «identification processes»137.

Canziani’s words on the subject are very meaningful, because they boost a reflection on still unresolved matters, like those underlined by this very study.

Is it really clear what gender identity is? And whether cross-dressing is really connected to homosexuality? Or to bisexuality? Or if being a drag queen is actually a job, or a spiritual condition? […] there is still a long way to go. Because changes undergone by vocabulary, more than those undergone by customs, make it labyrinthine to travel through this topic.

And words that have been absorbed – such as queer, drag queen, crossdresser, butch, transgender – do not help to make the situation clearer. On the contrary, they multiply the possibilities of distinction. Obscure acronyms (like MtF or FtM, which point out the direction of one’s transition) do not help to throw light on the path. Sexual orientation and gender orientation do not always match. To conclude, the theatre of identities is a real mess138.

Bibliografia Norberto ANGELETTI, Alberto OLIVA , In Vogue, Rizzoli, Milano, 2008.

Stuart BAKER, Voguing and the House Ballroom Scene of New York City 1989-92, SJR Publishing, London, 2011.

Judith BUTLER, Corpi che Contano. I Limiti Discorsivi del “Sesso”, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1996.

Judith BUTLER, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 1990.

134 135 136 137 138

On the other hand, each concept is a social and cultural result.

Judith Butler, Corpi che Contano. I Limiti Discorsivi del “Sesso”, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1996, 3.

Concepts such as “body”, “subject”, “gender” or “sex” are essential in the thought of Judith Butler.

Judith Butler, Corpi che Contano. I Limiti Discorsivi del “Sesso”, 3.

Roberto Canziani, Teatro delle Identità, Identità del Teatro, in «Hystrio», XXIV, 2, 2013, 42.

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Giuseppe BURGIO, Mezzi Maschi: gli Adolescenti Gay dell'Italia Meridionale: una Ricerca Etnopedagogica, Mimesis, Milano, 2008.

Roberto CANZIANI, Teatro delle Identità, Identità del Teatro, in «Hystrio», XXVI, 2, 2013.

Fabio CLETO (curated by), Camp: Queer Aestetics and the Performing Subject, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1999.

Corey K. CREEKMUR, Alexander DOTY, Out in Culture. Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, Duke University Press Books, Durham, 1995.

Eve KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, Epistemology of the Closet, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990.

Michel FOUCAULT, Volontà di Sapere. Storia della Sessualità, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2001.

Michel FOUCAULT, Gli Anormali, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2002.

Cristina GAMBERI (curated by), Educare al Genere, Carrocci, Roma, 2010.

Marjorie GARBER, Interessi Truccati. Giochi di Travestimento e Angoscia Culturale, Raffaello Cortina, Milano, 1992.

Camille PAGLIA, Sex, art and American Culture: Essays, Vintage Books, New York, 1992.

Sergio PERRI, Drag Queens: Travestitismo, Ironia e Divismo “Camp” nelle Regine del Nuovo Millennio, Castelvecchi Editore, Roma, 2000.

Enrico PITOZZI (curated by), «Culture Teatrali», n. 21, 2012.

Richard SCHECHNER, Performance Studies: an Introduction, Routledge, London, 2002.

Sara VICARELLI, Ostiense, Due Gay Pestati Fuori dall'Alpheus, in «La Repubblica», 29 aprile 2013.

William J. WILSON, The Truly Disavantaged. the Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987.

Sitography and Videography Niall CONNOLLY, Welcome to the Ballroom, where Voguing is Always in Style: http://boingboing.net/2013/03/06/ballroom.html Irma D'ARIA, Fitness, si Cambia!: http://d.repubblica.it/argomenti/2012/05/10/news/fitness_tendenze-1006927/ Intervista ad Andrea Attila FELICE: http://www.forumnews.it/?p=6445 Bruce LABRUCE, Notes On Camp/Anti-Camp: http://natbrut.com/notes-on-camp-labruce Madonna, Vogue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuJQSAiODqI Madonna, Girl Gone Wild: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYkwziTrv5o Tv commercial against homophobia, Portugal 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgfZDi-ps68 TV commercial by the Ministry of equal opportunities, «Sì alle differenze. No all’omofobia.», (2013): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvjByANuAEc

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SEBASTIANO NUCERA

Da Laas Gaal al John Lennon Wall Homo sapiens tra tecnologie e nuove dimensioni rituali The aim of this essay is to demonstrate how, starting from a continuous reconfiguration of ecological patterns, Homo sapiens has performed a transaction of the architectures that allow him to relate to his own conspecifics and to constantly changing contexts. This transaction, which has been realised in particular by the refinement of his artefacts and by a new understanding of these, creates, in fact, new ontological levels that are destined, in turn, to following transformations. More precisely, the interaction between individual and environment has produced, throughout the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, a “creative bond” that has remodelled the very concept of living in (and reacting in) the world. The creative evolution that accompanies the history of the modern man is one of the most powerful and versatile types of “grammar”, which paves the way for new task-scapes, redefines boundaries and ways of interaction between “body” and “environment” but, above all, makes the creation of increasingly more user-friendly communicative niches possible today, creating symbolic flows that are increasingly less infused in biological matrices.

In other words, the interactional loop between individual and environment creates the cognitive equivalent (Clarck, 2004) of Dawkins’ Extended Phenotype (1982) that, along with a spatial constraint of the physical world, provokes an expansion in the relationship among agents, culture and social networks at the same time.

1. I primi designer Le prime manifestazioni “tecnologiche” sono certamente identificabili negli strumenti litici del periodo olduvaiano rinvenuti nella valle dell’Awash in Etiopia (2,6 milioni di anni fa) (Harris, 1986) e nella gola di Olduvai nel Serengeti tanzaniano (tra 2 e 1,5 milioni di anni fa) (Leakey, Tobias, Napier, 1964; Leakey, 1971) e sono attribuibili a Australopithecus boisei e Homo habilis. La gola di Olduvai oltre ad essere uno delle più antiche testimonianze di tecnologia litica rappresenta un caso unico di “fissazione” cronometrica di sublimazioni tecnologiche attraverso la formazione di quattro strati geologici (Bed I, II, III, IV. Cfr. Leakey, 1971; Kimura 2002) che hanno “fotografato”, diacronicamente, l’evoluzione avvenuta nella lavorazione degli strumenti litici in circa 2,6 milioni di anni. Il periodo successivo, l’acheuleano (da 750.00 a 120.00 anni fa), sebbene caratterizzato dall’introduzione di nuove lavorazioni della pietra come la tecnica Levallois (Shea, Davis, Brown, 2001; Binford & Binford, 1996) risulta essere scevro di veri e propri shift tecnologici.

L’industria litica musteriana (da 300.000 a 30.000 anni fa), attribuita sia ad Homo neanderthalensis che ad Homo sapiens (Johanson & Edgar, 1996) segna la scomparsa delle asce manuali e l’utilizzo delle prime forme di leva. Sebbene sia innegabile l’enorme apporto conoscitivo che la strumentazione litica ci offre in relazione ai materiali utilizzati e alle tecniche di esecuzione al fine di determinare l’esistenza di proto culture, ciò che emerge, in modo sorprendente, è l’aritmia dell’innovazione: in

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circa tre milioni di anni la produzione litica si è arricchita di pochi e geograficamente eterogenei cambiamenti. Le novità, tuttavia, non tarderanno ad arrivare soprattutto a partire dalla capacità di Homo sapiens di ricombinare le innovazioni, declinarle, aggiustarle e trasmetterle all’interno di quelle che potremmo definire le prime “comunità di pratica” (Wenger, 1998). Questo passaggio si dimostrerà cruciale poiché non solo segna una tappa evolutiva in cui all’evoluzione biologica si affiancherà una veloce evoluzione culturale ma quest’ultima oltre a costituire anche uno “dei principali motori del cambiamento naturale” (Pennisi & Falzone, 2010:220).

Riprendendo Jared Diamond (1997:75-76) Fino al grande balzo in avanti, la cultura umana sia era sviluppata a passo di lumaca per milioni di anni. Il passo era scandito dal lento ritmo del mutamento genetico. L'evoluzione culturale è stata assai maggiore negli ultimi 40.000 anni - anni in cui si sono verificati mutamenti soltanto trascurabili nella nostra anatomia che nei milioni di anni precedenti. Se un visitatore extraterrestre fosse sceso sulla Terra al tempo dei neanderthaliani, non avrebbe riservato all'uomo un'attenzione particolare, come essere unico fra le specie del mondo. Al massimo, il visitatore avrebbe potuto menzionarlo assieme al castoro, all'uccello giardiniere e alla formica legionaria come esempio di specie dal comportamento curioso. Lo zoologo extraterrestre avrebbe mai potuto prevedere il mutamento che avrebbe ben presto fatto di noi la prima specie, nella storia della vita sulla Terra, capace di distruggere ogni forma di vita?

La storia umana è satura di swich-off culturali, tuttavia, è chiaro che il passaggio a sistemi culturali nuovi non è mai stato netto ma segnato, soprattutto in passato, da lunghi periodi intermedi. La comparsa di Homo sapiens è contraddistinta da una serie di indicatori che dimostrano l’emergenza di nuove ed evolute facies culturali, in particolare a partire dal Paleolitico Superiore (da 40.000 a 10.000 anni fa), che avranno successive ricadute non solo tecnologiche ma anche sociali. Probabilmente, riprendendo Potts (1996), è proprio a partire da questo periodo che la “dipendenza culturale” di Homo sapiens diventa irreversibile ed incorporata nel ricco scambio tra individuo ed affordances socio-ambientali, nell’evoluzione di strumenti e

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comportamenti e nelle possibilità adattative che essi realizzano. La cultura diviene quindi una “nicchia ontogenetica specie-specifica all’interno della quale avviene lo sviluppo umano” (Tomasello, 2005:102), ed è proprio all’interno di questa nicchia che Homo sapiens realizza un climax di “flessibilità fenotipiche” (Richerson & Boyd, 2005) che gli permetteranno, prima, di addomesticare o addolcire pressioni ambientali e successivamente, come vedremo, sia di sviluppare complesse codificazioni simboliche che di realizzare vere e proprie realtà ubiquitarie. Ma facciamo un passo indietro: a quando è possibile far risalire l’esplosione creativa della nostra specie? Si è visto, sebbene sinteticamente, come la produzione litica abbia dimostrato uno scarso arricchimento tecnologico in molti milioni di anni ed è opportuno sottolineare che la “scusa” delle specie funzionerebbe molto poco considerando che lo stesso Homo sapiens, la specie alla quale apparteniamo, solo negli ultimi 40.000 anni è stata promotrice di una sbalorditiva impennata creativa e le evidenze archeologiche lo testimoniano attraverso il ritrovamento di ossa incise, bassorilievi di argilla e le più note pitture rupestri. Sarebbe estremamente interessante ripercorrere le dinamiche dei processi messi in atto dai primi gruppi umani e dalle percolazioni simbolico-culturali che ne sono scaturite, tuttavia, per ragioni di economia del testo, mi limiterò all’analisi di specifici esempi di pitture parietali, quelle di Laas Gaal, cercando di allestire una prima tematizzazione relativa a nuove sinecologie e provando a cogliere non solo la dimensione eteronoma ma anche quella funzionale ed estetica di queste prime forme d’arte realizzando un confronto con le pratiche attuali di decorazione parietale tipiche della Street Art. 2. La dimensione situata dell’atto performativo Cosa è possibile definire arte? Il concetto di arte può prescindere da una dimensione meramente edonistica? Probabilmente, la dimensione estetica non è direttamente collocabile all’interno di una categoria universale del “bello” e questo a ragione del fatto che, ad esempio, la distinzione che si è soliti fare tra arti visive e arti non visive è puramente strumentale poiché sganciata sa situate intenzionalità culturali, funzionali ed espressive che ne costituiscono il fondamento. Tuttavia, sebbene non esistano culture che non abbiamo prodotto, in quantità diverse, sistemi e modalità di accostare trame cromatiche, elementi sonori, forme, o movimenti del corpo capaci di indurre, in chi li guarda o ascolta, determinati stati d’animo, sarebbe un grave errore credere che il piano emozionale costituisca l’unico metro interpretativo di quelle manifestazioni. In riferimento alle pitture rupestri, infatti, gli archeologi e gli psicologi evoluzionisti possono solo supporre, con abbondante margine di approssimazione, che quella “dimensione artistica” fosse determinata dalle specificità ecologiche e simboliche tipiche di quelle culture ma è, di fatto, impossibile

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specificarne il “senso artistico” così come oggi lo intendiamo. D’altra parte, per dare una risposta parziale alla prima domanda, appare limitativo e, per certi versi, fuorviante definire l’arte rupestre un’“arte”, appunto. Successivamente alla provocatoria introduzione del ready-made da parte di Duchamp, l’essenza di quello che eravamo abituati a pensare fosse “arte” è stata messa in discussione e, allo stesso modo, si assiste ad una profanazione del sentimento estetico se, riprendendo George Dickie (1971), l’opera d’arte non è altro che quel manufatto che i membri designati del mondo dell’arte definiscono tale139. Inoltre, ad un livello d’analisi ulteriore, la percezione “estetica” non soltanto è culturalmente situata ma muove a partire da categorie interpretative, insieme, autonome ed eteronome, che mutano, parallelamente al “divenire delle arti”, in un processo ineffabile tale che, come scrive Gillo Dorfles (2002:12) Ogni tentativo che […] sia rivolto al raggiungimento d’una catalogazione e d’una sistematica definizione delle diverse arti, dei diversi linguaggi artistici, non può che risultare estremamente aleatorio. Infatti, la rapidità con cui avvengono le trasformazioni stilistiche e tecniche […] fa si che si possa, con una certa probabilità di successo, studiarne soltanto il divenire, ossia il continuo processo metamorfotico. […] il divenire delle arti, o la loro obsolescenza, si verifica con un ritmo così accelerato che ogni tentativo di fissarne sistematicamente le strutture si rivela quanto mai precario.

3. Il primato del contesto Muovendo il focus esplicativo sulle domande iniziali, la chiave interpretativa è direttamente derivabile, quindi, da quello che Tim Ingold (2004:152) definisce “il primato del contesto” ovvero nel risultato scaturente da “dinamiche ricorsive, cocostitutive e co-evolutive” che “intersecano l’ontogenesi dell’individuo e la storia delle culture e delle tecniche”. In altre parole, come ben riassume Ugo Fabietti (2004:274-275) Tutte le volte che ci troviamo di fronte a un oggetto o una performance (danza, recitazione) che ai nostri occhi (o alle nostre orecchie) possiede un valore estetico, invece di qualificarli immediatamente come delle “opere d’arte”, dovremmo piuttosto porci una serie di questioni al fine di determinare quali possano essere i significati estetici che 139

Per una interessante disamina sull’argomento si rimanda a Andina T. (2012) Filosofie dell'arte. Da Hegel a Danto. Carocci, Roma.

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quell’oggetto o quella performance rivestono all’interno della cultura in cui sono stati prodotti. L’arte, o comunque si voglia chiamare l’attuazione di una espressione estetica, non è infatti n’attività disgiunta dal contesto sociale, politico, culturale ed economico in cui viene prodotta. L’arte può essere più o meno creativa, può cioè essere più o meno efficace nel far insorgere in noi uno stato percettivo di tipo estetico, ma in ogni caso i suoi legami con le condizioni generali del gruppo entro il quale viene prodotta hanno un’importanza fondamentale.

Il motivo per cui è importante definire questi aspetti risiede nella necessità di porre in essere un piano interpretativo che, negli intenti di questo lavoro, non deve spiegare l’arte rupestre, ma occuparsi dei suoi significati e per far questo, come si è detto, è necessario situarla.

Ho scelto di occuparmi delle pitture parietali di Laas Gaal per due ordini di motivi: il primo è che, a differenza delle più famose pitture di Lascaux, Chauvet, Cussac, Niaux, Les-Combaralles, Drakensberg o Altamira, godono di una notorietà decisamente minore a dispetto di una eccezionale qualità e quantità di rappresentazioni; il secondo motivo è strettamente connesso alle tipologie di tali rappresentazioni, il larga parte animali, che non offrono soltanto indicazioni sulla varietà faunistica, ma le modalità con le quali sono raffigurati specificano un’evidente ed interessante indicazione circa l’esistenza di raffinati sistemi rituali.

4. Laas Gaal: tecniche di esecuzione e dimensioni rituali Nel momento in cui scrivo, sono a conoscenza di un unico studio (Gutherz X., et al 2003), peraltro parziale, come ammettono gli stessi autori, circa le rappresentazioni del sito di Laas Gaal. La maggior parte delle figure rappresentante nel sito sono uomini, bovini (Fig. 1 - 2), antilopi e un’unica giraffa (Fig. 4). Lo studio condotto da Gutherz e colleghi evidenzia l’ottimo stato di conservazione delle pitture nonché una certa originalità per quanto rigarda gli stili utilizzati, sebbene cronologicamente sovrapposti. In particolare, uno dei pannelli presenta una serie di puntini e piccoli tratti che rimandano a figure umane e animali: l’artista neolitico, con pura inconsapevolezza, stava utilizzando una tecnica raffigurativa molto prossima a quella che circa 7000 anni dopo avrebbe preso il nome di “divisionismo”140. Il pigmento maggiormente utilizzato, come è facile evincere dalle figure (in particolare la Fig. 3), è l’ocra rossa, un minerale ferroso che pigmenta, con una certa facilità, le superfici 140

In Europa l’esempio più famoso e meglio conservato di “proto-diffusionismo” è certamente quello dei Cavalli di Peche-Merle, nella regione dei Midi-Pirenei. Per una completa analisi tecnica si rimanda a: Guineau, B., Lorblanchet, M., Gratuze, B., Dulin, L., Roger, P., Akrich, R. Muller, F. (2001), Manganese Black Pigments in Prehistoric Paintings: the Case of the Black Frieze of Pech Merle (France). Archaeometry, 43: 211–225.

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minerali ed il cui utilizzo è databile tra 100.000 e 200.000 anni fa (Knight et al, 1995). Riprendendo Gurthez sembrerebbe che lo stile utilizzato sia molto simile a quello individuato, a circa 1000 km di distanza, presso il sito di Čappe nella regione del Sidamo in Etiopia. Ciò farebbe supporre, continua Gurthez, l’esistenza di uno stile pan-regionale sebbene il sito di Čappe presenti delle tecniche di rappresentazione diverse come il disegno inciso (Joussaume, 1995; Cfr. Manzo, 2000).

Fig. 1 © joepyrek / flickr.com

Fig. 3 © najeeb / flickr.com

Fig. 2 © joepyrek / flickr.com

Fig. 4 Fonte: Gurthez et al, 2003

La dimensione rituale, invece, è immediatamente evincibile dalle particolari decorazioni che abbelliscono il corpo dei bovini; questi ultimi, non a caso, costituiscono le figure più ricorrenti in tutte le serie di pannelli. Il significato associato alla decorazione dei corpi degli animali è probabilmente legato alla divinizzazione degli animali stessi, presumibilmente in ragione del fatto che questi

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ultimi avevano un ruolo centrale nell’alimentazione di quei popoli. In altri pannelli è evidente come il ruolo delle figure umane sia di adorazione al cospetto degli animali raffigurati. Queste pitture rupestri, quindi, possono essere definite come “attuative” rispetto alle relazioni che raffigurano. Il rapporto, dunque, tra l’individuo e l’animale più rappresentativo, determina l’innesco del rito stesso. Tale aspetto che, riprendendo Durkheim (1912/2005), è una vera e propria manifestazione del sacro, ha un indubbio valore coesivo, ed è un’ulteriore manifestazione del fatto che sia la dimensione rituale che quella artistica vanno desunte ed interpretate entro cornici delimitate all’interno delle quali si realizza una concretizzazione della cerimonialità in stretta relazione all’utile (Rappaport, 1999).

5. Wall Writers e Cave Painter: finalità creative a confronto Sebbene il resoconto presentato sia, certamente, debitore nei confronti di una letteratura decisamente ampia, i riferimenti e le osservazioni presentate sono sufficienti a far emergere come i processi attraverso i quali saperi, valori e competenze vengono codificati, articolati e trasmessi, sono individuabili a partire dal sistema di relazioni che coinvolge gli individui. Accostare la produzione di pitture parietali di età Paleolitica e Neolitica potrebbe sembrare, in prima analisi, azzardato ma sono notevoli le contiguità che accomunano queste manifestazioni artistiche, soprattutto di natura rituale. Naturalmente non è mia intenzione proporre, almeno in questa sede, un resoconto dettagliato delle dinamiche artistiche, sociali, procedurali, tecniche e dei numerosi risvolti interpretativi desumibili a partire da tali livelli d’analisi relativamente ai Wall Writers (o meglio, “Graffitari”). I Wall Writers concretizzano una forma particolare di Street Art, spesso associata alla pittura murale, utilizzando, spesso, come “tela” l’arredo urbano che, “come le altre arti dell’Hip Hop, vive in una condizione di equilibrio e costante tensione” (Serra, 2007:82). Uno degli aspetti più interessanti che caratterizzano questa forma artistica è che i suoi “autori” costituiscono delle vere e proprie comunità “di pratica” all’interno delle quali si affinano gli stili e si migliorano le tecniche generando veri e propri sistemi di apprendistato (Crane, 2005). Il sistema subculturale141 dei Wall Writers integra, insieme ad una forte identificazione nel gruppo di appartenenza, una correlata “competizione stilistica” che si concretizza con la realizzazione di opere la cui valutazione non riguarda, in modo esclusivo, la capacità stilistica ma anche, e soprattutto, la difficoltà di realizzazione legata, molto spesso, alla collocazione

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Come è noto, il termine non ha una connotazione gerarchica. Si riferisce, piuttosto, ad un gruppo sociale delimitato che presenta caratterizzazioni (valori, preferenze, abilità, conoscenze) tali da diversificarlo rispetto ad una cultura dominante.

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urbana del “supporto” artistico (Serra, 2007: 80). Come sottolinea Lachmann (1988: 242-243) Comparisons of style Graffiti were made possible by graffiti's mobility on subway cars. Writers' corners allowed muralists to associate with their peers, who constituted an audience with the experience and discrimination for bestowing fame for style.

However, that collegial audience could not provide access to a wider audience nor generate material rewards for artwork on public spaces.

Così come detto per le pitture rupestri di Laas Gaal, la valenza collettiva delle rappresentazioni artistiche attuali legate al Graffitismo, evidenzia un polimorfismo, non solo percettivo ma anche funzionale, come si vedrà nelle conclusioni, profondamente legato al contesto sociale. Uno degli esempi più affascinanti che meglio descrivono il concetto appena espresso è il John Lennon Wall (di cui sotto riporto un particolare), un muro che, successivamente all’assassinio di John Lennon (8 dicembre 1980), è diventato commemorazione, ricordo, denuncia, ispirazione attraverso il ruolo attivo di Wall Writer che, ancora oggi, continuano ad utilizzarlo.

© Ian Britton / flickr.com

Conclusioni A partire da un agile excursus circa le evoluzioni tecnologiche e, insieme, rituali dell’arte parietale (in senso esteso, come si è visto), è emerso come, l’interazione tra individuo ed ambiente abbia prodotto delle combinazioni irripetibili sostanzializzate negli oggetti di uso quotidiano, nelle combinazioni simboliche che scandiscono gli sterminati repertori dell’agire sociale, nell’anticipazione di linee di tendenza. I primi artisti del Paleolitico e del Neolitico, al pari dei Wall Writers, hanno fissato (e fissano tutto’ora) un nuovo concetto di spazialità dove il mondo fisico tende a sfumare nella sperimentazione creativa e nel messaggio che questa realizza. Inoltre, non solo la

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rappresentazione prende le mosse dal rito, ma la preparazione, la progettazione, e la realizzazione della performances diventano, esse stesse, cerimonia.

Di fatto, le rappresentazioni prodotte dalla Rock Art e dalla Street Art sono potenti riflessi analogici di un processo di trasfigurazione del percepito dove lo spazio (muri e pareti) diventano moneta di scambio nella virtuale negoziazione di valori, di differenze e diffidenze e dove il limite prodotto dalla relazione diadica spazio-tempo viene cooptato per ridefinirne modalità e confini comunicativi.

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Kimura, Y. (2002) Examining time trends in the Oldowan technology at Beds I and II, Olduvai Gorge, «Journal of Human Evolution» 43, pp. 291–321; Knight, C., Power, C. & Watts, I. (1995) The human symbolic revolution: a Darwinian account, «Cambridge Archeological Journal», 5:1, pp. 75-114; Lachmann, R. (1988) Graffiti as Career and Ideology, «The American Journal of Sociology», 94:2, pp. 229-250; Leakey, L.S.B., Tobias, P., Napier, J.R., (1964) A new species of the genus Homo, «Nature», 202, pp. 5-7; Leakey, M.D. (1971) Olduvai Gorge, Vol. III, Cambridge University Press, London; Manzo, A. (2000) Ulteriori evidenze di contatti tra Arabia ed Etiopia in epoca protostorica.

Considerazioni su un sito gibutino di recente pubblicazione, Annali dell’Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Rivista del Dipartimento di Studi Asiatici e del Dipartimento di Studi e Ricerche su Africa e Paesi Arabi, 98 (58/3-4), pp. 519-527; Pennisi, A. & Falzone, A. (2010) Il prezzo del linguaggio. Evoluzione ed estinzione nelle scienze cognitive, il Mulino, Bologna; Potts, R. (1996a) Humanity’s Descent: The consequences of Ecological Instability, W. Morrow, New York; Rappaport, R. (1999) Ritual and religion in the making of humanity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; Richerson, P.J. & Boyd, R. (2005) Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, University Chicago Press, Chicago, trad. it. Non di soli geni. Come la cultura ha trasformato l’evoluzione umana, Codice Edizioni, Torino, 2005; Serra, C. (2007) Murales e graffiti: il linguaggio del disagio e della diversità, Giuffrè Editore, Milano; Shea, J., Davis, Z. & Brown, K.S. (2001) Experimental tests of Middle Palaeolithic spear points using a calibrated crossbow, «Journal of Archaeological Science» 28, pp. 807-816; Tomasello, M. (1999) The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, trad.it. Le origini culturali della cognizione umana, il Mulino, Bologna, 2005; Wenger, E, (1998) Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; White, R. (2003) Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind, Harry Abrams, New York;

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CARMELA CUTUGNO

RICHARD SCHECHNER’S PERFORMANCE STUDIES This interview, taken in New York City on August 2012, is based on Richard Schechner’s experience at the department of Perfomance Studies, New York University. He talks about the changes occurred since the time he contributed to create the department in the early 80s. This conversation also gives a brief overview of Schechner’s focus on the concept of performance, and on the relationship between theory and practice in “his” Performance Studies.

CC: You are working on a new edition of “Performance Studies: an Introduction”. I know that you are mainly working on the first chapter which is about “What is Performance Studies”, and on the last one which is about the “globalization and the link between Performance Studies and globalization”. I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about these updates.

RS: Well, since the book was first published I think in 2001 and then revised in 2006 and now in 2012 in terms of Performances Studies it was a pioneering effort, while now it is very wide dispersed. There are many many many places that say that they do Performances Studies and they are in all different parts of the world; they are in North America, in South America, in Europe, Asia, even some in Africa, Australia, of course; so that chapter just scans now different people, different groups, different departments and programs. Very often what has happened is that there is not a department of Performance Studies (there are still very few of them, maybe three or four or five in the whole world) but there are many departments like the one at Brown University, which is called Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies, or the one at University of California, Berkely… I think it’s also Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies; in Europe it is sometimes called Performance Sciences. It has different names but it is basically the same notion of the expanded view of performance: performance in everyday life, performance in business, performance in sports as well as the aesthetic jobs. So that is the first chapter: just it brings that up to date with the people that I quoted in these boxes, these little citations of people who are in 2012 “Practice in Performance Studies”. The last chapter is the movement in what constitutes globalization. After the terrorist attacks, in the second edition 2006 I did talk about the attacks on the United States, the 9/11 attacks, but in the new version I go a little bit further in terms of talking about the struggles… struggles between certain kinds of fundamentalisms. There are many efforts to, in a certain way, limit the use of technology or reject the use of technology. There are values that are pretechnological and actually pre-enlightenment even, on one side, and then humanist

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values on the second corner of the triangle, those are values that came in through the western eighteen century, through the writings of people like John Lock or Emmanuel Kant, which formed the basis… let’s say of notions that drove the French and American Revolutions, the notion of the universal rights of human kind and notion of democracy… that’s all part of the function of the enlightenment, and it’s still very active. But the third part of the triangle is technology and especially how technology is affecting economics and the global market. So, although we are living in “late capitalism”, standing capitalism theory, standing markets theory doesn’t really answer some of the questions that are raised by the internet and digital technology; not only at the level of increasing communication but at the level where there are generated enormously powerful artificial intelligences that guide our behaviors. And I don’t think that globalization is going to go away or to turn itself back. I think there is going to be further and further integration among human societies; there is going to be some tensions about that, and there are going to remain huge inequities between the rich and the poor. And how this pertains to performance is that at a number of levels performance investigates, celebrates, criticizes these movements. So something like the olympic games (which are currently going on as we are talking) are a kind of globalized celebration of nationalism, but nationalism in a certain sense translated and translated into the efforts of these individual athletes, and the athletes themselves are a kind of postmodern in the sense that sometimes they run under a flag of a place that they are not really living, or they train and they perform in a certain kind of spectacle that we enjoy; but when the country wins rivalry currently between the United States and China for example… it’s a false rivalry in a way; it’s a true beautiful rivalry, but a false rivalry; it’s the twilight of the age of nations and the emerging of this globalized world which is controlled by corporations, by interlocked systems, and so on. So the text-book is not a profound revision; it’s an update. What makes the third edition most new is that it has a large media aspect. Sara Brady has worked with me to develop the series of online resources that can be used along with the text-book. So we’ll have film clips embedded in it; we’ll have things to do and things to discuss embedded: we’ll have a number of links to different kinds of websites, and so on. So the text-book then itself becomes part of a system that is localized in whatever classroom or in the hands of a particular reader or participant, but it is globalized in terms of accessing the internet.

CC: Thank you! At the very beginning you were mentioning the fact that now we have different departments both in the States and also somewhere else, but most of the times they are not just Performance Studies departments, they are Theatre and Performance Studies departments, or Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies

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departments. Could you please focus just for a while on the identity of the Performance Studies department here at NYU, talking about the way it used to be at the beginning of the 80s and the way it is now?

RS: First of all, life is a system of organic changes. So if it was the same as it was in the 1980s, which is like 32 years ago, it would be a signal that it had become like a pyramid, something beautiful but dead. At that point the Performance Studies department consisted of, I think, only one woman, maybe two women: Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett, who just arrived at that point; she was an anthropologist from the University of Peensylvania; she is still a member of the faculty. There may have been Marcia Siegel; I am not sure if Marcia was there yet or not, but she was a dance critic and a dance scholar; she was interested in modern dance, particularly American modern dance; but in addition to that there was Michael Kirby, who wrote the book about happenings and was a visual artist and an happener; there was Brooks McNamara who was a theatre historian, interested in particular in the history of popular entertainments and Broadway, and he was the head of the Schubert archive.

There was Theodore Hoffman, who was a minister of actor training; he was interested in the theories of acting, but he was not really a scholar the way Brooks and Michael were scholars; Ted was the head of the theatre program at the Tisch School of the Arts and not really teaching acting so much as hiring people who thought acting. And then he was put in our department when they really felt that there was not room for him in the other things. So he was a kind of an addition that didn’t really belong in Performance Studies. At one point he was collaborating with me on TDR. And then there was me and my interest that, to some degree, consisted with the anthropological study of performance, the study of rituals, the study of performances in cultures throughout the world, currently working as I was even at that point at the Ramlila of Ramnagar, in Norther India. But I was also very interested along with Michael in the avant-garde. Michael, Brooks and I actually collaborated artistically.

Michael Kirby did the towers, the design for Dionysus in ’69, and Brooks McNamara did part of my production of Macbeth. Brooks had been a student at Tulane University, so I had known him from way back in the early 60s. He had come to NYU actually one year after I did. He came to NYU in 1968 and I came there in 1967 and I was one of the people who brought him there. Michael Kirby was a friend of mine before he got his PhD and he got his Phd from Performance Studies. So all of this was at that point when the department was beginning; it was a balance between the avant-garde and performance history, popular entertainments, dance and movement and what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett brought, which was the anthropological approach from the point of view of the study of food and the eating

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process, the study of tourists; she wrote Destination Culture, a book about tourist performance. We developed along those directions for about twelve or thirteen years, because Barbara was Chair from 1980 to 1993, but during that time, I am not exactly sure when, Michael passed away; and later Brooks in the late 90s or even in the early 2000 retired. And we began to open up to things that would have become what Performance Studies in the department is now. So when we hired Peggy Phelan, that was a very important hiring, and we hired her when she was still just finishing her dissertation. I don’t know where she was getting it; I think she came from Rutgers, but whether she was teaching there or whether she was doing her dissertation I don’t know. But she was a radical feminist scholar. She opened up the department to that branch of thinking. Sue Ellen Case, Judith Butler, Jill Dolan… well Jill had been a student in the department and worked with Michael. So that opened in that direction, and also Peggy was very interested in what was becoming Cultural Studies, not simply Performance Studies. So that was one opening and then shortly thereafter Peggy was Chair for six years I believe, into the mid 90s. And she left for Stanford, I am not sure exactly when. But at that point we added first James Amankulor who was a scholar in African Performance, and after he passed away because of a brain tumor, we added Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o, who was a Kenyan Performance scholar, playwright, novelist. We were opening in the direction towards this kind of broader view of Culture Studies. During the 74 and the 80s I continued my work with Turner and all those developments I had already been folded in. Also Michael Taussig came to the department; he is at the Anthropology department at Columbia at present and he is a specialist in Latin American studies and shamanism in Latin America; one of his most famous books is about shamanism in Latin America. We added José Muñoz. So people circulated in and out and José, who is still on the faculty, was just finishing doing his degree at Duke University (we were hiring young people). He was obviously very very bright and his field was queer studies. So if Peggy introduced strong feminist contingents, then José introduced the queer study contingents. Marcia Siegel, who had been doing dance from the criticism point of view, left and we brought here André Lepecki. And he was very young at that point, but we also had before that Randy Martin who is still at NYU in the Art and Public Policy, but he was a dance scholar; but then came Lepecki who was a dance theorist ad very interested in European dance, while Marcia had been focusing on American dance. We always were going to have a dance component; we always were going to have an African American or African component. We started to have the queer component, and with the African and African American we introduced critical race studies; so that would be like Tavia Nyong’o, who is still again on the faculty. Again, we added him as a very young person. Barbara Browning came in the late 90s or early 2000s, and her

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interest at that point was Latin America and Capoeira, and Latin America and dance; Infectious Rhythm was one of her earlier books. She was from Princeton and a very good writer, so she brought into the department this notion of high level of literary style in writing. In somewhere along the turn of the century, probably the late 90s, Diana Taylor joined the department. I met Diana in Durmont, where I was a visiting scholar. I am not exactly sure how she got involved in our department, whether I was instrumental in that or Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett was instrumental or whoever was instrumental… but Diana brought this enormous energy of hemispheric consciousness and she created while she was here the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics which still exists and it’s extremely powerful and important to the department. I should back up a little bit: with Peggy Phelan we began the journal Women and Performance. So that was part of this feminist business; the journal still exists. I brought TDR with me from Tulane University where it was the Tulane Drama Review, and here it became The Drama Review; I still edit it here, but Women and Performance became a second journal in the department. There were series of other people who worked in dance like Ann Dally, who wrote a very good book on dance and moved to the University of Texas. She is now not teaching anymore. With Diana there was this opening to the rest of the Americas. For one year Joseph Roach was here, and he brought in his particular historical sense. I am very sorry that Joe left and went to Yale. I would love to have Joe as a colleague still.

Phillip Zarrilli: he wrote his great works on the psychophysical actor training and a lot of colleagues were here over years. There are a lot of people who passed through and expanded Performance Studies. At the present moment, at the present constellation of faculty, where we have Diana being 2/3 of the time in Performance Studies and 1/3 in Spanish and Portuguese; Ann Pellegrini who is a specialist in Religion and Performance and Ritual, but she splits her time between Performance Studies and Religion Studies, and Karen Shimakawa, who came again around 2004 or 2005 from the University of California. She was working on theories of objection and she is now starting to explore Japanese performances. Even though she is Japanese-American, she had roughly a little knowledge of that kind of performance.

Now she is trying to open up more to that. She is the current Chair of the department.

José was Chair of the department for six years of big growth. So the department has moved in my view; it has expanded its range, so it does cover more the broad spectrum than when I began and I called for the broad spectrum, but it was highly theater and dance; now it’s much more. On the side that I have sometimes resistances; it is hard to distinguish Performance Studies from Cultural Studies, and I would like to see it more stay tight to the analysis of behavior, whether it’s behavior in everyday life, or behavior in sport, or in popular entertainments. But sometimes we

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become a department really concerned with high theory. And again with Peggy Phelan and then with José the import of particular post-structuralist thought was very important. And now with the influence of TDR and Lepecki and myself, we are getting to deal more with neurology and neurobiology and some of the developments in cognitive psychology in performance and in performance theory. So there is a kind of tension between elements of the department that deal with performance and aesthetic performance, elements that deal with performance behavior and elements that deal with theory.

CC: Thanks! This has just brought up something which is very interesting for me.

Because for people who are not from here and who are not familiar at all with Performance Studies as a field, it might be very hard to understand what’s the difference between Performance Studies and Cultural Studies…

RS: I think that these differences are in the bad sense academic. In other words: what difference does makes what the difference is. If I would have asked to tell the difference in a sense, I would say that Performance Studies must have at its basis behavior and must be based, as its research tool, either on artistic practice or anthropological participant observation; while Cultural Studies has at its basis literature and writing and takes as its primary resource texts. So if you say to me that behavior is a text, if you take a Jacques Derrida approach I would say: “No! I don’t want that approach! I don’t look at everything as a text. I look at text as a kind of behavior”. So I am more of a J. Austin “How to do things with words”, rather than a post-structuralist “how even a behavior is a kind of text”, “ there is nothing outside the text” - says Derrida. So Cultural Studies is very textually driven, Performance Studies is behavior driven. Now, this is a very slippery slope and blurry boundary between the two. And I am of course advocating behavior, I am advocating participant observation, I was deeply influenced by anthropology and anthropologists and by artistic practices where you have to be in a room doing… let’s call it… practical research standing on your feet. I mean, you where there watching me work all these months in England and afterwords and you know that that’s a different kind of work than sitting in a library reading a text.

CC: That was part of my attempt to try to really understand part of the methodologies in Performance Studies, because another element is just about the methodologies, which are proper of Performance Studies. So, I guess that what you have just said is pretty much about the methodologies of the field. Am I wrong? Am I right?

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RS: Again… all of this is contested and I don’t wanna become a defender of any kind of orthodoxy. So when you talk about methodologies and disciplines… these are things that academicians argue about and shed blood about, but they don’t defeat the angry or clothe the naked, they don’t bring peace to the world, instead of war; they don’t alleviate poverty, they don’t cure diseases. So I think we have to keep ourselves focused on what our work does to, in a certain sense, at one level alleviate the sufferings of the world and at another level entertain, make the world a more pleasant place to live in; and in a third way advance a knowledge. Now, where do you want to call that Performance Studies or Cultural Studies, where do you want to say it has this or that methodology… those kinds of questions have never deeply concerned me.

Those are academic questions like in the Middle Ages when we had these philosophers arguing how many angels dance on the head of the pin, because they want to know what is the size of an angel. So when you say methodology I say: “What is that you want to research and then we can discuss what methodology you should use to get that research done.” So if you wanna do research on the performances of Grotowski during his poor theatre phase, then you have to look at those archives, you have to interview the people who performed there, you have to look at the films, you have to try to experience the plastic exercises and do them yourself, etc. etc. etc. If, on the other hand, you wanna to do surgery as performance then you would have to go to a surgical hospital, you have to go to a teaching hospital, you have to observe surgery. I don’t think you can become a surgeon… that would take too long, but you have to watch what surgeons do. I think that for me the methodology in Performance Studies is always saying “what is done”, not “what is thought”, not “what is written”, but “what is done”, that’s where it starts, and then analyzing the doing. Now, in order to analyze the doing you have to read a lot that is written, and you have to apply that kind of literally scholar’s methodology or poststructuralist methodology or Foucault methodology, whatever, but for me it is about things done, physical actions… but I think some of my colleagues would disagree, and they are welcome to their disagreement. I respect their disagreement, and I don’t try to say that everybody should do what I do. I think that what I do is make my contribution and those who want to follow it or develop it still further will, and those who wanna go some place else will also. I have never engaged myself (I don’t think) in academic polemics as such.

CC: Thanks! I am very interested in trying to understand the political power of Performance Studies. It’s something that you have just mentioned. What can we see through Performance Studies in a kind of political way that we are not able to see from another point of view?

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RS: Probably nothing! There is probably nothing that we can see from many points of view. This kind of questions is a kind of what makes you special, what makes you a thing valuable. It’s a kind of like salesmanship; it’s an attempt to say: “If you buy the BMW you are gonna get something that no other car can offer you. But, you know, different cars offer roughly the same thing. So the question is if you think of the world as a set of actions, a set of doings, and you understand how people do things, how people tell the truth and lie, how people follow certain set scenarios, certain narratives and what narratives they follow; then you will be able to understand how people behave and you also understand how people make works of art or make business operations or make a political campaign. And I think that an academic discipline like Performance Studies does not change the world directly, it is not in itself political, though I think Diana Taylor would say that in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and her involvement with the Yes, men! now she is trying to make an intervention into politics. Perhaps TDR makes an intervention; but my interventions are trying a two types of interventions: one is trying to help students find their particular voices and ways of behaving and means of research.

Since I have an handcraft called teaching, then each student whose work I guide I guide in different ways. I am not rigid, I don’t say that everyone who does a dissertation with me has to do the same thing. My relationship to you is different than my relationship to Sarah Cousin, is different than my relationship to Dominique Laster; and that’s a kind of like, again, directing a play: each play, each performance, each devised performance is a relationship between a particular space, a particular set of actions, a particular group of people, a particular time and circumstances. So that’s very important into Performance Studies, the particularity or the specificity of each arrangement, and not overall and generalize and not to be deductive, but more inductive. So if you say “what is the politics of Imagining O”, the piece that you observed and helped work with me (and hopefully we will continue to work on), I would say that it’s a kind of unusual take on women’s erotic and social experience that is at the edge between a kind of pornography and eroticism, between what is allowed and what is forbidden, what is politically correct and incorrect; my tendencies are always to move towards the regions that people feel a little bit uncomfortable. So Performance Studies when I began… the people were doing theatre, the people were doing English Literature or Literature… they all felt uncomfortable… “What is this guy doing/what is he saying? We should study sports or we should study business… we should study anything as performance… isn’t that too broad?” Well, the world is very broad. So, what’s going on in Imagining O? Why do so many women liked it? It’s about a woman who has been abused and debased.

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But at the same time it’s a celebration of one mastery owned by holding that text, by not enacting Histoire d’O so much, as holding the book of it and taking from and playing with it, and saying that some other questions that are raised there Shakespeare also raised. So that these are classical questions as well as modern questions; and they also rise in a kind of deep way the “place of women”, the fact that women still have not totally emerged from being in a dominated position. And I would like to see a world which dominance is alternate between men and women and “transman” and “transwomen” (in other words there are many many different genders). So if there is a politics into my work it’s a politics of a kind of not anarchy because I am very systematic, but a profound liberation, and a profound questioning, whatever it is represented with, rather than an accepting. So that’s why I resist when you ask me “what are the methodologies”, because these kinds of questions push me towards normatives, and I have always struggled against normatives.

CC: Can you explain a bit more about the way you got to focus on performance?

RS: I was thinking about these things way back in the 1960s, when I wrote the essays called “Actuals”, in which I said that the performance activities of human beings were play, sports, rituals, popular entertainments and so on. So it’s a question that when I looked around performance was everywhere; the anthropologists were studying performance. So I looked up there and Victor Turner was writing about rituals and Clifford Geertz was writing about Balinese cock fights. This is in the 60s and 70s. Spencer and Geller were talking about circumcisions and subincisions around Australian Indigenous people. So I saw that they were calling this anthropology, but it really was performance. In other words there was following a certain kind of script; it was behavior in which the behavior meant more than what it was simply. So you cut yourself, that’s not a wound, that is a kind of semiotic statement about something. It’s wounds that means something. So I saw that; I went to a ball game and I saw that there was a drama in the ball game. So when you play American baseball, you hit a ball and you run around, you leave home and you go to basis, you return home, like Odysseus leaving home and going to Troy and returning; I mean I saw that there were narratives embedded in this, I felt that there were narratives embedded in these things. I make connections. I saw that what was done in the non-western and what was done in the western were very parallel. They were very similar. So in the West you have these certain magic practices, we may not call them shamanistic, but they are shamanistic. I mean these are kinds of cultural impositions, they make these broad separations, and I also saw that what was done aesthetically is also done aesthetically in rituals, excepted that in the rituals people emphasize what

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can the ritual accomplish, while in the aesthetics they were a kind of standing back, reflecting what did that mean. But the behaviors were very very similar; the behavior of a priest raising the host and the wine and saying “This is the flesh and this is my blood” and then “sharing and participating”, or Hamlet poisoning the cup or Polonius poisoning in the cup and Gertrude takes the wine and Hamlet says “Don’t drink!” So that’s a kind of poison communion, between again a mother and a son, a man, a Mary and a Jesus. I mean I always see connections, rather than separations, and I wanted to generate and form an academic discipline that would thrive on making connections, rather than thriving on making smaller and smaller separations. So that’s in a certain way why I am sympathetic to certain aspects of globalization. I see that globalization undermines the nation-state and maybe then we can undermine the corporations to some degree also. I see that there is a dynamic between the rich and the poor; the poor become rich and the rich become poor, there is a constant shifting. But overall I see that the level of human accomplishment is rising and the level of human suffering is falling overall in the long term. I have thought about a very long term of what happens. A hundred years ago the life expectancy of a man was a 55 years and of a woman was 58 or something, even in Northern Europe, and now the life expectancy of a woman in Japan is like 90 years, 85 years, and so on. So we know that we are making advances in this kind of medical things. So I am interested in making connections. I am also interested in the fact that we are constantly, as Erving Goffman would say, presenting ourselves, so we are performing. “Presentation of self in everyday life”. Wherever I looked I saw similar things being done, but I saw people putting themselves in little places, in little rooms and closets; it’s not communicating. So I wanted to create a kind of form, a public place where the English professor and the theatre professor, the sociology professor, the anthropology professor and even the mathematician and the physicist come into a public forum and exchange. I look at Performance Studies as an exchange of disciplines: it’s an interdiscipline. In a certain way I am glad that there are Performance Studies departments, in another way I wish there were not any Performance Studies departments, that there would only be a mixture of other departments, something like that.

CC: At a certain point you were talking about Theatre Studies as a field which was going to produce people who would not really have the chance to get specific jobs, and you were talking about this shift to Performance Studies as a new field where you could get the chance to analyze the world in a new way142. So I am basically thinking 142

Richard Schechner, A New Paradigm for Theater in the Academy, TDR, Vol. 36, No. 4, Winter 1992 Questo Comment di Schechner é in realtà la trascrizione dell’intervento fatto dallo stesso Schechner in occasione della conferenza nazionale dell’ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) tenutasi ad Atlanta nell’agosto 1992.

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about students in Performance Studies and the kind of things that they can do in life through Performance Studies.

RS: That’s another question that at one level should concern me, but it does not concern me. I am not an employment agency. I realize that most people who get a PhD want to become College professors, I did, and I did become a College Professor, so that’s good. I would think that if you have a degree from a well known department like NYU’s Performance Studies department that would make you attractive to be hired. But I don’t teach in order so people can get jobs. I do know that people who have gotten into Performance Studies… a woman is a broad-caster for the NPR; there are people who have gone onto Law School; there are people into Arts Management; there are people who are theatre directors, there are people who are professors; but those are the endpoints, or the next-process pints. What I am interested in is teaching the specific thing, teaching comparative Rasa-Chi, comparing Greek, Indian, Chinese and Japanese performance theory or ritual, play and performance. I am very interested in the subject I teach. I don’t like writing letters of recommendation; of course, I want the people I work with to get good jobs, but I wish I never have to write a letter. I do it because that is part of what I should do to be a good guy, but I hate it. I’d rather never writing a letter of recommendation; I’d rather never talking about a job. I am interested in the subject, and that’s why I love so much when I get into a rehearsal room, because I am not really concerned about how to sell it. Of course I want to stage it, I want people to like it, but I am not concerned about whether Niamh (one of the actresses of Imagining O) is gonna get a job as an actress or not; she is working for me now. So if you are in my class you are working with me; what happens later is your business. I am not a very good professor in that regard. I wish I could teach and give no grades, read only the papers I want to read, and never write a letter of recommendation: that would be the perfect job for me!

CC: This brings me to the link between theory and practice, for instance within the department…

RS: Well, in the Performance Studies department at NYU I don’t know what is the link between theory and practice. I know that a lot of students who come here are practicing art, and they want to continue their practice. When somebody asks me: “Should I come to NYU to be trained in practice at Performance Studies?” I say: “No!” It’s a department that focuses on theory and, to some degree, history. We do have the ECA (East Coast Artists) workshop in the summer and people enjoy that, and Anna Deavere Smith does hers as well; but it is not a “practice as research”

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department; it is not like the department at Kent where we worked together. It is basically more a theoretical department. I would like it to be more practical, but it is not going to be more practical, so I accommodated myself to that. I do my practice though. I do a workshop, or I do a directing. Obviously it needs to be a relationship.

What constitutes a practice? Obviously artistic production causes one kind of practice, but anthropological observation, living inside a group, studying something constitutes another kind of practice. And I imagine for some people archival research is also practice: existing within a library, finding out what happened historically… that’s very very interesting. So some people do that very very well, and I respect that.

CC: When it comes to the ontology of performance, there is this big discussion which is about the nature of performance in terms of “disappearing or remaining”, how can we “save” performance if the nature of performance is about disappearing. What is your opinion on this kind of issues?

RS: You know, those arguments seem to me to be highly academic and not in a particular good way. Obviously performance manifests itself in actual behavior, and obviously once the behavior is behaved it is no longer there. When we finish this interview, the interview will have moved into the past. It is the nature of the way we live life and our consciousness that the present moment becomes the past and the future becomes the present. It’s also the quality of our increasing ability to digitize and record and archive things that we tend to preserve the present into an ongoing present that is not exactly passed and we are troubled by because we say: “Well, this film of you talking to Richard is different than actually talking to him”. But this notion of ghosting, this notion of performance disappearing… I have never understood it exactly. What does it mean? Let’s say we watch a film of Grotowski’s Akropolis. It is very different than having been there. Once you say that, you were at this performance or at that performance? Unless you are Grotowski himself or the performers who were there at every performance, you are always gonna be there to sampling. So you are never sure which one you are gonna get. The amazing thing about a film of course, like with a novel or a piece of writing, is that finally there is a product which of course is not the same as its reception; the reception changes. But the primary product itself is more frozen in time and space. There is a particular set of words, or there is a particular set of behaviors in the film and so on. In live performance, since it is repeated over and over again, or it is done only once and it is gone, you have the performance itself or you have its archival representation. The archival representation is not the same as the performance, because the performance was made for the one-on-one encounter. And in that sense it disappears, so it is the

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last time I kissed my wife. Most things in life disappear once we have done them. I am about to go out for supper, because it is getting closer to my wife birthday; we are celebrating this week. We are going to have a nice supper. When I am finished with that supper it is over. I’ll have the memory of the supper. I now have the anticipation of the supper and then the supper itself. All I can say is that performance in that regard shares what mostly everything in life shares. When we talk about making records like books or films, films record behavior, books record description about behavior, monuments, buildings and so on… they don’t disappear, they are not quite as ephemeral as behavior in itself. But they are also ephemeral in the sense that at the physical level they disintegrate, at the memory level they get reinterpreted. So I don’t see where it is such a big problem! I mean I do see that people exercise themselves about it, and that’s part of what academic style is about: you find something that nobody is worried about and you worry about it, and if you worry about it in an articulate way you’ll get a big reputation and then you’ll get promoted.

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A “SPECIFIC PERSPECTIVE” FROM A “PERFORMANCE STUDIES INTERNATIONAL” VOICE. AN INTERVIEW WITH MAAIKE BLEEKER Performance Studies, as an academic discipline, was born in the United States, but nowadays it seems not to be only an American field of research. What does Performance Studies look like from a European perspective? This interview with Maaike Bleeker, the current President of the PSi (Performance Studies International), focuses on what international, intercultural and interdisciplinary actually mean in relation to Performance Studies. Here Maiike Bleeker stresses the idea of how powerful Performance Studies becomes when it embraces all the different traditions and the specificities that constitute it.143

CC: First of all I would like to ask you to briefly introduce yourself and to talk a little bit about your academic background, your research interest and your work…

MB: Ok! More or less how I ended up where I am now (laughs)… It’s a mixed road.

When I started going to the University, originally I wanted to go to Art School, and I ended up more or less incidentally in Art History, but I really liked it and so I stayed a long time at the University. I did a program called “Doctorat”… that was before the Bologna process; so I was working at what they now call a Bachelor and a Master together, and I studied, I think, for nine years, and I did Art History and then Theatre Studies and Philosophy, and in the meantime I started making theatre, first as costumer designer and then as a dramaturg. So it was a kind of the two things together, both the theory and the practice. Then when I finished I decided, after Philosophy, that it was time to do a PhD. Also very pragmatically I think that I went through the selection for the money, but having a grant trough the PhD meant that I could make theatre for free, and that was for me at that time really important. Then I was in the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis for my PhD. That was at the time a very interdisciplinary School. I was the only one working at that time in theatre, performance kind of work. I did spent part of my time in California, with Susan Foster who was my supervisor, and after that I continued a kind of trying to combine theory and practice. I developed a big interest in questions of perception. My work was on visuality in the theatre, and visuality as a cultural specific phenomenon, and embodied phenomenon also very much. And from there I developed a continuing research on questions of perception and the very complicated but interesting connection between perception and cognition in thinking, so more questions on 143

This interview with Maaike Bleeker was taken in May 2012 in New York City.

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sensorial experiences, the theatre as a perspective on this kind of questions; and on the other hand in poetics; it also grew from this interest in visuality, the question of politics in visual culture, a performativity, a performance of politics, but also the politics of performance. I have been working on these things for quite a while now.

And along that also we are generally still working a lot around dramaturgy from my own experiences, because I find dramaturgy at the moment a very interesting question that connects to a lot of my other research interests, thinking, perceiving, how people make sense, but also what is political, what is critical, what is important to do in the theatre now and why. And generally I am interested in new forms of theatre, a lot of dance, I write quite often about dance as well, and the kind of shifts and overlaps with visual arts and philosophy. I think this is generally where I am now. I feel also that I am running off my projects. I got to PSi also because I am interested in the question of performance studies and of Performance Studies in different cultural contexts, but this is probably something we can talk about later more. But I guess this how I ended up where I am. I did this PhD project, I was on a Post-doc for a couple of years, and then quite soon I was appointed in Utrecht as Head of Theatre Studies there. And that meant that a totally different part of the University became part of my life in terms of administration and much more teaching. So for that moment I thought more strategically about University politics, Performance Studies within that, and connections with other departments. In Utrecht we are very interdisciplinary so that’s a very interesting kind of context to think about these things.

CC: Great! Thank you! The next question is right about PSi. You are the President of Performance Studies International, so I was just wondering if you can talk a little bit about your experience also in relation to what you did in Utrecht last year.

MB: Yeah! I guess the first thing was my surprise to end up in a way as being a President of something at all, but also maybe of Performance Studies, because, as I explained before, Performance Studies as a discipline was not part of my background, but it also had to do with the Dutch situation where Performance Studies doesn’t exist separated from Theatre Studies. And a lot of what happens maybe in other places under Performance Studies does happen in the other places where I was part of Theatre Studies, Art History, Cultural Analysis like things. And PSi… I encountered PSi through a conference I went earlier in Singapore. I was going there just because of curiosity. At that time my department in Amsterdam was more connected to the International Federation for Theatre Research. So I had been going there, but I was very curious about PSi and I was very very much impressed by the conference then.

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It was a very interesting conference in the way that it was in a such different cultural context, and very much asking the questions also abut Performance Studies in different parts of the world. I was also much taken by the interest in a nonhierarchical type of conference: in that sense the dynamics of Performance Studies and the interaction between theory and practice in very different ways; the interdisciplinary outlook of Performance Studies also outside the arts. So that was a moment that I got curious and then I attended the next conference because I was invited to go there to get with two artists that I had been talking about in Singapore.

So it was a very interesting way of entwining with the artists. And then things went quite fast. I remained interested in the conference and I was invited to become a member of the board and also, at some point, the then President started to inform whether I would be interested in organizing a conference, which was a big thing. But then I was just appointed in Utrecht and I thought: “Actually it makes sense to do that. We have a wonderful context to do it; it will be great to collaborate within my department in doing something like that.” I was more and more feeling connected to what I saw happening in PSi: this all question of Performance Studies as something that is not unitarian but something very different in different places of the world. I find it a very important question at the moment in the context of globalization but also in the context of awareness that many practices are performative and meaning itself is performative. But also this performativity means that it is loco, and it is important to understand how to negotiate this connection between the loco and the global, how to respect the differences but also to connect. That was when I got more and more involved and then, at some points, it apparently mixed… and I was informed I would have been nominated as President, and I thought: “Yeah! Actually this is an organization that I would like to do that for”. Because it felt for me, and it still feels for me like an organization that has some important and very intriguing steps to make this movement and that made a very interesting challenge to do that.

And it has also maybe to do with my background. That would be the challenge of the organization having of course a very strong connection to its origins in the United States, but as the organization having moved away from that, not in the sense of opposing the situation in the United States but becoming more diverse. At the moment the board has only four members who are affiliated to an American University on twenty-three members of the board. So that’s a huge shift away to the inclusion of other parts of the world. I think the dominance now is continental Europe, becoming a mix of continental Europe and UK. I think this is very significant of this moment and the question of how to move also beyond that to include much more and then again also other parts of the world. And for me the idea of representing Performance Studies for the first time as somebody not from the US/UK/Australian

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connection and as a not an English native speaker. And that’s of course also a big issue in an international organization. This complex relationship to English, that for me has always been the language that allowed me to communicate with people from all over the world, and that has something very positive, but it also causes power differences; and I am very much aware of being not born into English myself.

CC: Thanks! There is something you have just said that was a kind of suggesting me something else. You were talking about people who are part of the board, and so this kind of no balance in a certain way between people from US and people who are not from US. So I would like to ask you which are according to you the main differences in terms of issues between PS people from Europe and PS people from US, in your experience.

MB: I find it very hard to answer. I am not sure if there are main differences, and I also think that US are not one thing. But I think that one difference that happens is that, since the US is such a big country and Performance Studies is established as a discipline within the University, it is very easy on one hand to keep looking at Performance Studies as a US phenomenon, as long as you are within the United States. There is also maybe a very important interest because of this having been institutionalized as a discipline, which of course brings a lot of department politics.

This is very different from Performance Studies in some other places in the world, where it does not exist as such an institution. So that works differently. But I think for me the main surprise sometimes is that, although I don’t think it is often consciously done, but the automatic identification of Performance Studies with PSi or viceversa, or with Performance Studies as an international phenomenon within the United States… I am not so sure if it is so international within the United States. Sometimes it seems a little bit a lack of awareness of the diversity of Performance Studies outside and the specificity of Performance Studies within the US. It reminds a little bit what Peggy Phelan calls Unmarked. There is not specificity; specificity exists only in the rest of the world. That looks differently if you are not from the US. CC: How was for you introducing this field through a conference in a country where, as you have just said, Performance Studies doesn’t really exist as an academic field?

And I am thinking about what is happing in other countries: for instance what they have done in some countries through the PSi clusters, like in Greece, or in Portugal or even in Italy. These are all countries where Performance Studies doesn’t really exist as an academic field. So I was thinking about your own experience also in terms of the feedback you got from people in your country.

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MB: I don’t think that was very complicated in a way, in the sense that a lot of that kind of research exists, it’s just not called Performance Studies and it happens in other places, it happens partly in Theatre Studies, partly in Media Studies, in Gender Studies, and in many other fields actually. Right now there is a quite strong tradition of interdisciplinary research anyway in the Netherlands, not everywhere of course.

And in a way many of the issues that are Performance Studies are also very much part of Theatre Studies in the Netherlands, and there is not that much of distinction and maybe that is also connected to the field of theatre and performance. We don’t have so much of strong opposition there and maybe the opposition is getting stronger with becoming more conservative. But we have a history since the early 70s in the Netherlands in terms of state support and discourse; also a very strong interest in experimental work and in work that crosses disciplinary boundaries. It used to be not such a strong text based tradition in the Netherlands for example. So maybe most of the oppositions that were important one upon a time to distinguish Performance Studies from Theatre Studies do not make so much sense, and a lot of work that we see, you probably don’t call it theatre somewhere else, but it is theatre in a Dutch context. We teach theatre and dance combined in a program, because there is so much in common in the practice that we don’t have really two separate programs at the University. In practical training yes, the dancer training is different than the training for actors, but ever there, they are so many interdisciplinary fields. These distinctions work differently. I did not have the feeling that it was difficult to introduce the conference of Performance Studies in a Dutch context. Also the Festival that was part of the conference, that kind of work, it could have been called performance festival but it is called theatre festival. So in the Netherlands I usually say that Performance is the word we use to describe that, that and that. I think of the Dutch context that it was interesting to see how many people from different disciplines were interested in coming together in Utrecht to talk about these issues and to feel supported in an international community, because a lot of this work happens interdisciplinary and then sometime when you feel a bit alienated in your department, conferences like PSi is a moment when you notice that there is a lot of people doing similar things, and that can be helpful!

CC: Thanks! This is very helpful for me, because one of my main issues is trying to understand if, what and how Performance Studies can give something new to its own object of analysis. Most of the scholars, most of the times, come from different fields, Theatre Studies, Anthropology, and so on and so forth. And then they become part of this specific field in a certain way, which is Performance Studies. So I am still

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wondering what is the peculiarity of Performance Studies, in terms of what Performance Studies can give which is new to the object of analysis. For example, you were saying that as theatre scholars we are used to analyze our object of analysis in a kind of interdisciplinary way, so my question is: what do you think it is new in the Performance Studies perspective? Is there something so peculiar that we cannot find in other approaches?

MB: I do not think that Performance Studies has one methodology or one approach, but I do think that there is something which is quite characteristic of the various ways of working that happen under this label of Performance Studies. And when it is for example about what it is that it has to offer to the analysis of theatrical arts and performing arts, I think there, in Netherlands now we have to have Performance Studies next to Theatre Studies, but somehow the idea has got incorporated as part of what Theatre Studies does. But it is a different approach that it represents, in a sense that Theatre Studies has a tradition of dealing with its object, these theories of semiotics, of drama, theories that are part of a history of a specific artform, whereas Performance Studies brings in a perspective that does not necessary bring in this all history, but it looks a bit from the perspective of how it is performative, with all these theories of Austin and Butler and Derrida on performativity; but also the connections with the anthropological approach of ritual, of cultural performances. I think in that sense it approaches these artforms from a different perspective, and I believe that is one way that is very refreshing and it focuses on different elements of performances; it does not necessary explain a performance in terms of this all history of how people have been thinking about theatre and what now performance is doing with it, or in relation to traditions of dramaturgical structures or that kind of things. This approach makes possible that you can look at theatre and other phenomena in similar ways.

The wonderful thing about approaches from performance, performativity and Performance Studies is also that we can look at many other things, not only at performing arts in that way, and start to see connections that would remain invisible if you only look at performing arts or only from a performing arts perspective. So I think there is an interesting possibility for the field and a challenge also to expand on these possibilities, to, again, not get stuck in very specific topics or focused areas. For long time in Performance Studies the all notion of identity has been very dominant.

That is something that, for example, from my Dutch-European perspective, is not a very prominent one, whereas in how I have been trained and in the connection with philosophy and in current questions about perception and cognition, very different aspects of performance and performativity are now very interesting. In Utrecht we did this prelude panel with questions of technology where Jon Mckenzie has such a

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wonderful work, or with the performance of perception, or the question of the involvement of mathematic and performance, which is a slightly different approach of what can be studied from Performance Studies, and they are more cultural anthropology context, which has been quite dominant for quite a while.

CC: Thanks! You were just saying that there is not a specific kind of methodology in terms of Performance Studies. We always talk about a post-disciplinary or transdisciplinary or inter-disciplinary field for Performance Studies, but, do you think it is possible to identify some methodologies within the field, even if diverse methodologies?

MB: I think that is at the moment the big question. When I say that Performance Studies is not one thing that is my conviction when we look at Performance Studies as something that exists in different places in different ways, and even in one place it can exist in different ways. But it is not to deny that some approaches to Performance Studies are institutionalized and very strongly. And I think that part of thinking through this international character of Performance Studies is also aware of that.

There are some methodologies and approaches that are more equal than others. I guess it is one of the questions at the moment to keep it open and to be aware that some more institutionalized forms of Performance Studies are only one possible form of Performance Studies, and that opening up to an international field means not only to open up to spread your own world or to include objects from all over the world, but it is really to acknowledge that there are different approaches to what Performance Studies is, and that it is not owned by one place.

CC: .. one way of thinking about it‌ MB: Yeah! One way of thinking‌ CC: This can be a way we could use to define the academic field in itself. Every time we try to understand what this field is about, we also try to define it. But we are all aware that Performance Studies in itself does not like to be labeled, although, for some aspects, it is a field and it is institutionalized. Do you think that what we have just talked about, which is the impossibility of fully defining the field of Performance Studies, is part of its identity?

MB: Actually no, because I think that the state of impossibility is also a way of avoiding it, and it tends to become a kind of mythology. I think that really

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acknowledging differences will require that we define various Performance Studies and the specificity of each of them, and also how they are specific. This goes back to this point of Unmarked. A wonderful work has been done by Jon McKenzie in his Perform or Else to show the cultural specificity of Performance Studies as emerged in the United States. It is stronger if we can say “Ok! This kind of Performance Studies has to do with this cultural context, because that allows others to be different”. I think it is very important to look at the specificity, and then to look at what else is going on that might be called Performance Studies, which Jon McKenzie and others did in this wonderful book Contesting Performance. They show that there are many traditions, and I think that there is a lot of work to be done there. We can look at the research going on in different places, and at how in different places different genealogies of performance research developed, and how they make sense in a particular loco context, and how we can benefit from that if we think about that more globally. I think specificity is really important.

CC: This is about the field and the methodologies in the field, but then there is something which is about the object of the field itself, performance. So another big issue is just defining what performance might be. How would you define performance?

MB: I don’t know (laugh). This is like saying that I don’t know what I am talking or writing about! I know what I am talking and writing about, but this is, of course, first of all, a language issue. Performance has a definition in English. Performance is not translatable in Dutch and that happens with many other languages as well, or, if it is translatable, it is not necessarily translatable in a similar way in opposition to, for example, theatre. So this understanding already exists within a language, which means that we will constantly be shifting in different languages. But I also think that to work with a concept is not necessarily to have a very strict definition. I mean, for some concepts that you work with, you need a very strict definition, because you want to do things with them that require strict definitions; but you can also look at performance in the context of Performance Studies as a kind of searchlight. It highlights to look through the lens of performance at objects, at a field of potential objects; it highlights different elements of this object, than looking at them as theatre, or looking at them as whatever. In that sense I like that idea of a concept as a searchlight, because then your research is doing both things: it defines the concept as performance to look at the field and then the field also tells you back what performance can be, because if you look at something in a certain way then you realize that that thing actually could also be a performance, or could be looked at as a

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performance. I think that after great thinkers like Derrida we are careful with the assumption that we could ever fix the meaning of other concepts. We are very much aware of how they are all connected and of how we try to negotiate a field of meanings, how there is always interest involved, politics. For some reasons at some point it can be very useful to define something as performance, just to make something happen that you find important to happen. It can be a very critical concept because it can oppose others who say something about something that you disagree with, So, it is a tool, I think.

CC: It is an object and a methodology at the same time.

MB: Yeah! True! We cannot distinguish the method and the object, because the method will define the object and the object will define the method. They are always entwined. The challenge is to make them not entwined in a way that everything is already fixed before, but in a way that the object needs to be able to talk back and challenge the theory, because otherwise you are just putting things into theoretical categories. But as long as there can be a kind of back and forth then it makes sense to look at them as entwined.

CC: Thank you! There was something you were saying at the beginning that is about the intercultural identity of Performance Studies. Do you think that Performance Studies, by trying to be so intercultural, is really able to avoid an only western point of view?

MB: Very good question, and I think, indeed, one of the big questions for Performance Studies at the moment… the intercultural and the international. It’s clear that Performance Studies from the beginning, as it developed, had a great interest in other cultures. I am not so sure how much space there is for real differences. I think that is the bigger question. It’s clear that Performance Studies has been very fascinated by talking about objects from other cultures or thinking about performances from other cultures, but the real question is a question about the power relationship and the perspective in these approaches. And that I think is the big question at the moment, and that comes back to what we were talking about before: the fact that there might be different Performance Studies. That would be about acknowledging the perspective in Performance Studies as it exists and the possibilities that there are other perspectives and that there is not one way of uniting them into one overall kind of happy family, but it might be about negotiating differences much more; that is a crucial question at the moment. My address in

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Utrecht, when I start as a President (of PSi) was that we need to start to think about Performance Studies as a western invention, because otherwise we never get acknowledged that that is where it comes from. The only way to make the situation of Unmarked go away is to mark, is to acknowledge that that is how it came into being as an invention of the West, with a very beautiful intention and with a lot of good things. But if we really want to give others the possibility of thought back we also need first to be able to dare to say that we are self-specific and that the intercultural is not only about reaching out and finding beautiful things there, but also being confronted with your own specificity. I think that is a challenge at the moment.

CC: You have mentioned several times Unmarked which is a famous book written by Peggy Phelan. There is a specific chapter in that book that is about the Ontology of Performance, where she highlines the idea that the ontology of performance lies in its disappearing in a certain way. How do you relate, as a scholar, to this idea of dealing with performance as something which disappears?

MB: Well, the fact the object disappears and you still have to deal with it as a scholar, that also goes for history. We were all not present at the French Revolution and still that seems not to be a problem writing about it. That’s much broader and of course in the context of trying to think about the ontology of oerformance it is absolutely an important remark, but I am not sure if that means that we cannot write about it.

Sometimes it is taken as an apology that we cannot write about it. There is a very strong ideology that says that it is about presence, but this is not necessarily the same as the essence of the object. We can very well study performance in very similar ways we study history, because it is an event from a moment in the past, and there are maybe some documents left and we start writing about that. And maybe some can write from having been present there, in other cases we are not personally present there but maybe we have testimonies of what happened there, and we can go to the place where it happened. The difference is not so much essentially in the object but in the ideology that has been very strong in Performance Studies. The idea that performance is about presence is a very specific idea about performance, but I do not think it is the only necessarily one. And if, indeed, you say that performance is about presence then of course automatically you start lamenting the fact that it’s basically never really present, because it is already always disappearing. But you can look at it as something which is not always necessarily present, that is the way that many people have looked over the ages to performances; they have been looking in very very different ways, and not in the lost of presence or in the idea of a constant disappearance. So I think that is a specific understanding of performance that works

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through in certain approaches of Performances Studies. That is one way of approaching, but then I think it is very important to be culturally specific because this is not necessarily shared. The idea of performativity implies the concept that things are performative in the sense that they are produced in the doing, or that they get their meaning through practices instead of having that kind of internally essential there.

Also that is not necessarily about disappearing. For me it is very much about the creative force of performance actually, or even the disciplinary force of performance.

Performance and performativity are constantly producing what we think is the reality as given, but in fact that’s the all gender argument of course of Butler, elaborated by others in their fields after her. And Butler is also very clear about the normativity of performance and performativity. How we can look at all kinds of practices in life as actually producing what we think is simply there. So my approach would be more on that side.

CC: I would like to ask you something which is about historiography in the field, which is not the historiography of the field, but it is more about the historiographic approach that each Performance Studies scholar has in relation to its own object of analysis. In one of the most recent issues of TDR there is a contribution coming from Marco De Marinis is which, among the other things, he also addresses the idea that Performance Studies does not really have an historiographic approach to its object of analysis‌ MB: I think he must be responding to a specific tradition of Performance Studies when he observes that. Because I do not think it is inherent to an approach that one could call performance research that has no attention for historiography of the object.

But I agree that there are many examples of concrete Performance Studies work where this is absent, but that is not a matter of the approach not allowing it. But I agree that certain people who are working in the context of Performance Studies or maybe certain traditions within Performance Studies have very little attention for that. That was also something that occurred to me coming to Performance Studies and being initiated in thinking about performance and performativity through Cultural Analysis. For me the time in school in Cultural Analysis was the time when I learnt most about performativity and performance as an approach to many different phenomena, although it wasn’t a training in Performance Studies. There was always an historiographic approach as part of the reflection there, and I agree that I am sometimes surprised. I guess it is somehow in a very integrated way related to what you were mentioning before, that within certain traditions of Performance Studies

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there is this strong focus on presence, which on a way focuses so much on this overwhelming here and now.

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CARMELA CUTUGNO

“REBECCA SCHNEIDER’S PERFORMANCE STUDIES REMAINS” This is the transcript of a video-interview I realized with Rebecca Schneider, Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University, in May 2012. In this conversation Professor Schneider talks about her work as a Performance Studies scholar and the specific focus of her research interests. By thinking critically about certain aspects of this discipline, above all in relation to Theatre Studies, she underlines the dialogue between performativity and theatricality, as well as the importance of a certain kind of historiography in Performance Studies research methodology. Moving from the ontology of Performance Studies to the ontology of performance, she finally focuses on the idea that performance does not disappear, as she explains in her most recent book, “Performing Remains”.

CC: You come from the Performance Studies department at NYU: you gained your Masters there and then your PhD; you also taught there but now you are the Chair of the Theatre and Performance Studies department here at Brown University. I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about your personal experience in this field.

RS: Well, I was extremely fortunate to be at New York University at such an exciting time, when basically Richard Schechner, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Brooks McNamara, Michael Kirby and Marcia Siegel in dance had brought together this very exciting emerging group of thinkers around this brand new idea of performance in what Richard has called the “broad spectrum”. It’s not of course a brand new idea but it was taking a disciplinary shape and that was very exciting. At that time Peggy Phelan had just been brought in, and so she was a new addition to the department, coming out of Literary Studies. She brought psychoanalytic lines of investigation with her. While I was there they then brought in Michael Taussing, an anthropologist, who at that time was thinking very rigorously about the work of Walter Benjamin, as well as the College of Sociology led by Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, asking questions about the sacred and tragedy. I had taken a course about shamanism and tragedy and another with him about capitalism and Benjamin, that were very foundational for me.

So these were people that had not been trained in the same field and were coming together in one department, figuring out a field as they went along. That was extremely exciting. The questions were very new and there was a lot of debate. I think one of the reasons it was successful was that in a sense they flattened the field, which means they brought in a very large number of graduate students. There were always a lot of people around the table having discussions. And several of us who completed the course were lucky to go on and get jobs, because at that time we thought: “We are going to have a PhD in something no one has ever heard of; how

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we are ever going to get a job?” But the reality is that those of us who came there hadn’t done so because of the market, for jobs, or we never would have been there.

We came there because we were driven to ask these questions.

Fortunately, the field of Theatre Studies at large did become the right sort of place for this new initiative. Across campuses, across other Universities there were new mandates for the globalized, the transnational… we didn’t call it transnational then, but for thinking about Theatre Studies in a global prospective, which meant that there was a new pressure on departments to include African ritual traditions as well as, let’s say, Asian, non-Western, as it was called then, theatre forms. That demanded a kind of Performance Studies perspective, the ability to talk about what the relationship between ritual and performance or theatre and a drumming-based performance is. It so happened that there were jobs in the field because of this teaching pressure, and Performance Studies people could get these jobs. I was fortunate because I also had a theatre background, so I was employable in theatre departments. So that’s one story.

Obviously NYU also had the fortunate cousin in the Northwestern program around Dwight Conquergood, that was growing up in Chicago out of oral interpretation and communication studies So NYU came out of theatre and dance, Northwestern out of communication and oral studies… studies of oral histories. And we found conferences where we could meet up, like the Association for Theatre in Higher Education: this was before Performance Studies International. We would meet there and made a focus group. Another really foundational aspect in Performance Studies in my view was the Women and Theatre Group, a sub-group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education where many of us from Performance Studies would meet and debate questions about gender which were very focused and intense at the time. The first PSi was in 1990 or 1991, perhaps unofficially: I don’t know if counted as the first PSi, but we had a Performance Studies conference at NYU. I remember debates about whether Performance Studies International should be a capitol “i” or a little “i”. It was a very exciting time.

I went on from there to Yale. I had taught at NYU but then I taught a class at Yale, and then I was a Visiting Assistant at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. I then became a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at Cornell University where I got tenure but moved to Brown to help them found a new PhD program, where I am now Professor and Chair of the Departmen. . We changed the name of the department at that point to Theatre and Performance Studies, and our Performance Studies students have done very well in the market, so we are pretty happy about it.

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CC: Would you explain a little bit more about the difference you have experienced between the Performance Studies Department at NYU and the Theatre and Performance Studies Department here at Brown University?

RS: Well, it’s interesting that of several of us who got a PhD in Performance Studies and have gone into the field… you know, there is no one, except André Lepecki I think, in a Performance Studies Department who has a degree in Performance Studies. It’s curious that several of us with doctoral ??? degrees in Performance Studies sort of went on and found ourselves in Theatre Departments and had to figure out how Performance Studies fits within theatre: is it the same as theatre? Is it different from theatre? What is the overall umbrella? Is Theatre Studies an umbrella under which Performance Studies sits, or is Performance Studies an umbrella under which Theare Studies sits? Or is an umbrella the wrong metaphor?

When I came to Brown there were already people doing Performance Studies.

The Department was called Theatre, Speech and Dance and we felt that actually we had to bring theatre and dance together for instance, instead of thinking that you have theatre here and dance here, and over there that media department, and over there visual time-based art; so Performance Studies could be more of an intermediary or could help us actually have these exciting conversations between our forms that were already under the same roof. We wanted to think more profoundly about dance together with theatre, which as I said earlier, from a global perspective, if you think about African or, Asian traditions for instance or many of the American ones, like American musicals, you have to think dance and music, you have to think of these other forms together with the spoken text, with drama. The primacy of drama was loosening a little bit with thinking about performance.

Clearly a lot of rigorous work in Theatre Studies had already been in that direction: the semiotics of the theatre, thinking about the theatrical operations of the body as a sign-making mechanism. This was already thinking beyond the text, thinking beyond the limits of what happens in theatre according to the text-centric action of the playwright narrative. We found ourselves already in league with all of those efforts in Theatre Studies. We changed the name of the Theatre Department to a Theatre and Performance Studies Department because we didn’t want to lose the reach of aspects of Theatre Studies that had already been working in this more semiotic and phenomenological way. We didn’t want to lose a rigorous study.

Sometimes Performance Studies in its… I don’t want to say “pure form”, because there can be no pure form for Performance Studies, it’s like an oxymoron… but Performance Studies without Theater Studies, it’s possible that you wouldn’t necessarily have to study theater to study performance behavior. But in our

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department we really had a strength in Theater Studies, so we wanted to keep the studies in theater history, in theater and dramatic theory, we wanted an historical aspect. When I went through NYU, one didn’t have to know history for instance. I happened to have studied theater, so I came with that. It wasn’t a requirement, and I don’t think it necessarily should be, but in our department we offer that. What we think now, what we are working on are things like the theater history of photography, or the theater history of film, because one conceives the medieval screen for instance, the screen of all aspects of the author and spectator/performer relation relative to the advance of photography, as a kind of trajectory that results in all sort of screens. Why is that not in the historical register of photography? We would like to consider the theatre history of these things more profoundly. And in a sense say that something like photography could be seen as a performance, a performance study, a study of our relationship to screens; but to do that really well, one needs to know something about the history of screens and of performance.

This might be a long way round of answering your question, but one of the differences is that Theater and Performance Studies in our way of looking at it contains history and historiography a little bit more than does Performance Studies, at least in its NYU variety at present. In terms of looking at Performance Studies in the US, when I said at the beginning that it’s interesting that those of us who have degrees… I was thinking of Shannon Jackson who has a degree in Performance Studies from Northwestern and who did the same thing at Berkeley: they changed the name into Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies. Now that doesn’t mean, as with us, that these are separate things: that theatre is separate from Performance Studies, separate from dance, but it does mean that one doesn’t lose the trajectory of the study of craft even, because the other difference is that we both, Berkeley and Brown, and I think Stanford maybe, changed their name too. I don’t know what they are changing it to but I have heard that they have maybe changed their name… you know these are strong programs that have undergraduate study as a major part of it, and the training of craft happens with undergraduates. So they want to study acting and directing and dance and these kinds of things. That’s not a requirement, it doesn’t happen at NYU because they don’t have any undergraduates. So that’s a difference as well.

CC: They are going to have one soon I think…

RS: Yes I think they are going to have one soon and we’ll see what happens with that, but they have another place at NYU where students can study acting and those things.

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CC: If we use the kind of metaphor we used before, the mataphor of the umbrella or the metaphor used by Schechner when he talks about a “broad spectrum of actions”, we think about all these things which are under this huge umbrella of performance. I am thinking about what the Performance Studies perspective can give which is new in terms of analyzing each specific object. I mean if we think about scholars who come from Theatre Studies and who have always studied theatre as an object of analysis, then I think: “What can a Performance Studies perspective give that is new to this specific object of analysis?”

RS: To the theatre you mean? To the study of theatre?

CC: Yes, but that is just an example. Then the same thing can be said about dance or everyday life; everything is under this kind of umbrella, so that basically, everything each time is analyzed as performance.

RS: At one point the Performance Studies perspective was new, but it doesn’t seem very new right now; but maybe it is new in some places. I think quite a while ago it was scandalous even to say that one is going to look not only at what happens to this discrete object in the theatre… no, it wasn’t scandalous… I mean at the beginning there was a great deal of resistance in the academy, in traditional Theatre Studies to Performance Studies, because one of the criticisms was that Performance Studies was “the study of everything”. I mean if everything is performance then nothing is discrete, and if nothing is discrete, how can you study anything? But I think this is linked to what happened in the art world in general. If you think about what happened in the visual arts with the huge explosion of time-based performances, performancebased art, it becomes very clear, and already was in the 1960s that intermedial performance, intermedial art expression was going to demand a new way of thinking about art. That that long tradition of segmented art disciplines, that long enlightened tradition of segregating the arts into these sorts of discrete categories was rapidly unraveling with mid-century performance work, time-based work. I have tried to write a little bit about this in a couple of publications: one was an essay, “Solo, Solo, Solo”, that I did in a book called After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance (edited by Gavin Butt, Blackwell Publishing, 2005), but I also take up the subject in my recent book Performing Remains a little bit, about this kind of undoing of the sure spaces between media. In that book, Performing Remains, I look a lot at photography and I try to read the sort of problem that theatre has had with photography and photography has had with theatre: theatre has claimed that a photograph is not the thing itself, that it can’t capture theatre, and meanwhile

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photography is trying to claim that it was there, in the thing that is the image; it says: “We can’t be theatrical! We are evidence!”. There is a lot of tension between these forms. At the same time, if you look really closely, the pose is deeply theatrical, and you have myriad examples in the rise of Naturalism of posing, even posing for photographs on stage. So these media think about each other and they think through each other.

One thing Performance Studies does is help us think about the spaces between media. It helps us think about intermedial negotiations that one kind of medium is always sort of posing as another kind of medium. Remember that famous image of the Etienne Decroux mime…. I can’t remember the year, but it’s early… and he’s standing with the camera taking the photograph, the theatre and the camera together.

Well, what kind of discrete medium is going to let us think about that? Photography?

Why a mime? What does a mime mean? We need to think of theatre and photography together, and one way to do that may happen under something like Performance Studies or with something like Performance Studies. Thinking about the squeaky, leaky boundaries between media is one thing that Performance Studies brings to theatre that’s new. I mean theatre has always been porous, leaky, composed of many different disciplines: scenographers, visual artists, dancers, actors, writers; it already has this betweenness; it’s the medium of the between; it’s a medium that won’t stay pure; it’s the medium everyone loves to hate in terms of the long tradition of antitheatricality.

I don’t know what Performance Studies brings to Theatre Studies. I am right now actually more interested in returning to a way of thinking about theatricality.

Thinking about philosophy, many articulated in the 1980s and ‘90s what has been called “the performative turn”. You have the work of Judith Butler engaging with performativity, taking up John Austin from the 1950s and a lot of queer theory. We are thinking about performativity because what performativity can do is render something real and through an act, you know, “how to do things with words”, that performativity creates the real through a reiteration that doesn’t understand itself as reiterative. What I tried to argue in Performing Remains is that this thing that John Austin calls useless to performativity, which is theatricality, is actually of extreme interest. What many scholars are now calling the “affective turn”, thinking about the production of affect in a neo-liberal economy, and many of the Italian thinkers have been absolutely central to this, and thinking about “immaterial labour”, requires consideration of the construction of affect; and the circulation of affect requires thinking about theatricality, about the production of emotions that are given to circulate and may not be real, like this performative thing that is done. I am interested in theatricality and think it has a lot to offer to Performance Studies, and by that I also

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mean the history of theatre. I can say that because I have a PhD in Performance Studies and I am not saying it as a theatre historian who is just angry at Performance Studies. I am saying it as a Performance Studies person who wants to see that kind of rigorous analysis take place in the field.

CC: I would like to take a step back to something you just said, which is about the importance or the lack of importance of historiography in Performance Studies. I am not talking about the historiography of the field, but about an historiographic investigation of the object of analysis itself.

RS: That’s interesting. I think it is necessary, but don’t mistake me, because I think there is a new form of historiography. When you say “the analysis of the specific object in the field”, I mean one of the issues with Performance Studies is “no object is discreet to itself”. You know, that specific object is not a specific object; it’s already composed of a myriad problems of looking, of spectatorship, of engaging the object from a perspective, if you will, of your viewing, and it’s already going to be other than itself, because of your engagement with it. So, there is not this idea of the mastery of a specific object so that one can tell the lineage of that object. One has to engage with the volatile relational contingency of when one thinks one mixes that object in the moment. There is a pressure on telling the history and on thinking about history, in this new moment of the undoing of the specificities of the object.

How does one do it? I mean how does one tell that story. In a way one has to tell the story of telling stories; and of course historiography is about history thinking about history. History thinking about itself. It’s not just the narrative or the chronicle; it’s not just the history. Historiography is in the sense of “how do we come to this place to try even to tell this story of this object”; and I have to be critical of that, of the fracturedness of my attempts to even do that. But there are ways to tell that history or to bring history in, even while complicating that linear march of a kind of enlightenment, investment in forward-moving progress-oriented time. If you think about certain historiographers like Carolyn Dinshaw, whose book Getting Medieval has been very informative to me because she really writes about the affective echoes across time that might happen in an object; an object might retain some kind of affective echoes from another time. The challenge in that isn’t necessarily just a kind of recovery of some sort of unproblematic story of how this object travels to come to this place; but to engage in a set of desires about knowing and about accounting for, “how do we account for this?” Sometimes it looks like a very different historiography, and this is maybe why people say “we don’t need that, we don’t need that kind of history perhaps’; but we do need an account of our implications, our

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tangledness in time. And to my mind that’s best served by deep study of other moments in time. To account for our entanglement in time, our genealogy that brings us to a moment of trying to think about telling history differently. We are best informed by looking at other efforts in other moments in time to tell the historical narrative, as we devise new ways of telling those narratives to ourselves. Some people do it by a personal narrative, some people say “my personal history is the only history that I might have to bring to this object”. Other people may say something different, but I disagree that one doesn’t need any kind of engagement with history or historiography.

CC: So it’s more about a new way of thinking about historiography in terms of Performance Studies, when the object is performance…

RS: One of the reasons my book Performing Remains is about reenactment is beacause historically there has been this idea that performance disappears, a basic idea of Performance Studies; I give an account of it in my book. But, you know, Richard Schechner said this in 1985; it was picked up by many people, Peggy Phelan, famously reiterating “performance becomes itself through disappearing and it cannot be recorded” etc. etc., and that’s all been a very important thing to think with; but it also says “then, if performance disappears, it has no means of remaining, it doesn’t have a means of remaining in the archive, whereas in the object-based and text-based archive, what about the body as an archive? I mean psychoanalysis gives us the body as an archive; there are many examples: Foucault gives us the eruptive body… there are many examples of the body as an archive. But to tell those stories, to tell a history in that way… this is why Foucault calls it a geneology and not a history. We aren’t finished with figuring out what it is to enunciate a past that comes to us through that which has been forgotten. That’s a different kind of history, but it doesn’t happen in isolation to what does remain in the archive. It’s like what Diana Taylor argues; it’s some kind of crosswind that we can become better at thinking through.

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