Narrare humanum est. Włoski teatr narracji ostatniego trzydziestolecia

In the 1980’s young artists of Italian theatre begin to work on restoring the communicationbetween the stage and the audience and giving the theatre a new meaning, as its decline becomesa point of discussion. In time, their attention goes to story telling, and it is artists themselveswho become story tellers.We believe that it is not by accident that the revival of narration theatre starts exactly atthat time. A post-modernist man, who perceives his own identity as disorganized set of fragments,needs a tool that would allow him to put himself together. That tool, as A. Giddens,S. Hall or P. Ricoeur state, is narration (Ricoeur talks about “narrative identity”). Narrationtheatre meets this human need by means of travel and laboratory method which teaches selfexpressionin relation with another person. (The term “teatro di narrazone” is translated into“narration theatre”, rather than “storyteller’s theatre”, to emphasize the relation of narrationtheatre with the theory of narrative identity.)Apart from this individual dimension, narration theatre has also a group dimension. Newnarrators – Teatro Laboratorio Settimo or M. Paolini – on one hand become living archives ofthe history of societies in which they work, and cultures in which they grew up; but on theother hand by active involvement of the audience in the artistic process they contribute to thecreation of new communities, based on the consciousness of the same past and connecting allof its members.