Research

OUTDOOR THEATRE
OUTDOOR THEATRE

EASTERN THEATRE

ACTOR’S DRAMATURGY
 

In the last years a different attitude of man and society and a different cultural reality produced a new way of conceiving and acting in theatre. This is the case of a phase of contemporary theatre history, the “Theatre’s Space” (“La Poésie dans l’espace”, to quote Antonin Artaud) and its popular version, the street theatre.
For TTB an outdoor performance’s dramaturgy is as complex as the one in an indoor performance. It’s not restricted to the simple logic of a “procession” or a “parade”. Its aim is to help unreality surface in everyday life. Ghosts, shadows, jokes and fears which are not the ones of nightmares and obsessions, but that look more like the ones in dreams, fairy tales and figures that decorate our lives (in the few moments we are able to not rely completely on the media and interactive image flow).

TTB’S EXPERIENCE

TTB lived this phase of contemporary theatre since its beginning (Bitef-Belgrade 1976) making it one of the central moments in...

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  • its research activity and stage practice. Our challenge has always been studying the possibilities of  dramaturgy in open spaces carried out with the same care and resolution of indoor theatre, aware of the fact that the environment is a constitutive element of the performance.
    In street theatre “unsolved tradition” TTB’s work mixes “popular” forms and “high” festive events of renaissance and baroque plays, sacred theatre and the profane one in medieval carnivals, without forgetting the underground  movement of open air plays that came back in the study and practice of the twentieth century vanguard. To that we owe the knowledge of theatre out of common places’ possibilities (and social necessity), refusing to identify the  theatrical performance with the theatre building.
    Related Topics: Open Spaces

IN THE WORLD’S STREETS

Since 1976, when Albatri was first presented (it was the first example of Italian street theatre with a dramaturgy), TTB produced...

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  • seventeen outdoor plays brought to over forty countries: from the squares of Vienna and Mexico City, to the cliffs of New Delhi, form the skyscrapers in Houston and the streets of Lisbon to the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta and the new library in Alexandria, from the mountains in Trentino and the Sicilian villas to the gardens in Madrid and the Acropolis in Athens, from the districts of Beijing and the small villages in southern India to the favelas in Rio and the streets of Quito.
    Here’s some accounts and opinions on TTB’s outdoor plays.
    «From Europe to Latin America, TTB is a model for outdoor performances» Eugenio Barba “L’Eco di Bergamo” 2005
    «[...] In TTB’s street theatre there is everything that worried and satisfied theatre in the last thirty years. You can  sense, not without a thrill, the lesson of great masters, from Jerzy Grotowsky to Peter Brook, from Tadzeus Kantor to Eugenio Barba and the oriental theatre, finally intended in the right way» “Il Resto del Carlino”
    “Teatro Tascabile di Bergamo is a Group specialized in street theatre and you can see that very well. [...] it’s a way to revisit or discover Shakespeare in an original way, a dream within a dream. [...] Getting rid of prejudices is the main lesson for the audience.» “La Segunda” Santiago, Chile
    Related Topics: Open Spaces

DIVERSE DRAMATURGIES

The outdoor performances and Festivals produced and organized by TTB sum up the interdisciplinarity that  characterizes the...

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  • group’s work; the deriving stream of artistic density allowed it to present plays with different  dramaturgies and the dislocation of the scene/audience/actors relationship. For TTB a simple need underlies the  research for an outdoor performance: surprise. The first aim of a outdoor performance is to transform an ordinary  reality into a different world for the audience, with impossible figures (for example walking on stilts). A space can be transformed by ornaments that twist its sense, or (even more effectively) through the actors’ “ambushes”, who appear and disappear from street corners, rooftops, from the end of a road, guiding and confusing the audience.
    Through the years TTB organized parades (Grande parata d`apertura, 1985), “a stazioni” moving performance (Albatri 1977, Alla luna 1981, Storie del giardino dei peri 1995, Corteo Manzoniano 2004-2005) "a pianta fissa e centrale" (Valse 1994, Amor mai non s’addorme-Storie di Montecchi e Capuleti 2009), outdoor programs (Arlecchino d’Oriente 2006, L’Aria infinita 1986).
    There are productions only or mainly characterized by “cordial parties” explicitly inspired by the spectacular model of the reception (Sogni vagabondi 1987, Con suoni e con canti 2005) and, on the other side, more dramatic plays  (Sonja 1979, Alla luna 1984). The last production of the group, Amor mai non s’addorme. Storie di Montecchi e  Capuleti, joins all those productions with a complex system of loans and “translations”. It’s a new reading of the  popular Shakespearean myth of Romeo and Juliet, an epitomy of all the elements forming TTB’s poetics.
    At the moment (fall of 2012) TTB is working on the production of a new outdoor performance.
    Related Topics: Work Methodology / Open Spaces

«So our plays, almost off the cuff, matched the circumstances, the season, the ground, the audience. They were sound, powerful, almost clean of the stage dust. »
J.COUPEAU

 
 
 
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