INVEN
TARIO
FOR A DIDACTIC
OF THE NARRATIVE BODY
There is something incomparably intimate and productive in the work with the actor entrusted to me. He must be attentive and confident and free, for our labor is to explore his possibilities to the utmost. His growth is attended by observation, astonishment, and desire to help; my growth is projected onto him, or, rather, is found in him - and our common growth becomes revelation. This is not instruction of a pupil but utter opening to another person, in which the phenomenon of "shared or double birth" becomes possible. The actor is reborn - not only as an actor but as a man - and with him, I am reborn. It is a clumsy way of expressing it, but what is achieved is a total acceptance of one human being by another.
Jerzy Grotowski, TOWARDS A POOR THEATRE
"Shared birth" and acceptance of another human being: it is perhaps starting from this Grotowski's statement pronounced in 1965 that we may try thinking about the sense of education, of the multiplicity of knowledges and, somehow, about the heritage through which we would like to share and vehiculate not only techniques and methodologies, but also meanings, contents and signs.
In a present where the great masters of the 20th century often seem forgotten, in which the memory of our origins gets lost in the dust of a confused time, which is frequently deprived of the references that historically and artistically generated and nourished it, and in which - consequently - even the gesture, the body, and the word itself risk to be no longer being a the mean through which is possible to act forms capable of conveying intelligible contents. Our vocational education and training work aspires to transmit a set of practices and knowledge that can help to accompany the future young dancers in the construction of their personal “thinking body”. A “thinking body” is a body capable of bringing meanings into form, of playing any possible danced action with awareness, precision, technique and immersion, of crossing the space connecting with the present; it is a body that wishes to discover but that has patience, a body that practices, a body that builds day after day, a body that experiences, stratifies, observes and seeks. This body descends into the depths of its real feelings, it is not satisfied with the first result, but builds its present by growing roots in the past, chewing them; this body re-elaborates and challenges what it has learned, walks alongside the footsteps of the great Masters with humility and gratitude, and which then, over time, it will defines and embodies its own artistic identity and, above all, its own autonomy of thought.
By placing this thought and this precise purpose into the cultural and artistic system of the Piedmontese territory, we find ourselves in a synergic dialogue with a rich and diversified landscape of actors who, in various and complementary capacities, work professionally and permanently in the performing arts industry.
In this way, INVENTARIO becomes the input to coordinate and harmonize a fluid calendar of training and professionalizing efforts whose aim is to transmit, share, refine in dialogue, an ethics of training that is a stratification and a living and eternally revived archive in its relentlessly being questioned by the a dancing, speaking and signifying body.
INVENTARIO as a scientific list of tools to be refined and used at the service of artistic languages.
INVENTARIO from the Latin inventarium, derivation of inventus, the past participle of invent = to find.
INVENTARIO as a space for the invention, for the creative spark that precedes and constantly questions the meaning of the artistic journey.
