Teatro, Accademia e Società sul terreno degli incontri

“Social theatre” is a very complicated definition to explain a lot of theatrical experiences not aligned. It deals with a form that the doesn't consider theater as art, but it assumes the representative art as an educative medium. Therefore, this kind of theater is not reserved to professionals, but to places and people usually distant from this cultural language and (especially but not only) to the uneasy contexts. The projects realized in these social conditions include the adoption of an ample concept of “theatrical” in place of a common conception of the play. The theater in the jail belongs to this typology of intervention, answering both to a collective emergency and to a defect of communication. In Italy the theater in the jail is an active reality and, for about thirty years, is coordinated by a national organization. From 2014 to 2017, the national coordination organized a project called Destini Incrociati consists of meetings, conferences and laboratories both inside the jails and to the univesty in order to reflect on the achievements and on the necessity of qualified operators. Destini Incrociati has brought to the University of Salerno a laboratoy of formation in whinch a group of students in performing arts has frequented an intensive stage for theater operator in the jails. The students have been able to conceive the prison as place of knowledge, sperimantation of languages and disparate cultural matrixes, an area in which “marginality” and the detention become occasion of bodily and internal investigation. So they have completed their theorethical knowledge drawing different perspectives, openings to the pedagogic and artistic challenge with the purpose to elaborate practices of intervention that use the forms of the theater in the definition and the development of further horizons of sense.