Waiting for the wind. About theather as a disruptive agent
Marina Mazzolani
The theatrical experience that was born in 2001 as an integrated laboratory, between disabled and non-disabled actors, which created the ExtraVagantis Association, a group interested in the themes of diversity, has always had a special focus on the issue of social categories: much of the work has been devoted to exploring how they can spur prejudices, stereotypes, stigmas and, from tools of knowledge to cross the complexity of reality, they can become walls that divide people and cause marginalization. In Minotauri, the last production to which ExtraVagantis participated, in cooperation with the Solidarity Theater Network of the Bologna Metropolitan City, the great heterogeneity of the group of its actors has pointed out that it is important to give value to the differences but also to look for similarities, establishing ties that define new memberships, making useless the use of categories separated from theatrical work, from the exchange between bodies and voices of the very different people involved in collective creation. The theatre community reflects the wider community: in its scenarios the present is represented but above all, the future is experimented.
Keywords
Categories, stereotypes, prejudices, social theatre, ExtraVagantis, concept of normality