What Can Theatre Do
Miguel A. Melgares ed. , Silvia Bottiroli ed.
What Can Theatre Do invites artists and thinkers to explore the potential of the performing arts, the political role of theatre and its ability to imagine alternative realities and future scenarios, ranging from essays to artistic interventions.
At a time when the relation between art and society is under permanent scrutiny, the utterance What can theatre do serves as an open invitation for artists and thinkers alike to reimagine the potential agency of the performing arts. The formulation of this sentence is both ambitious and ambiguous since the affirmative or interrogatory status remains undefined. The intonation of the sentence can provide both a sense of hope and belonging or a nihilist sensation of powerlessness. It could provide a resource for research development and analytic inquiries, but could also serve as a suggestion to trigger political action.
From fictional interviews to recipes, social-media exchanges to dramaturgical texts, theoretical essays to artistic interventions, the contributions gathered here are a diverse and multifaceted collection of dialogues. These interventions are singular and unique but share concerns and desires about the politicality of theatre as a realm where possible alternative realities can be enacted and potential future scenarios can be collectively rehearsed.
What Can Theatre Do tries to explore the idea of a book as a complex performative apparatus that can generate a space within which art and theory, and therefore also strategies of reality-making and of fiction-making, can entangle and affect one another, creating possibilities for the emergence of the not yet imagined.
Contributions by Lotte van den Berg, Carolina Bianchi, Silvia Bottiroli, Ilenia Caleo, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Piersandra Di Matteo, Valeria Graziano, Ainhoa Hernández Escudero, Samara Hersch, Asa Horvitz, Mala Kline, Low Kee Hong, Tom Oliver Jacobson, Miguel A. Melgares, Juan Miranda, Ogutu Muraya, Mazlum Nergiz, Andrej Nosov, nyamnyam (Ariadna Rodríguez and Iñaki Alvarez), Giulia Palladini, Venuri Perera, Livia Andrea Piazza, Amanda Piña, Annalisa Sacchi, Mariana Senne, Agat Sharma, Lara Staal, Elioa Steffen, Rolando Vázquez, Elioa Steffen, Suvani Suri, Pankaj Tiwari, Ingrid Vranken.
