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«For a long time I dreamed of the jester actor, an actor who, unlike the static and loud-speaking feature of the contemporary Italian tradition, would be able to play music and do somersaults: it seemed to me as if, in this way, sweetness and liveliness, sorrows and songs, could be more imaginatively and effectively expressed. Thus technique was conceived as a mean to bend the Body to any expressive aim, – and here our reference, both romantic and mythical, was to Paganini and his violin. […] Could we, barbaric jesters, the fire-eaters tramps on stilts, ever commit ourselves to the more refined and sophisticated acrobatics of the eyes, of the fingers and of the furrier muscles?»
Renzo Vescovi, “La via dell’India”, in Teatro e Storia, Anno XVII (2002-2003) 
TTB’S EXPERIENCE TTB’s work has a very precise cultural, political, ethical connotation. It is also the story of a technical research in...
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which specific instances combine: the will of precision and strictness in the studies carried out by International School of Theatre Anthropology, founded by Eugenio Barba, and secular rules, like the Master’s tradition, for a long time ignored by western theatre. These are some of the elements that concur to one’s actor practice and extend up to the point of conceiving theatre, both indoors and outdoors, as “actor’s centrality”, whose work is the production’s raw
material. This theoretical-practical development got different results that traced differentiation and stratification lines in the production. The play is the product of the process style of the work more than the final act of a production cycle, modeled through the concept of training and improvising, in an endless continuum of practice and rehearsal.
EAST – WEST Soon the jester-actor proposed by Renzo Vescovi looks East and creates a possible theatricalism utopia. He looks at an ideal...
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model of actor: the one who, through the complete mastery of his body and full expressive autonomy, evokes and produces poetry on stage. Orient will teach the actor discipline, body polyphony, control, production of sign unities in time unities, energy and material organization in an encoded language, poetic freedom in a formal cage. So the “lyrical actor” and “the nameless actor” add to the “jester-actor” as an aesthetical-technical ideal: the choral dimension and the loss of “role” and “character” add up to the relevance of the physical and instinctual part. Anyways this orchestration of the single body is a figure of the ensemble body orchestration, that is of the idea of group as an orchestra and of the play as a polyphonic performance, where actors are dramaturgical function that keep on changing and interacting between them; these are all incompatible features to the strong verbal and intellectual individuality (and individualism) of the actor in conventional theatre. “To be, not to appear” as Renzo Vescovi wrote.
MASTERS AND TECHNIQUES Through the years different techniques and masters joined: after Eugenio Barba and Jerzy Grotowsky we started working with...
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the Colombaioni brothers on clowerie and acrobatics, singing with Giovanna Marini, voice with Gabriella Bartolomei, Indian dance with Kalamandalam John, Usha Raghavan, Aloka Panikar, Pei Yan Ling for the Beijing Opera, Made Djimat for Balinese dance and many more. Then we developed self-learning techniques for improvisation methods based on “pure dance” or on “tasks” for musical instruments and voice and for the use of stilts in street theatre, through which TTB bent the open space to a dramaturgic function: another mix of cultured and popular, high and low, and play “for everyone”.
GROUP THEATRE DRAMATURGY TTB plans its actor to plan its theatre and elaborates tools and guidelines of the project in the making: it’s pure ...
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research, at the crossroads of, enterprise, initiation process, knowledge itinerary. The actor’s pedagogy is its tool and at the same time its purpose. Education is one with the production. The process circularity of the Group’s activity allows learning to be conceived as in the old times art workshops, something that involves, at different levels but with the same passion, teachers and students. The so called studentship thus becomes a process of reciprocal knowledge,
integration and adaptation, more than simply sharing knowledge, with a huge (emotional, human, professional) investment towards the new students. An experience that challenges the Group and its members every time. And every other time it redefines their identity.
«Cultivation transforms physical behavior on two levels: there’s a collective side, belonging to a performative tradition, and an inner side, linked to the “secret universe” of one’s associations.
The tension between these two sides – the collective one and the inner one – is one of the artist’s sources of strength, who is able to detach from the models he learned in the very moment he learns and performs them. Hence comes the strength of a master, when he knows how to transform what he learned in practical reflection and therefore he can give the student not only action models, but also a personal attitude»
E. BARBA, “Conoscenza tacita: dispersione ed eredità”, in Teatro e Storia,Annali 5-6, XIII-XIV (1998-1999) |
