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Nicholas Ridout
Lecturer in Performance, Queen Mary University of London "The Post-Democracy Show: Teatro all'italiana" Monday, 6 February 2006 5:00 p.m. Room L140, Chazen Museum, 800 University Ave. Sponsored by the Center for European Studies and the Visual Culture Cluster The theatre is one of those things Europeans are sometimes thought to have invented. Democracy is another. The mythology shaped by these claims has encouraged a range of recent thinkers to imagine the theatre as a place of political possibility: of speech, of action, of true representation. But we also know theatre to be a place of feeble shows and constant illusion. The work of contemporary Italian theatre makers like Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and Kinkaleri struggles to articulate an almost impossible politics in the context of Berlusconi's near-perfect instantiation of neo-fascist mediocracy. Nicholas Ridout explores the relationship between theatre's mythic political potency and its antic feebleness in one of Old Europe's special post-democratic places.
Nicholas Ridout is Lecturer in Performance at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, to be published by Cambridge University Press in May 2006. He is the co-editor, with Joe Kelleher, of Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion, to be published by Routledge, also in May 2006. He was the guest editor of Performance Research 10.1: On Theatre (2005) and has published articles on contemporary theatre and performance in Theatre Research International, Performance Research, Contemporary Theatre Review, PAJ and Frakcija.
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