Ovi Symposium:

“A Philosophical Conversation on the Nature of Art within Modernity
and the Envisioning of a New Humanism”

between Drs. Abis, Buccolo, Nannery, Paolozzi, Paparella and Vena
Twentieth Meeting: 27 February 2014

Direct participants (in alphabetical order):

Dr. Alessandra Abis is a graduate of the Department of Foreign and Classical Languages and Literatures at the University of Bari. She, with her husband Arcangelo, founded the Adriani Teatro in 1992 in Italy. She has performed in Greek-Latin plays, among others: “Voyage in the Greek World” (Andromaca), “Miles Gloriosus” (Plauto), “The Last Temptation of Socrates (from Plato’s Ione Minor). Also from the Commedia dell’Arte: “Harlequin Doctor Flyer,” and “Without Makeup” (Chechov), “Four Portraits of Mothers,” Lady Madness (Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly).

Dr. Maria Buccolo teaches theater at the University of Roma Tre in Rome, Italy. She is a graduate of the University of Bari and has participated in various projects aiming at establishing cultural bridges among nations and people, one of which is the Project for the Integration of Immigrants via the theater “Leonardo da Vinci Transfert Multilaterale dell’Innovazione” with the participation of four EU nations: France, Italy. Belgium and Rumania).

Dr. Lawrence Nannery has studied at Boston College, Columbia University and at The New School for Social Research where he obtained his Ph.D. He founded The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal and authored The Esoteric Composition of Kafka’s Corpus. Devising Nihilistic Literature, 2 vols. Lewiston: the Edward Mellen Press, 2006.

Dr.Ernesto Paolozzi teaches history of contemporary philosophy at the University Suor Orsola Benincasa of Naples. A Croce scholar and an expert on historicism, he has written widely and published several books, especially on aesthetics and liberalism vis a vis science. His book Benedetto Croce: The Philosophy of History and the Duty of Freedom was printed as an e-book in Ovi magazine in June 2013.

Dr. Emanuel Paparella has a Ph.D. in Italian Humanism with a dissertation on Giambattista Vico from Yale University. He currently teaches philosophy at Barry University and Broward College in Florida, USA. One of his books is titled Hermeneutics in the Philosophy of G. Vico, Mellen Press. His latest e-book Aesthetic Theories of Great Western Philosophers was printed in Ovi magazine in June 2013.

Dr. Michael Vena is a former professor emeritus at Southern Connecticut State University. He has a Ph.D. in Italian Humanism (with a dissertation on Leon Battista Alberti) from Yale University. He has published a book on Italian theater titled Italian Grotesque Theater (2001). Recently he has published an English collection of modern Italian plays by well known playwrights such as Pirandello, Fabbri and De Filippo.

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Table of Content for the 20th Session of the Ovi Symposium (2/27/2014)
Main Sub-theme: “The theater as an exploration of our humanity.”

Indirect Participants at this meeting within the “Great Conversation” across the Ages (in the order of their appearance): Vico, Gadamer, Heidegger, Dilthey, Betti, Hirsch, Habermas, Apel, Ricoeur, Levi-Strauss, Nietzsche, Vattimo, Rorty, Derrida, Sartre, Dante, Adriani, Khalo, Clytemnestra, Traetta, Aristophanes, Socrates, Benigni, Biancolelli, Plauto, Chaplin, Lewis, Zelle, Han, Duse, Garbo, Callas, Monroe, Circe, Wesker, Chiarelli, Welland, D’Annunzio, Verga, Nuessel, Da Vinci, Mongili, Tonon, Napolitano.

Preamble by way of an Abstract by the Symposium’s Coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella

Section 1: “An Invitation to the Hermeneutics of the Self via Vico’s New Science and Gadamer’s Truth and Method.” A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

Section 2: “Introduction and Survey of the History of the Adriani Teatro.” A presentation by Alessandra Abis with a brief introduction by Emanuel L. Paparella.

Section 3: “The Return of Positivism and its Crisis.” An introduction to a future presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi as translated from his book Vicende dell’Estetica.

Section 4: “Michael Vena on Luigi Chiarelli: a review by Professor Frank Nuessel of Michael Vena’s pedagogical book on Luigi Chiarelli’s play La maschera e il volto’” (The Mask and the Face).

Section 5:  A warm welcome from the Ovi Symposium to Maria Buccolo as a regular Ovi Symposium contributor.

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Preamble by Way of an Abstract by the Symposium’s Coordinator Emanuel L. Paparella

In this session we continue the conversation on the theater as a bridge between life and art, theory and praxis and the more general theme of the theater as an exploration of our humanity and a journey into the self. In section one Paparella introduces those aesthetics’ themes via Vichian hermeneutics of the journey into the self.

In section two Alessandra Abis, already introduced to the Ovi readership in the previous meeting of the Ovi Symposium, debuts with a narration of the history of the theater company she and her husband Arcangelo Adriani founded some twenty two years ago in Italy (1992), namely the Adriani Teatro. She narrates for us its particular vision, its goals, its mission. The Adriani Teatro presently operates in the US, where Alessandra and her husband currently reside and work, but it remains international as a transatlantic  cultural bridge of sort between the EU and the US.  She too, not unlike Michael Vena conceives of the theater as a bridge between cultures and a journey into the self.

In section three, in tandem with section one’s theme of philosophical hermeneutics, we introduce briefly the next presentation of Ernesto Paolozzi titled The Return of Positivism and its Crisis, as translated from chapter 6 of his book Vicende dell’Estetica. This is to merely wet the reader’s intellectual appetite with an  antipasto morsel, so to speak. The full course meal or presentation, and any added comments and conversation, will be published in the next session of the symposium. So, stay tuned.

In section four, within the parameters of the theme of the theater as a pedagogical tool, we are presented with two reviews of one of Vena’s edited books on one of Luigi Chiarelli’s plays, namely La maschera e il volto, a book which albeit published in the mid seventies is still in use in the US in many colleges teaching Italian language and culture. 

In section five we extend a warm welcome to Dr. Maria Buccolo currently teaching theater at the University of Rome while briefly introducing her to the Symposium’s readership. In the near future she will be collaborating with Dr. Abis by way of an inter-Atlantic cooperation between two continents and two cultures,  writing essays for the Ovi Symposium that focus on the function of the theater in education and the bridging of cultures.

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1

An Invitation to the Hermeneutics of the Self
Via Vico’s New Science and Gadamer’s Truth and Method
A Presentation by Emanuel L. Paparella

Giambattista Vico (1668-1743)

Vico’s New Science has often been identified as “a science of humanity.” As such it leads its readers to an exploration of what it means to be human, that is to say, to a journey into the self.  Vico considered self-knowledge essential for the road to wisdom, even more so than knowledge of mathematics, metaphysics, and natural science. He conceived of wisdom in classical terms, as the summation of an authentic holistic life, able to harmonize the material, the intellectual and the spiritual components of one’s humanity. A life, in other words, that is neither one of Dionysian excess nor one of mere Apollonian clarity; one that while accepting and integrating man’s imaginative and rational spheres, remains at all times capable of transcending both; hence the importance of his paradoxical concept of providence which in his philosophy is both immanent within human history but also transcendent.

A Vichian intellectual journey requires, at a minimum, a willingness to dialogue with Vico and then among ourselves and then with the rest of the world. What makes the dialogue possible is the common humanity we share and we bring to the conversation. As I attempt to be a guide of sort into Vico’s complex  thought I need to be the first one to bring my own humanity and life experience to the hermeneutical process which a Vico reading inevitably engender, or my invitation to a journey into the hermeneutics of the self will be moot.

During graduate studies at various institutions of higher learning (New York University, Middlebury College, The University of Perugia, Yale University), I came in contact with various theories of literature. A new one seems to appear on the academic scene every five or six years. It has even been suggested that “theory” stands for “politics” in reified academic circles. One of the most popular nowadays is that of Hermeneutics which originates with Hans-Georg Gadamer, an eminent Vico scholar at the University of Heidelberg whose magnum opus is Truth and Method (1960). It is a theory of interpretation claiming that in the reading of literature the reader’s own self-understanding necessarily comes into play. In other words, either a particular text addresses me, the reader, as a person, or there is no encounter with it. Far from being mere conceptual knowledge, literature is, properly speaking, life experience. Gadamer calls it the event of understanding and establishes the so called “critical circle” of history, aesthetics, language giving proper credit to both Vico and Croce for their seminal ideas on philosophical hermeneutics.

To be sure, Hans-Georg Gadamer's project is strongly influenced by Heidegger, but in his masterpiece Truth and Method  his starting point is undoubtedly provided by Vico and Dilthey's hermeneutical inquiry on the methodology of the human sciences. While taking anew the dialogue with the human sciences and the open question of their claim to truth, Gadamer calls into question Dilthey's premise according to which the experience of truth in the humanities depends on method. In seeking a methodological foundation that alone could guarantee their scientific or objective status, Dilthey sought to keep the humanities to the model of the exact sciences and would thus have forfeited the specificity of the humanities, where the involvement of the interpreter whose understanding is constitutive of the experience of meaning: the texts that we interpret are texts that say something to us and that are always understood in some way out of our questions and "prejudices." The implication of the interpreter in the "event" of meaning, as Gadamer likes to put it, can only be deemed detrimental from the model of objectivity heralded by the natural sciences. Instead of this outdated notion of objectivity, the human sciences would do well to understand their contribution to knowledge out of the somewhat forgotten tradition of humanism and the importance it bestowed upon the notion of Bildung (formation and education). The humanities do not seek to master an object that stands at a distance (as with the exact sciences), but their aim is rather to develop and form the human spirit. The truth one experiences in the encounter with major texts and history is one that transforms us, taking us up in the event of meaning itself.

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911)

Gadamer finds the most revealing model for this type of understanding in the experience of art since we are always involved by the presentation of an art work, which Gadamer understands as the revelation of the truth or the essence of something, so that a play reveals something about the meaning of existence, just as a portrait reveals the true essence of someone. Yet it is a truth-experience in which we partake in that it can only unfold through a process of interpretation. For Gadamer hermeneutics is to be understood, first and foremost, out of the arts we call the "arts of interpretation" or the "performative arts": just as a piece of music must be interpreted by the violinist (that is, never arbitrarily, but with a leeway that has to be filled by the virtuosity of interpretation), a drama by the actors or the ballet by the dancers, a book must be interpreted through the process of reading and a picture must be contemplated by the eye of the beholder. It is only in this presentation of a meaning to someone, a performance which is always an interpretation, that meaning comes to be realized. One notices here that "interpretation" refers both to the interpretation of a work of art by the performers and to the "spectators" who attend the performance and must also "interpret" the piece.

The difference between the two forms of interpretation is less important for Gadamer than the fact that the experience of meaning, and the truth experience it brings out, essentially requires the productive implication of the interpreter. The same holds for the interpretation of a text or a historical event, even in the scientific context of the human sciences. The point is that interpretation is not the simple recreation of a meaning that always remains the same and can be methodically verified, nor, for that matter, the subjective, and potentially relativistic, bestowing of meaning upon an objective reality (because the reality to be understood can only be reached through a renewed attempt of understanding). In other words, to claim that interpretation is relativistic on the grounds that it implies the subjectivity of the interpreter is to miss the point of what the humanities and the experience of meaning are all about.

The objectivistic model of the exact sciences is ill-equipped to do justice to this experience of meaning. Distance, methodical verification, and independence from the observer, Gadamer concludes, are not the sole conditions of knowledge. When we understand, we do not only follow a methodical procedure but we are "taken up" as the art experience illustrates, by the meaning that "seizes" us, as it were. The instrumental sounding idea of procedure is somewhat suspect for Gadamer, for understanding is more of an event than a procedure. "Understanding and Event" is indeed one of the original titles Gadamer thought about for his major work, before settling on "Truth and Method," which underlines the very same point that truth is not only a matter of method and can never be entirely detached from our concerns.

But these concerns come to us from a tradition and a history that are more often than not opaque to consciousness. Every understanding stands in the stream of an  "effective history," in which the horizons of the past and the present coalesce. Understanding thus entails a "fusion of horizons" between the past and the present, that is, between the interpreter, with all the history silently at work in his understanding, and his or her object. This fusion is not to be viewed as an autonomous operation of subjectivity but as an event of tradition in the course of which a meaning from the past is somehow applied to the present.

This leads Truth and Method to suggest that the best model for the humanities was perhaps offered by disciplines that had been traditionally preoccupied with the questions of interpretation such as juridical and theological hermeneutics, insofar as the meaning that is to be understood in these fields is one that has to be applied to a given situation. In the same way a judge has to creatively apply a text of law to a particular case and a preacher has to apply a text of Scripture to the situation of his or her congregation, every act of understanding involves an effort of "application" of what is understood to the present. Gadamer does not mean by this that one first has to understand a meaning, of a text or a historical event and then apply it to a given situation by bestowing new "relevance" upon it. His idea is rather that every understanding is at its root an application of meaning, where our experience and background are brought to bear. This "application" is, by no means, a conscious procedure. It always happens in the course of understanding to the extent that interpretation brings into play the situation and "prejudices" of the interpreter that are less "his" or "hers" than the ones carved by the effective history in which we all stand.

Gadamer expands on this idea by comparing understanding to a process of translation. "I understand something" means that I can translate it into my own words, thus applying it to my situation. Any meaning I can relate to is one that is translated into a meaning I can articulate. It is not only important to underline the obvious fact that translation always implies an act of interpretation (a translator is also called in English an interpreter) but even more to stress that this interpretation is by no means arbitrary: it is bound by the meaning it seeks to render, but it can only do so by translating it into a language where it can speak anew. What occurs in the process of translation is thus a fusion of horizons between the foreign meaning and its interpretation-translation in a new language, horizon, and situation, where the meaning resonates.

Truth and Method draws on this insight to highlight the fundamentally linguistic nature of understanding. Understanding is always an act of developing something into words, and I only understand to the extent that I seek (and find) words to express this understanding. Understanding is not a process that could be separated from its linguistic unfolding: to think, to understand, is to seek words for that which strives to be understood. There is a crucial fusion between the process of interpretation and its linguistic formulation. It will not be the only fusion of horizons that will interest Gadamer in his hermeneutics of language. His thesis goes even further: not only is the process of interpreting (interpretare) linguistically oriented, what it seeks to understand (the interpretandum) is also language.

Language also determines the object  of understanding itself. In the end there occurs a fusion between the "process" of understanding and its "object" in the sense that no object can be separated from the attempt  to understand it. Gadamer's famous phrase to express this fusion between the object and the process of understanding itself is: "Being that can be understood is language." This simple, yet enigmatic dictum can be read in two quite different directions: it can mean that every experience of Being is mediated by language, and thus by a historical and cultural horizon (negatively put: "there is no experience of Being without an historical understanding or language"). This would seem to draw Gadamer into the "relativistic camp." It is striking to note, however, that Gadamer always resisted this merely relativistic appropriation of his thought. This has been overlooked by postmodern readers of Gadamer, but in his dictum "Being that can be understood is language," the stress can also be put on Being itself. What Gadamer hopes to say by this is that the effort of understanding is in a way ordained to the language of the things themselves.

A difficult and unpalatable notion for postmodernism, to be sure, but one that is essential to Gadamer's hermeneutics: language is not only the subjective, say, contingent translation of meaning, it is also the event by which Being itself comes to light. Our language is not only "our" language, it is also the language of Being itself, the way in which Being presents itself in our understanding. This is why, when one speaks and interprets, one cannot say everything one fancies. One is bound by something like the language of the thing. What is this language? Difficult to say since we can only approach it through our language, and the language of tradition, but it is nevertheless the instance that resists too unilateral or too violent readings of this Being. It is this language of Being that I seek to understand, and to the extent that understanding succeeds, a fusion of horizons has happened, a fusion between Being and understanding, an event I do not master, but in which I partake.

E.D. Hirsch (1928-     )

Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch (1987)

The history of hermeneutics after Gadamer can be read as a history of the debates provoked by Truth and Method. Some of the first responses to Gadamer were sparked by the methodological notion of hermeneutics that prevailed in the tradition of Vico and Dilthey. After all, it had been the dominant conception of hermeneutics until Gadamer (with the sole, albeit very peculiar, exception of Heidegger's "hermeneutics of existence" that had left behind the older hermeneutic tradition which had been concerned with text interpretation and the human sciences. Since Gadamer, in spite of his Heideggerian roots, took his starting point in Vico and Dilthey's inquiry on the truth claim of the humanities, he was often seen and criticized from this tradition. Emilio Betti, the Italian jurist who had published a voluminous General Theory of Interpretation (in Italian) in 1955, which was intended as a methodical foundation of the humanities in the Dilthey tradition, vigorously criticized Gadamer's seeming rejection of the methodological paradigm. If Gadamer's own "method" for the humanities consisted in saying that one just has to follow one's own prejudices, it had to be condemned as a perversion of the very idea of hermeneutics. Betti, who was followed in this regard by E. D. Hirsch in America, opposed the relativistic idea that interpretation always entails an essential element of application to the present. Surely, texts do acquire different meanings or relevance in the course of their reception, but one has to distinguish the actuality or significance thus garnered from the original meaning  of the texts, that is, the meaning of the text in the mind of its author (mens auctoris), which remains the focus of hermeneutics.

Jurgen Habermas (1929-    )

Coming from the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas hailed, for his part, this element of application in understanding, claiming that knowledge is always guided by some interests. This hermeneutical insight, he believed, could help free the social sciences, spearheaded by psychoanalysis and the critique of ideology, from an all too objectivistic understanding of knowledge and science. Hermeneutics teaches us that our understanding and practices are always motivated and linguistically articulated. It is Gadamer's too strong reliance on tradition and the importance of authority in understanding that Habermas opposed. He faulted it for being "conservative"; but Habermas' lasting point, that language can also transcend its own limits, followed an idea that he discovered in Gadamer but turned against him. When Gadamer said that our experience of the world was linguistic, he also stressed, for Habermas, that it is open to self-correction, that is, that it could, to some extent, overcome its own limitations by seeking better expressions or dissolving its own rigidity and was thus open to any meaning that could be understood. Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel drew from this self-transcendence of language the important notion of a linguistic or communicative rationality, which is laden with universalistic assumptions that can form the basis of an ethical theory.

Emilio Betti (1890-1968)

Paul Ricoeur tried to build a bridge—a most hermeneutical task and virtue in itself—between Habermas and Gadamer, by claiming both authors had stressed different but complementary elements in the tension that is inherent to understanding: whereas Gadamer underlined the belongingness of the interpreter to his object and his tradition, Habermas took heed of the reflective distance toward it. Understanding, viewed as application, does not only have to appropriate naively its subject matter, it can stand at a critical distance from it—a distance that is already given by the fact that the interpretandum is an objectified text. This notion of a hermeneutics that seeks to decipher objectivities came mainly from Vico and Dilthey, but Ricoeur used it in a productive manner in his decisive confrontations with psychoanalysis (Freud) and structuralism (Claude Lévi-Strauss). He linked them to a "hermeneutics of suspicion" that is most useful in that it can help us get rid of superstition and false understanding. But such a hermeneutics can only be conducted in the hope of a better and more critical understanding of understanding. A "hermeneutics of trust" thus remains the ultimate focus of his work: the meaning we seek to understand is one that helps us better understand our world and ourselves. We interpret because we are open to the truths that can be gained from the objectivations of meaning in the grand myths, texts, and narratives of mankind, in which the temporal and tragic aspects of our human condition are expressed. Ricoeur drew far-reaching ethical conclusions from this hermeneutics of trust that has learned from the school of suspicion.

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005)

Betti, Hirsch, Habermas (and, to a certain extent, Ricoeur) all faulted Gadamer and hermeneutics for being too "relativistic" (i.e., too reliant on tradition). Postmodernism went, to some degree, in an opposite direction: it welcomed Gadamer's alleged "relativism" but only believed it did not go far enough. Gadamer would have been somewhat inconsequential in not acknowledging fully the relativistic consequences of his hermeneutics. To understand this shift in the hermeneutical debates, it is important to observe that authors such as Heidegger (especially the later Heidegger) and Nietzsche play a paramount role for post-modernist thinkers. One thinks, in this regard, of the Nietzsche who said that there are no facts, only interpretations, or of the Heidegger who claimed that our understanding was framed by the history of Being. The postmodernists lumped this Nietzschean-Heideggerian outlook together with Gadamer's seeming critique of scientific objectivity, his stress on the prejudices of interpretation, and his insistence on the linguistic nature of understanding. Stressing these elements, hermeneutics, they believed, jettisoned the idea of an objective truth. There is no such thing given the interpretatory and linguistic nature of our experience. This lead Gianni Vattimo to "nihilistic" consequences and Richard Rorty to a renewed form of pragmatism: some interpretations are more useful or amenable than others, but none can per se be claimed to be "closer" to the Truth. In the name of tolerance and mutual understanding, one has to accept the plurality of interpretations; it is only the notion that there is only one valid one that is harmful.

Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

Jacques Derrida can also be seen in the "postmodern" tradition, since he too depends heavily on the later Heidegger and Nietzsche, stresses the linguistic nature of our experience, and also urges a "deconstructive" attitude toward the tradition of metaphysics that governs our thinking, an attitude that Paul Ricoeur would classify in the "hermeneutics of suspicion." But his deconstruction does not directly take the direction of the pragmatist tradition of Rorty or the nihilism of Vattimo. Despite the Heideggerian origins of his notion of deconstruction and his pan-linguisticism, Derrida does not identify himself with the tradition of hermeneutics. His "deconstruction" is indeed distrustful of any form of hermeneutics: every understanding, he contends, would involve or hide a form of "appropriation" of the other and its otherness. In his discussion with Gadamer in 1981, he challenged Gadamer's rather commonplace assumption that understanding implies the goodwill to understand the other. What about this will? asked Derrida. Is it not chained to the will to dominate that is emblematic of our metaphysical and Western philosophical tradition? Hence Derrida's mistrust of the hermeneutical drive to understand the other and of the hermeneutic claim to universality. Gadamer was touched by this criticism to the extent that he claimed that understanding implied some form of application, which can indeed be read as a form of appropriation. This is perhaps the reason why, in his later writings, he more readily underlined the open nature of the hermeneutical experience. "The soul of hermeneutics," he then said, "is that the other can be right."

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

Gianni Vattimo (1936-    )

Beyond Interpretation by Gianni Vattimo (1997)

Given this background, one can readily see that for Vico and Gadamer, a literature which is incapable of relating to me standing in the present with an historical horizon, is pretty much a dead literature. I may of course play academic games of literary pathology with it, dissect the cadaver and maybe even re-construct it again; but those games will not bring the text to life. On the other hand, if a text is capable of producing a dynamic personal meaning, the reader’s self-knowledge will inevitably be enhanced. When we say text we ought not just think of words on paper or literature proper, or spoken language which remains pre-eminent, but of any aesthetic manifestation of the human spirit understood as a language of sort, what Vico calls the poetic: music, theater, painting, sculpture, architecture, history, etc.

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002)

Philosophical Hermeneutics
By Hans Georg Gadamer (1977)

With self-knowledge acquired via history understood as a narration of man’s journey, (in Italian the word for history and story are one and the same) one may more confidently project a future. Such was my own personal experience, a sort of epiphany, when I first read Vico’s Scienza Nuova some forty years ago. There is much more to this theory, but what a beginner into the hermeneutics of the self needs to grasp initially is that meaning and meaningfulness are contextual in nature. The interpretation of any of man’s artifacts, especially linguistic artifacts, always stands in the situation in which the interpreter himself stands. Meaning is immanent within the very texture of life and is a perception with a nexus which is priori to the subject/object separation in thought.

Hermeneutics in the Philosophy of Giambattista Vico
By Emanuel L. Paparella (1993: Mellen Press)

In the absence of a dialogue with literary texts, much of what passes for literary humanistic studies in our academies ends up assuming a dehumanizing mode. By objectifying the work of literature one fails to bring one’s own humanity to the conversation and the hermeneutical circle cannot be closed. Literature becomes mere conceptual knowledge with which to make a living and build an academic career. Some of these academics go around proclaiming that literature is superior to philosophy but in effect they have objectified and rationalized literature too, reduced it to mere knowledge understood as power. Dostoyevsky’s literature may have much more of the existential philosophy than say a Sartre but that can only be true if we are able to grasp the hermeneutical function of literature.

Objective knowledge needs to be brought back to the sphere of life and human experience from which it originally sprung. Had Dante wished to write his Commedia for the exclusive monopoly of scholars and university professors, he would in the first place have written it in Latin which he was perfectly capable of doing. Similarly, Vico did not write his New Science for the mere furtherance of his academic career at the University of Naples (where indeed he remained largely unappreciated), but rather “per insegnar il volgo a virtuosamente operare,” i.e., “to teach ordinary people how to live well.” This ethical mission is at the core of the New Science, deeply interested in human origins and identity. Like the ancients of antiquity, Vico insists that without self-knowledge there is no acquisition of wisdom. His was the question of the ancients as re-discovered by the high medieval and Renaissance humanists: what does it mean to be human; how does one live humanly?

Vico, as the ultimate Italian Humanist, endeavors to answer those ethical questions. For the moment let me simply mention that, from my own standpoint in space and time, and given the predicaments of our technological rationalistic civilization which threatens to swallow up our freedom and our very humanity, the post-modern world, I remain as convinced as I was thirty three years ago that Vico’s concerns are more relevant and urgent than ever. It is indeed crucial that the average non-academic layman who is well informed on the cultural currents and cross-currents of our time, become better acquainted with Vico’s speculation.

Those who wish to undertake this Vichian journey into self-knowledge need to be warned that Vico and Gadamer resist oversimplification. They need to be pondered and taken in slowly. They are a hard nut to crack but once cracked the rewards are plentiful; a personal epiphany of sort may ensue. For this to happen beginners in hermeneutics have to bring their own humanity to the historical horizon, for as Vico has well taught us man is his own history. If we venture on this journey across disciplinary boundaries the results may indeed astonish us; for it is at the edge of boundaries that life and knowledge meet most fruitfully.

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2

An Introduction and Survey of the History of “Adriani Teatro”
A Presentation by Alessandra Abis

Brief Introduction to the presentation by the Symposium’s Coordinator: What follows is a brief survey of the history, the vision, the mission and purposes, together with the illustrations of actual performances of the Adriani Teatro, by way of a brief narration by Alessandra Abis of her twenty year plus accomplishments in the theater in collaboration with her husband Arcangelo Adriani, particularly their explorations in the ancient Greek and Roman Theater and the Commedia dell’Arte and their indefatigable inter-Atlantic building of bridges of understanding between continents and cultures. Undoubtedly, their future contributions to the Ovi symposium will inspire those readers who already know and love the classical theater, and foment the interest and curiosity of those who wish to further deepen their knowledge of the theater as a universal form of art.

ADRIANI TEATRO is a theatre company born in Italy in 1992 by the artistic and drama director Arcangelo Adriani and the actress and choreographer Alessandra Abis. While organizing events which promote arts, the company focuses on being an international pole of attraction and an answer to anyone charmed by the world of stage. Arcangelo and Alessandra, together with other professionals of the company, specialize in Ancient Greek and Roman comic Theatre and Italian Comedy of The Arts. They utilize their expertise on traditional theatre to look for new forms of theatre. They consider the stage an empty space. They believe that an artist can fill it with his own personality. The mask instrument can help the artist discover new aspects of his own personality, in order to always present new forms on stage. Adriani Teatro’s mission is to communicate this instrument to anyone interested in understanding more about theatre. This line of thought gives them the opportunity to utilize any kind of space for their performances, because any site can be a stage.

Dr. Arcangelo Adriani, co-founder of Adriani Teatro

The Adriani Teatro has directed and organized many cultural events such as “The Theatrical Season of Bitonto Community Center”, the prose review “Theatre & Stars”, the “Medieval Fair of Saint Leo” in the historical centre of the city of Bitonto, the “Great Opening of Umberto I, alias Tommaso Traetta, Theatre”, Bitonto Community Theatre of XIX century, the National Festival of Philosophy on Stage “Philosophizing”, the International Festival of Women on Stage “Talking Mirrors” and finally the National Festival of School.

Mata Hari, Frida Khalo, Anne Frank, Clytemnestra: women who defied death. Indeed life.
The stories of some women come to us to tell us their wish dream to be part in the history, starting from the mirage of immortality and passing trough different trails. These women want show us that the desire of every human been “to live beyond death” involves very high compromises, pains, lies and losses.
Some actresses through the art of monologue go back over the same past of these women. They attempt to arrive at the meeting with the character to shake hands with her. Or, maybe like in a mirror, to meet themselves.

“Talking Mirrors” is an International Festival produced by Adriani Teatro with the Artistic Direction of Arcangelo Adriani. This cultural event wants to be a voyage to the discovery of female’s sensibility through theatre, focusing the real or presumed life of immortals and mysterious women of Human History.
The Festival was born in 2005 in Apulia – Italy and was collected a great success with the audience and critics. Many prestigious performances have been presented in four editions of this cultural event. Most of them were original and international female productions.

“Philosophizing” is a Festival of Philosophy on Stage produced by Adriani Teatro with the Artistic Direction of Arcangelo Adriani. The Festival, was born in 2006 in Italy. The cultural event wants to be a reflection on some philosophical issues related to questions of ethics and coexistence in a community and urban space. Through the bare logic of words and its development in a speech, this festival aims to involve audience by stimulating a discussion through comparison with authors, texts and artists involved in theatrical performances. The project includes “The Learning Dialogues,” a series of classes, lectures and meetings on some philosophical issues related to theatrical action and some aspects of ancient and modern thought. Some experts, using dialogue form, stimulate audience to create ethical awareness about active participation and about citizenship and dialogue education.

“School Theater”:: Theatrical activities in the school have a positive educational and social value and represent an extraordinary opportunity for youngsters to cultural and human growth. Stage@School is a competition for schools of any grade selected in all over the country. The Festival aims to train young theater audiences, offering the chance to meet each other and exchange cultural experiences. All schools in competition can also share a great opportunity for an artistic experimentation. Theater for school and school for theater and community.  From 2004 to 2008 there were five editions of this cultural event. The Festival happened in the nineteenth-century Community Theatre “T. Traetta” of the city of Bitonto  with an extraordinary contribution of 12,500 spectators. A qualified jury composed of actors, directors, teachers experts in theatre and critics have provided prizes money for Euro 13.000 and various art awards. The cultural event gave an opportunity to participate to 82 schools from all of the country, involving more than 3,000 students and teachers. During the festival there were 87 performances including comedies, fairy-tales, tragedies, musicals and dance show.

“Productions”: ADRIANI TEATRO performs in any kind of space and situation. They like to produce performances strictly pertinent to what is the occasion, choosing the theme of the play, of the monologue or of the event (eg. Harlequin’s improvisations, Aristophane’s and Plauto’s comedies, Socrates’s philosophical questions, Anna Frank’s storytelling). This type of work helps them feel, every single time, the theatrical text as new and allows them to make it “alive” on stage. Or in any empty space.

“Socrates’s Apology”: Once I went to the theatre to see the Academy Award actor Roberto Benigni. He ended his performance surprisingly, by acting the final part of Socrates Apology. The italian actor and director, well –known for his being so ironic and revolutionary, said in that occasion that he thinks to Socrates as the greatest maestro in human history, together with Jesus Christ. In the beginning the comparison seemed to me blasphemous, but then I began to think about that. Actually Socrates and Jesus were both prosecuted for their speeches and their words because they said deep truths about human life. Their words were more powerful than weapons: words can strike fear. Both Jesus and Socrates were convicted and killed for the same reason. With death they could not speak anymore. Their voices were supposed to be quiet forever. Moreover Socrates can be associated with Jesus because both of them chose to die instead of being silent for the rest of their life. They could save themselves. But they didn’t. Their choice was an act of revolution. Socrates had to sacrifice his own life in order to let his philosophy changing the world. His death was the Example, necessary to change . Something had to happen in his own life in order to let something happens in the world’s life. Apology is Socrates last performance. Time to take off the mask and tell the Truth. So I thought to a blasphemous comparison: like Socrates the actor goes on stage.The audience is the judge of the actor’s destiny. And of Socrates life, of course. Are you ready to be part of the jury?

The piece Harlequin The Flying Doctor, by the author & director Arcangelo Adriani, was born as a development of a scenario about sixteenth century by Domenico Biancolelli, one of the most famous Harlequin in the world of theatre, mix with the Moliere’s comedy of the same French name “Arlequin le Medicin Volant”. Actors play the text on a scenario with a fixed text and some points in which they act “all’improvviso”, (this is one of the most important characteristic of Comedy of the Arts). They create a sketch on the moment, depending on humor and reactions of the audience. The performance contains the most famous North Italian Masks or fixed types of Comedy of the Arts: the two young lovers Ottavio and Isabella, the miser old man Pantalone, the clever servant or first zanni Trivellino, and the naive servant or second zanni Harlequin. As in Plauto’s comedies, in this piece the protagonist is a servant, Harlequin, (in the Braggart Soldier of Plauto the protagonist was the servant Palestrione) who most times somebody makes a full, but sometimes he makes a fool of somebody. This character is different from the Plauto’s servant because he doesn’t plot to make fun of somebody, but the joke originates suddenly, and it is necessary only to eliminate an obstacle, with many comic results. Therefore Harlequin seems to anticipate the comic characters of the last century as Charlie Chaplin and of the contemporary theatre as Jerry Lewis. Every performance of Comedy of the Art is different because it really depends on the relationship between masks and audience. Usually the results for both are astonishing.

“What about Mati Hari:

“Among thousands of daisies, is a beautiful orchid”. This is the first verse of a naïve poem a girlfriend wrote for Margaretha Zelle, a normal Dutch little girl. Years after Margaretha will blossom under the name of Mata Hari, which in JAVANESE means “The eye of Dawn”. The DIVINE. Why Mata Hari? Why did I choose Mata Hari instead of any innocent heroine who sacrificed her life for the Country? Because the role of the Divine – from Eleonora Duse to Greta Garbo, from Maria Callas to Marilyn Monroe, has always seemed to be uncomfortable yet charming, negative yet enviable, trouble some yet mysterious. What is the secret to be born or to become Divine? Perhaps all these women from Circe on through the centuries, have handed down the secret recipe to one another of a potion that would enable them to shine like stars allowing them to charm the world. Or maybe, they became immortal at the price of compromises, sacrifices, slanders and great isolation. What lies the truth? The story of Mata Hari is EMBLEMATIC because she was sentenced as guilty, being the charge based exclusively on her moral conduct. They considered crimes Mata Hari’s love affairs with Army officers and politicians of that time. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to believe in Mata Hari’s innocence: she was the Indian dancer who conquered Paris and Europe unveiling her nude body with cimbali music. She also became the lover of some of the most important men, responsible for the destiny of First World War. It is absolutely difficult, actually impossible, to believe that she wasn’t a spy, because she had always cleverly lied about her origins and her art of dancing. And yet if one day I had the chance to meet her, in a meadow or on a stage, I would never ask her about the secret potion or the truth about her spy story. Because I already know she would answer: “I am not guilty”. And I would believe her because I’m sure that on that morning of October 15th 1917, at dawn, in front of twelve armed soldiers, there was not the Divine Mata Hari, but only a pure white innocent woman named Margaretha, which in English means “daisy”.

“Miles Gloriosus”

We chose Miles Gloriosus, among twenty-one comedies of Plauto’s production, because this play is one of the most comic (the second scene of action II is brilliant: the old man Periplectòmeno makes a live television report of what the servant Palestrione mimes on stage), and one of the most complete for its human characters; actually it contains all the fixed types or masks of the fabula palliata: the braggart soldier , the clever servant, the parasite, the naive old man , the stupid and rough servant , the young man in love , the cook, the false virgo, the meretrix and her servant, and at last, the puer or little servant, and the lorario or slave driver. Alessandra Abis reproduced masks in polychrome latex representing the fixed types of Plauto’s comedy. The masks are reproductions of IV century B.C. Lipari’s terrecotte (Sicily). They represent, in their kind, the richest existing collection in the world of types of Nea Greek Comedy from which Plauto got the idea (sees the Pollux’s catalogue of comic masks of II century A.C. in Pollux, Onomasticòn IV, 143-145). These masks allowed us to work as presumably ancients actors: a few actors for more roles, with immediate change of mask and costume. In antiquity only men could act on stage. Masks helped us to cancel the actor’s identity and to point out the comic type played by the actor. Using masks men and women can act in different male and female roles. The translation of the text tries to maintain, from Latin to English all the vivacity of Plauto’s language without vulgarities. Everything brings to a comedy full of rhythm making the audience laugh and have fun without knowing the reason.

“Curcullo”

“Curculio” was composed and represented from Tito Maccio Plauto between the 193 and 191 B.C. The title of the comedy (whose action is in Epidauro) is given from the name of the protagonist, parasite Curculio, which in Latin means a worm rodent of wheat. Even if it is a short comedy, Curculio contains many of fixed human types of the fabula palliata: the young man in love with the honest virgo who is slave of a lenox, the drunk old woman thirsty of wine, the clever servant, the parasite ready for anything, the old man lenòx, the braggart soldier. In this play you can find also all conventional tòpoi of Greek comedy: the theme of deception (false letter and disguise), the arbitration, the final recognition and wedding. Curculio, on the other hand, introduces some spectacular elements of great importance: the famous serenade to the latches made from the young lover Fèdromo in front of the house of his lover, the arrival from Caria of the parasite Curculio with his comic report and at last, the monologue of the choràgus or props, greatest example of metatheatre in Plauto. Alessandra Abis reproduced masks in polychrome latex representing the fixed types of Plauto’s comedy. The masks are reproductions of IV Cen. B.C. Lipari’s terrecotte (Sicily). They represent, in their kind, the richest existing collection in the world of types of Nea Greek Comedy from which Plauto got the idea (ref.: Pollux’s catalogue of comic mask of II century A.C. in Pollux, Onomasticòn IV, 143-145). These masks allowed us to work as presumably ancients actors: a few actors for more roles, with immediate change of mask and costume. In the antiquity only men could act on stage. Masks helped us to cancel the actor’s identity and to point out the comic type played by the actor. Using masks men and women can act in different masculine and feminine roles.

“Hide & Seek: The Diary of Anna Frank”

Anna is thirteen years old and she receives a diary as a birthday gift. Anna writes about her passions: movie stars, world tree of royal families, mythology. Anna rambles a lot, she likes history and hates algebra. Many friend and boring admires are about her, but she hasn’t “her bosom buddy”, because in the end – she writes - youth is more lonely than old age”. Anna thinks that she is lucky because she has a secret hideout where she can grow and play. It is a place in which she can discover life through small things narrow spaces. In her secret hideout Anna falls in love, she disguises herself, she dances alone in front of the mirror, she writes fairy-tales and, above all, she dreams. She dreams to become a famous journalist or writer: “will I be able to write something of great success?”. Anna is an adolescent who will reach her dream during an extraordinary moment of History, in which it was impossible to be youth and to have ideals. She writes: “On this age it is very difficult to have ideals. Dreams and beautiful expectations born and in a moment they are already destroyed […] by cruel truth. It is very strange I didn’t forget all my dreams because they seem absurd and pipe dreams. But I hold them tight, regardless, because I still believe to the intimate goodness of human beings”. Anna Frank is a Jewish child who will become one woman. One young woman who will become immortal dying in the lager of Bergen-Belsen on February 1945. But who is the real Anna? In the last page of her diary she writes about herself: “My spirit is like if it was divided in two parts. […]when I am with others the good Anne always lies ridden, when I’m alone she prevails on me.” The actress tries to stay alone with the real Anne. She tries to give life to our secrete desire: to be Anne just for a while. In this way we can understand how she does it, how she believed in the goodness of human being, how she loved life so strongly, even if the world was taking all away. Anne Frank thought “all will make right; this hardness of heart will end and quiet and peace will come back in our world”.

“My Frida”: Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon or, simply, Frida Kahlo.

Diego Rivera wrote about her: “Frida is the first woman in the history of the art to have explored women’s themes with absolute and inexorable frankness”. Never until then a woman was able to painting with so desperate poetry. Never until then was a woman perceive a so much strong desire to belong to a earth, the Ancient Mexico, to belong to a man, Diego Rivera his “fount-flower”. In Frida pain and art create an inseparable binomial. Leaving from her body “not sick”, but “broken” (because of a violent accident), Frida, meets painting with great anxiety. This encounter will be a communications medium between the artist and her own life, helping her to overcome her torments. Frida has the capacity for consider the consciousness of them self as a beauty, that is always on the move, in circle. “we are all in one and we conduct ourselves towards ourselves through million of human beings …… nobody is separate, nobody fights for himself….All is in one …… anguish and pain, pleasure and dead are not more than a process in order to live” Frida’s life and work are not full of tragedy . The darkness of her pain, physically unbearable, is the background of a wall that is illuminated of the wonderful light of its biological power. She fights for her life, she fights to not commit suicide, she fights to love herself and passes one life to watch herself to the mirror and to paint herself.Tortured from reliance on love, Frida is not a feminist heroin. Frida ….. as a baby ….. as a mother who feeds…. as a daughter never been born…. as a Tehuana Divinity….. as a Mexican …..….as an European …… as a woman who discovers herself ….. in the mean while she is fragility and myth.

“4 Mothers 4”

“4 Mothers 4” is a one woman play of English contemporary theatre, by Arnold Wesker’s “Four Portraits of Mothers” (1982). The actress Alessandra Abis plays four different feminine characters who are involved in a very difficult role: the “attempt” to be mothers. They tell us their stories story with four short monologues:

Deborah, woman as mother earth, 35 years.
Naomi, as mother who never was, 70 years.
Miriam, woman as failed mother, 45 years.

Ruth, woman as unmarried mother, 39 yearsThese characters inevitably ask us some questions: How can you be a “perfect” mother? What does it mean the word “mother”? A pièce that inquires on woman’s universe, on familiar dynamics, on multiple parts of a woman, often not recognized. Common places and old habits are melted in the live present of every woman. All is changed in women’s life, but all remains as it was. Yesterday like today and perhaps for eternity, always they have to do domestic and familiar jobs. The mother is only one: even if they are different for some aspects, today like one hundred years ago, mothers are ready to make everything all day and in the evening they are exhausted. But today there is more: what they make seems to turn out useless and not recognized from society. Therefore mothers must try to resolve their problems alone… “…therefore it has been all along… ” “….a world of men terrified from women…” “… a house that nobody wants to leave never …” “…sons! You’ll never win with them! …” “… I need you …..” Forever and ever.

“Lady Madness”

A game. A joke. An admirable comedy. This is life of every man on earth. As an actor, every man plays his role sailing endlessly among struggles, traps, defeats, illnesses, pains, destinations to reach. From a human being’s birth to death there is an unquestioned queen who dominates with her rules-no rules in the big game of life: she is Lady Madness. A great Divine. An immortal lady, brilliant, egocentric, spontaneous, and honest. A lady who can’t say lies. She charms us, she conquers us little mortals who make a mistake, trying always to control her. What a game would be so amusing, fascinating and wonderful without so a good friend? When I was younger and I had very often the presumption to feel so “different” from others. I felt enable to face up the difficult path I chose by myself. In these difficult moments I convinced myself to be crazy. I remember that my mother (more crazy than me only for the reason that she gave me birth) answers me this way: “What does it matter if you think to be crazy because you feel so different”? I read a plaque in front of a mental hospital’s gate which said a great truth: “MOST ARE OUTSIDE”. All crazy, therefore: outside from lines, outside from outlines, outside from rules, in order to meet our timeless friend: Lady Madness. Will you be brave enough to face up her and to listen anything she has to say us? I beg your pardon if I dived in my first direction, but I invite you to remember that I’m crazy and above all I am a woman.

“Socrates’ Last Temptation”

Will the art of rhapsode be the art of military generals? Socrates discusses with Ion the question of whether the rhapsode, a professional performer of poetry, gives his performance on account of his skill and knowledge or by virtue of divine possession.

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3

The Return of Positivism and its Crisis
An Introduction to a Presentation by Ernesto Paolozzi 

It is almost useless to remember that every periodization is relative, devoid of real correspondences with the epochs one analyzes. In order for them to be enunciated, for if they are not enunciated one cannot even speak of history, it is necessary to choose a point of view considered the most faithful to reality but that remains above all meaningful within the totality of the interpretation one wishes to offer to the reader. Keeping this in mind we will hold on to the principle which we have held and enunciated up to now; that of essentially paying particular attention to the mass dissemination and propagation of the theories and the doctrines which we are examining.

As it is rather obvious, the dissemination and propagation of ideas and opinions, always come after the original springs of inspiration from which they derive, and they are not necessarily connected with each other, as it may seem from the outlines utilized in summaries, anthologies and scholastic essays. In between these creative fountainheads and the performance of those new ideas there is the entire journey of human history, with its political and social struggles, its scientific discoveries, its affective and moral passions, its economic rivalries, within  a tangled articulated complex of factors which cannot be untied except through arbitrary and convenient choices.

Therefore a point of view is always partial, and for various reasons: because it refers to the history of culture, to philosophy and aesthetics in particular. But we can assume that, even via particular points of view, we can arrive at useful albeit generalized interpretations. This is an assumption which, paradoxically, is founded on a fundamental theoretical act of humility: the consciousness that one cannot discuss anything from a purely general viewpoint, because when one thinks about it carefully, this same preposition “general viewpoint” is contradictory. A particular perspective is never general, but always particular, and there is nobody, except for God, that can look at the world not from a particular but from an absolute position. (To be continued in the next session of the Symposium).

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4

Michael Vena’s Pedagogicai Book on Luigi Chiarelli’s Play
“La maschera e il volto”: a review

Luigi Chiarelli’s La maschera e il volto
edited by Michael Vena (1975) 

Editor Vena, Professor of Italian at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, has already established a solid record of publication on the Italian grotesque theater which makes him an ideal scholar to prepare a pedagogical edition of Chiarelli's play written in this literary tradition. The present publication has a two-fold purpose. On the one hand, "... it is intended to expose the student to the practice of spoken and written language, through vocabulary building and manageable sentenced structures commonly used by Italians" (vii). On the other hand, this well-known literary work with its intellectual stimulation and its satiric format, is the first Italian grotesque play to be edited in English. While always recognized as an important playwright in his time, there has been a resurgence of critical interest in Chiarelli's dramatic works in recent times.
 
Born at Trani (Bari) on July 7, 1880, Chiarelli received his secondary education in Rome. The untimely death of his father, however, precluded university studies. His interest in writing and literature began early (1895) and continued until his death in Rome on December 20, 1947. Vena states, correctly, that "Chiarelli was an innovator and he knew it". In fact, the author breaks with the conventional bourgeois dramatic models of the nineteenth-century, which had become stale with the exception, of course, of the very special works of D'Annunzio and Verga.

Considered to be his masterpiece, Chiarelli's three-act play La maschera e il volto (The Mask and the Face) was written in the summer of 1913. This drama is a brilliant satire of the prevailing attitudes toward marital infidelity in which the husband feigns his spouse's death to avenge his honor. Thereafter, a bizarre series of fantastic and ironic misadventures ensues. In many ways, there is an obvious affinity between Chiarelli's dramatic art and that of his better known compatriot Luigi Pirandello.

Vena argues convincingly that this play is a brilliant example of the grotesque movement in theater. The editor describes this movement as "... a genre of theatre wherein the passions and tragedies of life are mechanically simplified and shockingly distorted. The grotesque incorporates positivistic disenchantment, social criticism, and an unusual concept of ethics which denies traditional values and leans toward a relativistic philosophy".

Professor Vena utilizes a familiar and pedagogically sound format for his edition of Chiarelli's play with footnotes and right marginal notes for the English translation of unfamiliar words for the target intermediate-level Italian student. This edited volume contains the three-act play proper, a series of exercises, and a vocabulary section. Vena has produced an excellent and didactically effective edition of this theatrical piece. Moreover, it is a dramatic work that will interest contemporary students because of its irony, its philosophical underpinnings, and its iconoclastic and avant-garde content. Instructors will appreciate Vena's deft but unobtrusive scholarly intervention through his notes and selectively appropriate use of marginal glosses in the text. Likewise, the exercises, which cover each of the three acts of the play, cover its content, and they are sufficiently varied and engaging to maintain student interest. Finally, the activities are formulated so that students who do them properly will demonstrate their comprehension and mastery of the text. This edited volume would be an excellent choice for an entertaining way to develop reading skills at the intermediate level of the Italian curriculum.
 
Frank Nuessel, University of Louisville

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5

A Warm Welcome from the Ovi Symposium to Professor Maria Buccolo

We’d like to take this opportunity to formally welcome Professor Maria Buccolo as a regular contributor to the Ovi symposium. She is the sixth scholar to join the Symposium since its birth some eight months ago. She will endeavor to furnish us with a more thorough understanding of the nature and definition of the theater while bringing to the table some innovative and challenging ideas on the theater conceived as a pedagogical tool and a bridge between the scientific and the humanistic worlds for the achievement of peace and the building of a new humanism; all in collaboration with Alessandra Abis who has also joined the Symposium recently.  We look forward to a very fruitful collaboration. Under Professor Buccolo’s  photo we have included, for the readers’ information, a brief bio derived from a  list of  accomplishments within the theater, too long to mention in its entirety here. We are honored to have her join the symposium’s conversations as a colleague and a co-worker and we enthusiastically welcome her aboard. To say it with Federico Fellini: “E la nave va.”

Professor Maria Buccolo

Professor Maria Buccolo teaches and researches theater at the University of “Roma Tre” in Rome. She is a graduate of the University of Bari and has participated in various projects aiming at establishing cultural bridges among nations and people among which the Project for the Integration of Immigrants via the theater “Leonardo da Vinci Transfert Multilaterale dell’Innovazione” as organized at the University of Florence and to which have participated four nations of the EU: France, Italy. Belgium, and Rumania. She has done research on the methodology of the entrepreneurial theater. She has collaborated with Theatre a la Carte of Paris for its dissemination at the International level. She is also editor of the publication “Una scena tra l’altra” as well as researcher for the interdisciplinary project of Unesco for human development aiming at a culture of peace, also a project of the University of Florence. She is a member of the International Association of Drama/Theater/Education, also author of the books La formazione va in scena (La Terza, 2008), L’educazione emotiva nell’infanzia (Franco Angeli, 2013), Teatro e Formazione with S. Mongili and E. Tonon (Franco Angeli 2012),  Manuale per Form-attori con S. Mongili and E. Napolitano (Dino Audino, 2013).

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END  OF 20TH SESSION OF THE  OVI  SYMPOSIUM (27/02/2014)

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