Premise

“The theatre belongs to everyone; it is where we find answers, explore our limits and become participants within the community.”

M. Lupinelli

Starting from here…

Maurizio Lupinelli’s short quote perfectly describes the necessity and poetic impulse that inspired the founding of the Laboratorio Permanente, a socially inclusive cultural project with disabled people, active in Rosignano Marittimo (LI) since 2007 and in Ravenna since 2019.

The Laboratorio Permanente is structured as a long-term, complementary itinerary of workshops dedicated to small communities of people living with serious pathologies and severe marginalisation. Meetings are held on a regular basis, every month throughout the year. The Laboratorio focusses intensively to develop and expand the participants’ creativity, expressivity, new skills and knowledge within theatrical disciplines. Over the years, through this work, the participants have acquired and consolidated an ever-increasing relational and expressive capacity and autonomy and come to understand the stage as a safe space where they can participate without inhibition.

The project is also nourished by encounters with other artists and other working methodologies in a practice that we have defined as Crossings. The guiding idea is for the Laboratorio to be a junction where different professions, sensibilities, skills and generations intersect and are transformed into an open, poetic and communal building site, characterised by its broad outlook. Touring the shows produced within the Laboratorio Permanente is another important aspect of the project, bringing the world of disability, which is often concealed and private, and the world of theatrical performance, which by necessity is visible and public, into direct contact.

We are deeply aware of the artistic value of working with these special people who, through a wealth of expression that is usually hidden, inspire new forms of theatre and experimentation to germinate.

The Laboratorio Permanente in Rosignano M.

Active since 2007, the Laboratorio Permanente in Rosignano M was started and has grown thanks to the support of a number of local organisations including its host, Armunia; the Nuovo Futuro Social Cooperative in Rosignano M.; the Bassa Val di Cecina local health authority (ASL); and the Region of Tuscany, which has funded the project since 2012.

The workshop has about 20 participants between the ages of 25 and 50, with physical or mental disabilities who are part of the Nuovo Futuro Social Cooperative. Over the years, about 200 disabled people have been involved in Laboratorio Permanente’s activities, which are held in the rooms of Rosignano’s castle and are part of Armunia’s artistic residency programme.

Numerous shows created within the Laboratorio Permanente have been presented in national and international festivals and theatres: among these are Marat (2007), l’Amleto (Hamlet) (2009), Che cosa sono le nuvole (What are Clouds) (2012), Attraversamenti (Crossings) (2015), Sinfonia Beckettiana (2018) and- in collaboration with Abbondanza/Bertoni- Doppelgänger. Chi incontra il suo doppio muore, (Doppelgänger. He who meets his double dies) which won the Ubu Prize 2021 for Best Dance Performance, with the dancer Filippo Porro and Francesco Mastrocinque, renowned actor from the Laboratorio Permanente in Rosignano M, onstage together.

A new phase of research centred on the character of Pinocchio began in 2019 and will conclude with a staged performance in 2024. Approaching Pinocchio with disabled people is a great challenge, since the story presents numerous traps, often associated with the themes of diversity and pity. The Pinocchio story, with its countless nuances enfolded within a story that is still deeply relevant, can be read on many levels, and there are many points of departure when undertaking an investigation of this work: the sui generis physicality of the protagonist, the theme of lies, the relationship with the family and parents. The decision to also consider the story of Pinocchio through the distinct and original perspective of Giorgio Manganelli’s Pinocchio, a parallel book was made because it allows us to enter Collodi’s work with rare and extraordinary freedom, liberating the disabled actors of the Laboratorio Permanente to adhere to it less strictly and with literary inventions that are inclusive of an intrinsically, (and fortunately!) heterogeneous and composite group.

The Laboratorio Permanente THEATRE DIFFERENCE in Ravenna  

Activities began in 2019, thanks to the endorsement of the Municipality’s Department of Social Services, and have continued on a permanent basis since June 2021. The workshop is held within the spaces of the Novella Montantari Theatre and involves around 20 participants between the ages of 20 and 70 with physical or mental disabilities who frequent the three different local cooperatives, La Pieve, San Vitale and Selenia daily.

The workshop Theatre is Difference is a project of social inclusion through theatre modelled on Laboratorio Permanente’s experience in Tuscany since 2007. Hence, it is a working method that has been exported to a different territory from the one in which it originated, adapting specific characteristics of the project to new groups and local context. One common denominator of the two workshops is that they are not structured to be episodic, but are developed over time.

The initial phase of the programme was devoted to building a ‘common alphabet’, beginning with the themes of the body and perception (both of space and of others), engaging as a group in exercises and sequences and working up to more complex tasks, such as theatrical improvisations, which train the participants to author and convey new material, elaborated through their own personal inventiveness. On the strength of the acquired techniques, the group’s journey will culminate in 2023 with the staging of the play Marat/Sade, in which the assimilated practices and internalised exercises are consolidated and declined in dramaturgical function with respect to the text by Peter Weiss, from which the project draws its inspiration.

A special training programme has also been designed for the Ravenna group, comprising meetings with other artists, or Crossings; envisioning other works and encounters with other working methods as a source of growth, stimulation and integration.

Workshop calendar 2024

15>19 January Teatro Lo Zodiaco, Ravenna