Theatre presentation: Italian futurism and the theatre Itself

Extract

[...] This is a great example of that Futurist theatre which embodies element compressed into a few minutes into words and gestures, sensibilities, ideas, and sensations. Another technique that Futurist often used was the idea of audience participation. In Dalla finestra (From the Window), written by 2 other Futurist writers, Corra and Settimelli, the spectators themselves are listed among the characters. At the beginning of this play the audience is told that: All the spectators are characters and protagonists, who in order to understand the play they must try to imagine that they are paralyzed and cannot move of speak, with only their intelligence, imprisoned in the flesh, left alive and unclouded, that they are in a bed next to a window, with [...]

[...] Also a good thing to mention is that Canguillo toured Italy with Marinetti (and also a man named Rudolfo DeAngelis) as part of the Theatre of Surprise Company and as part of DeAngelis's New Futurist Theater, two of the most visible Futurist theatrical companies in the later years of the movement. Marinetti died in December 1944 but the originality of his work and the enormous influence it had on the development of theatre (as well as music, painting, sculpture, dance, and cinema) were not recognized for many years, owing to his Fascist sympathies during and well after WWI. [...]

[...] Theatre presentation: Italian futurism and the theatre Itself The futurist movement in theatre began around 1909 with Flippo Marrinetti's publication of the first Futurist Manifesto. Francesco Cangiullo, born in Naples in 1888. He was a poet playwright, theorist, and visual artist wrote several Futurist sintesi (which is a very short play). In 1914 he wrote a parole in liberta (words in freedom) which was the first Futurist play to expand upon the aesthetic Marinetti proposed in this “Variety Theater Manifesto” in 1913. [...]