Theatre
A Psychogeographical Voyage Through the Cities and their Theatremakers
“The city is a discourse, and this discourse is actually a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak to our city, the city where we are, simply by inhabiting it, by traversing it, by looking at it.” Roland Barthes, Semiology and Urban Planning
If we consider the artistic act alone, to what extent does it affect the city and how much does the city affect the artistic act? “Hugo has written a very fine chapter of an extremely subtle intelligence, ‘This will kill that’; ‘this’, which is to say the book, ‘that’, which is to say the monument.”
Psychogeography is essential to understanding the spiritual relationship between the city and its inhabitants. The most famous definition of psychogeography is: “the point at which psychology and geography collide, a means of exploring the behavioural impact on the urban space.” The behavioural impact on the urban space, however, may also be approached in a spiritual way. Indeed, psychogeography is related to the research of the genius loci, which is the spiritual sense of the place as perceived by one subject. In an artistic context, the research of the genius loci leads to the elimination of any boundary between art and urban space, so that every artistic act and any other person’s behaviour leave a trace in the spiritual stratifications of the city. Psychogeography is popular for its tracing maps which follow the spirit of the place as perceived by one subject, who is always a wanderer, rather than representing how the city physically appears. The first psychogeographical map is considered to be contained in Daniel Defoe’s novel A Journal of the Plague Year (1772) which depicts London through a fictitious eyewitness of the plague that infected the city in 1665, imaging how the urban signs became unrecognisable to its very inhabitants, providing a map of this disorientation. According to psychogeography, each urban element has in itself this stratification of spiritual and virtual meanings that any subject leaves by living in the city. Both the psychogeographical and linguistic study accept that there is a mutual influence between the people and the city.
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Let us now take into account The Roman amphitheatre built around the 1st or 2nd Century BC in Lucca, a city located in Tuscany. Originally the amphitheatre was built outside the city as it was common during the Roman era and its capacity was about ten thousand people. The first account of change of the function of the building happened with the barbaric invasions when the theatre was employed as a storehouse and its decorations were removed. Under a semiological point of view we can see how the advent of a new cultural code, the primal function of the theatre (capacity of people) was substituted with another primal function (capacity of goods) and the elimination of the decorations that connoted the entertaining, cultural and social aspect of the space was deformed through their removal, adapting to the new function and code. The function of the amphitheatre changed again during the Middle Ages, when it was employed for the citizen assembly as witnessed by a parchment dated back to 980 BC. In modern times, buildings started to rise around the central empty space, originating the sui generis town centre that maintains the elliptical shape of the original theatre whose walls are still visible as they merged with more recent buildings. If a theatrical space can become the city, can the city materially become the theatrical space beyond the metaphor of Theatrum Mundi? How can theatre-makers detach themselves from the cultural code they belong to in order to look at the urban space, beyond its denoted signifiers, and conceive new ones for theatrical purposes? The artist, in particular the theatre-maker, can detach themselves from their cultural code and look at a given architectural element beyond denoted and connoted signifieds, and therefore contribute to the evolution of the code.
