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A year after its debut at the Teatro Strehler, a successful run at the 2017 Avignon Festival, and an international tour, Emma Dante's Bestie di scena (Stage Beasts) returned to Milan. Co-produced by the Piccolo Teatro, Atto Unico/Compagnia Sud Costa Occidentale, Palermo's Teatro Biondo, and the Festival d'Avignon, the play was conceived by Dante, devised with former students of the Teatro Biondo's Scuola dei Mestieri dello Spettacolo (School for the-Performing Arts), and directed by her and members of Sud Costa Occidentale, Dante's Palermo-based theatre company. For a Dante scholar, Bestie di scena was a fascinatingly self-referential play in which clear echoes of past productions emerged through gestures and props, giving them a new metatheatrical dimension. Yet, at the heart of Bestie di scena was a continuation of Dante's investigation of the relationship between actors and audiences.
A postdramatic, physical tour de force, this seventy-five-minute performance had no plot, no dialogue, and no conventional characters, set, or costumes. While it toyed with spellbinding lighting and a variety of diegetic sounds, the play used no prerecorded music beyond a few bars from the Platters' Only You. Instead, the piece was comprised of a series of collaged, largely unrelated sequences. External forces initiated the causally linked dramatic action within each of these sequences. Reminiscent of the invisible powers lurking beyond the camera frame in Beckett's Act Without Words I, these backstage forces mimicked the generative process of improvisation-centric, leader-led collective creation as they...