<I>Il corpo dello spettatore. </I>Performance studies<I> e nuova teatrologia</I>

Abstract

It may seem trivial to say that theatrical relationships bring into play the body as well as the mind, the muscles as well as the thought, the senses as well as the nerves, imagination as well as emotion , and this goes both for the viewer and for the actor or performer. Theater people have always known this; on the contrary theatrical history and theory seem to have acknowledged it only recently. In fact, it is only in the course of the twentieth century that theatrical theory began to fully and explicitly take into account the bodily dimension of theatrical experience, thus overcoming the disembodied, logocentric paradigms in which it had been involved from Aristotle onwards.