Pinocchio: What Is a Person?

The work of redefining identities through the instrument of Art, the centrality of the person and their fragilities, are the principles underpinning the pedagogy of the Elementary School of Theatre, a popular conservatory for the performing arts. Pinocchio and the entire symbolic ensemble of the tale seem to embody all the characteristics of an incomprehensible, misunderstood adolescence, whose torment—at times joyously furious, at times dark and irredeemable—reflects a society of adults reduced to caricature or ruin. Pinocchio is the different one, he is all the different ones, with their anarchic and disruptive charge, but he is also the wood ‘raped’ as Bene used to say, by the perversion ‘of the image and likeness’ I would add of a Father, of a whole normalizing Society for which the concept of Person has rigid, conventional, bourgeois standards. Pinocchio, in an early draft, ended with the puppet being hanged, as if to mark an impossibility of escape, later corrected by Collodi with a definitive, conciliatory, benevolent transformation into a child, into a Person. Yes, but what is a Person? Dates: - Saturday 06 February at 20:30 - Sunday 07 February at 16:30