Encyclopedia of Emotions

Davide Iodice, who for years with his Scuola Elementare del Teatro has worked with fragility and disability, leads an inclusive workshop of expression, relationship and individual and collective creation. The objective is to stimulate in participants the capacity to resonate with their own and others’ emotional spectrum, the quality of listening and the willingness to create non-stereotypical relational dynamics. The project L’enciclopedia delle emozioni was born in the immediate post-pandemic period, from the consideration that in the dystopian time we have fallen into, beyond the tragedy of real illness and death, we experienced that without the possibility of expression, without relationships, without social life, without beauty, homes can become the tombs of our identity. A city, a neighborhood, the whole country can become a tomb; a desert. The society emerging from the long pandemic period is convalescent, even more fragile and in need of help, disoriented in a true “postwar of the emotions.” It then felt, more than ever, urgent to recover the original cathartic power of theatre, its quality as Pharmacon, renewing it in contemporary terms; re-signifying the therapeutic and social function for which this art was born. It therefore seemed essential on the one hand to recode the performative, spectacular event as a device for participation and encounter with a community or social group, and on the other to put the theatrical artist back at the center of the process as a specialist of emotions and relationships, aspects that are central to overcoming trauma and to recomposing the psychological, relational and social fracture that resulted. L’enciclopedia delle emozioni, conceived with these premises, thus positions itself as a process of proximity, pedagogy and creation to be replicated in method and adjustable in its possible applications in different contexts and territories. The intensive workshop aims to stimulate in participants the capacity to resonate with their own and others’ emotional spectrum; to foster empathic ability and taking responsibility for the other; the quality of listening; the willingness to create non-stereotypical relational dynamics; and finally the autonomy to structure progressively emerged experiential material. The nature of the actor, the person of drama, the scenic score, the prop as ‘soul in an external form’, the MASK, are some of the thematic orientations of this total craft that opens to languages as well as to very diverse outcomes.