QUARTIERI DI VITA 2021: FRAGILITIES AND PERFORMING ARTS IN NEUROSCIENCE AND HUMANITIES

Abstract

Social theater offers the opportunity to transform fragilities into artistic performances through relationships and direct involvement in playful and bodily practices.

In December 2021, Quartieri di vita, the International Training and Social Theater Festival organized by Fondazione Campania dei Festival, involved seven socially fragile groups operating in the Campania Region.

The dialogue between humanities, neurosciences, and theatrical cultures brings out how, embodying arts, fragilities resulting from wounds can be transformed into a gift for others. Through scenic relationships, traumatic and painful experiences become hard-fought, intense life histories, opportunities to develop positive emotions, care, and support. Studies on embodied simulation confirm that it is the sharing of the same bodily state between observer and observed that allows a direct form of understanding, which we could call 'empathic'. Through mirroring, in others’ eyes, fragility, art and beauty intertwine and multiply by embracing an inclusive vision.