Theatre History Studies

This article examines the work of Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890–1960), a theatre and film director, stage manager, militant critic, and theorist of theatre, dance, and cinema. During the 1920s, Bragaglia set out to reform the status of actor-dancers, making this interdisciplinary role central to a wider project of "theatrical theatre" and the re-theatricalization of theatre on both the stage and the written page, ideally in connection with figures such as Vsevolod Mejerchol'd, Georg Fuchs, Edward Gordon Craig, and Adolphe Appia.¹

To pursue this project, Anton Giulio Bragaglia focused on two distinct but complementary levels, conceived and practiced as an organic whole: set design/scenography and the human body. The first level has been quite thoroughly investigated by theatre studies, but to date the second has received much less attention. This article focuses specifically on Bragaglia's reflections on and practices surrounding the action of the human body "in a representative situation."² Bragaglia was a fervent supporter of Fascism, and I aim to demonstrate that, in the very decade in which the Fascist regime was consolidating power, he imagined a performing body that overcame the division between "theatre" and "dance." At the same time, this body he envisioned was both subjugated to and incompatible with the regime, in that it was substantially incoercible, laying outside of univocal classifications of theatre versus dance. He also theorized this body on the basis of a direct engagement with the concrete practice of theatre and its needs, including his own keenly felt need to be recognized as Fascism's most representative theatrical artist. [End Page 126]

To capture the connotations of this complex dancer-actor body, I analyze three volumes by Bragaglia, La maschera mobile (The Mobile Mask, 1926), Scultura vivente (Living Sculpture, 1928), and Jazz Band (1929), and position them in relation to their theatrical and political contexts.³ As will be discussed below, these volumes focus almost exclusively on dance: this reflects not only my choice to valorize Bragaglia's thoughts on dance but also Bragaglia's own approach to theatre as a whole. In fact, to re-theatricalize the Italian theatre of his time, which he considered excessively centered on the dramatic text, Bragaglia looked to the dancing body as a primary source of inspiration. Dancers (and in particular modern dancers) could inhabit the stage and develop their poetic language without resorting to the spoken word; in Bragaglia's view, this offered an enormous range of possibilities to renovate Italian theatre from its foundations, through the search for a performing body capable of "speaking" without words. As we will see, this project was both groundbreaking and deeply rooted in Italian theatrical history.

In addition to offering an opportunity to delve into Bragaglia's work, these books provide a glimpse into 1920s theatre and society and, as such, inevitably interact with the narratives produced around Fascism thus far. Insofar as these books were born out of close engagement with the practical needs of theatre, they allow us to consider the conditions under which theatre was produced in the Fascist period and how it interacted with the regime in terms of financing and aesthetic conditioning. Antonio Gramsci has argued that "the practical organization of the theatre as a whole is a means of artistic expression" and, if this is true, we must ask ourselves what these volumes demonstrate about the languages and power dynamics operating in the theatre of the time.⁴ They are an example of writing by a man "trusted" by Fascism, a man who, perhaps even unconsciously, propagated an idea of corporeality that is at least partially incompatible with the principles underlying both the regime's complex of "rites, myths and symbols" and, as I will show, the field of dance as well.⁵ This contradiction lends new depth to the study of this controversial historical moment and of the aesthetics and collective performances that dominated Fascist life in both theatrical (mass theatre) and social arenas (rallies, liturgies, sport celebrations, etc.). It conveys a sense of the fluidity of theatrical life, a fluidity that eschews...