Psychophysical Dante for an Eternal Child

In this text, the author describes and analyzes a practical application of a psychophysical and performative approach to Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, which she conducted in autumn 2019, involving five third classes of the Francesco Redi scientific high school in Arezzo, Italy, for a total of 121 learners and 5 teachers of Italian Literature.

Her initial question, guiding the entire research, was how to propose Dante's poetry at school to 15-year-old students in a way that was relevant to them. Maggini has therefore created workshops in which to develop a less intellectual and more immediate approach of some lines of Inferno Canto I together with students and teachers, for a scenic rendering of the text. The students, first individually, then in pairs and in small groups, transferred their perceptions of the hendecasyllables into physical movements and actions, so as to compose poetic micro staging.

For this Maggini used specific activities taken from the work of various directors, including the Russian Konstantin Stanislavskij, to induce students to a physiological experience of vowels, consonants and words. Facilitating a real act of psychophysical creation, for the Russian director Michael Cechov, a pupil of Stanislavskij and the nephew of the writer Anton, means giving the actor full autonomy and responsibility to become the author of his own stage work.

For Chekhov, "Creating, in the true sense of the word, means discovering and showing new things". Therefore, the discovery becomes what the actor perceives and transforms within his own body-mind. Since the voice is part of the body, through the creation of a "living word", as in Stanislavski's psycho-physical approach, the author's words can be transmuted into an inner experience for the student-interpreter.

For the English director, Kristin Linklater "a voice in direct contact with emotional impulses, modeled by the intellect but not inhibited by it is the natural voice, ... An intrinsic attribute of the body ... A transparent voice, which, without describing them, it reveals inner impulses of emotion and thought, directly and spontaneously ".

A voice intended as an extension of the actor-student body for Checov is capable of expressing on stage the subtle creative intuitions evoked by poetic words and therefore capable of "transforming a literary creation into a theatrical work of art". The source of this transformative natural voice can be found in that part that Michael Checov calls "the eternal child", the part where self-confidence and absolute simplicity reside and which possesses an inner compass, genuine, intuitive, respectful of what is nourishing, beautiful, lasting and true.