Acting Fosse: Italian experimentation

Abstract

How should one act Fosse? This article will explore such a theme analyzing the work of Valerio Binasco and Vanda Monaco Westerståhl. Binasco has staged four works by Fosse, occasionally also participating as an actor. His productions are very awake to the essential eloquence of space and the rhythms of time, of which the actor is architect. In his drive to restore poetry to any and all life, the actor seeks the “vital rhythm of the character”, beyond the confines of psychology and judgement, as if in a continued close-up and an intensely musical game. Vanda Monaco, who with her translations contributed greatly to the Italian awareness of Fosse, has worked particularly on I Am the Wind. She has a “physical approach to the text”: a meticulous study into the words and sounds, the emotions and images that this coming together triggers, so as to arrive at a character. Paradoxically, lending characters humanity through the mask of a seventeenth-century Pulcinella who, freed from stereotypes, is quantified by the body of a contemporary actor and the words of a great author.