In the current dehumanized and tragic realities shaping our society, many turn to art to use the felt anger, sadness or pain to create something which may help themselves, others, and the world. Performance artist Carlos Martiel is one of those who first started making art to help himself, then, with his raw and impactful works, he inevitably began to help others. This essay investigates Martiel’s work, focusing on the central role of the body as a catalyst for change in the context of performance art. By demonstrating how his artistic practice resembles nonviolent protests, the view of performance art as artistic activism is suggested, acknowledging how their effect, affect, and Æffect, is resonant.

The essay focuses on a cycle of very short pieces (one to two minutes) by Francesco Filidei for soprano solo on texts from Federico Maria Sardelli’s collection Proesie. During the lockdown, the composer created one musical Proesia per day; the singer Jeanne Crousaud performed them on video, taking care of a particular staging for each one, and posted them on Facebook. Through Sardelli’s ironic, surreal and often irreverent lyrics, Filidei intended to express through music the (emotionally variable) psychological impact of quarantine. Starting by highlighting some of the salient features of the composer’s musical writing - the sophisticated formal construction of these (only apparently disengaged) pieces, in which moment after moment the slight alterations of pitches and rhythmic values take on a gestural value - the essay will dwell on the particular qualities of the staging, curated by Crousaud in agreement with Filidei. Each video, in fact, involves an appropriate realisation, connected to the meaning of the literary text and the gestural implications of the music. Finally, it will be highlighted how the characteristics of extreme brevity and the playful-ironic aspects of these performances are particularly suited to the audiovisual medium of the social network.

The controversy that erupted following the accusation of cultural appropriation triggered between 2018 and 2019 by Robert Lepage’s plays SLĀV and Kanata is analysed in the Canadian context and in the political and cultural specificity of Quebec. Favouring the lens of Performances Studies, the polemic, as a symptom of a social malaise, is studied as a performance and reveals a scenario of embodied imaginaries within which to observe a crisis of the worldview built on the power relationship between a majority identity and minority otherness. The conflict between representation and presence within the living arts reveals the erosion of the mimetic paradigm of representation: it is the immanent body on the stage of the actor belonging to a historically oppressed minority that demands an ethics of representation

The paper addresses the performance Product of Circumstances (1999) by Xavier Le Roy, highlighting the particular corporeality that it conveys, promotes and theorizes. The work of the French choreographer is approached from an epistemological perspective and related to the “constructivist” corporeal episteme promoted by a part of contemporary dance. In conclusion, the article questions how revolutionary or not are the premises of Le Roy’s non-dance compared to the production system of contemporary dance.

Why did Carmelo Bene specifically choose Achilles as the last personality with which to confront himself? Is it possible to identify in the «progetto-ricerca Achilleide»? – a project that encompasses more than a decade of Bene’s opus – his testament? These are the questions that animate and direct the hereby study that attempts to carry out a global reconnaissance of the project, confronted by its intermedial nature. The primary subject of interest is Pentesilea. Ovvero della Vulnerabile invunerabilità e necrofilia in Achille, a text that represents Bene’s poetry debut. The object of analysis is not merely this specific literary work, but also the “pre-texts” which constitute its skeleton: Homer, Statius, Kleist. A rereading of these classics in the light of later Bene’s work, in an attempt to specify the reasons behind a choice. Therefore a reconstruction of the voicing of the text – that is already “aural poetry” by itself – is proposed, passing through various “moments” of the «progetto-ricerca», inspecting all the available reviews, critical texts, and testimonies. There is particular attention given to the «spettacolo-sconcerto» from the year 2000, last of Bene’s opus, a conclusive desertion from the scene in an encounter with the absolute musicality of silence.

The essay focuses on one of the fundamental points of Enzo Moscato’s literature (poetics of transsexualism) investigated through the creative process that generates the staging. In particular, the work of the director Francesco Saponaro about Ragazze sole con qualche esperienza (written by Moscato in 1985) is analyzed with special attention in observing the main characters as declinations of gender identity. A circular path that – starting from characters such as Bolero Film and Grand Hotel as staging by Saponaro in 2017 – analyzes the directorial / dramaturgical vision that conveys and mutates into a ‘scenic key’ the intrinsic paradigms of Enzo Moscato’s dramaturgy.

The current Italian landscape of performing arts shows the almost complete absence of a programmatically queer music theatre. Nevertheless, within this frame some recent experiences have been thematising LGBTQ+ ideas, characters and figures. In particular, in the present article I investigate La Traviata Norma (Conservatorio di Como, 2018, and Milano, Teatro Elfo Puccini, 2019) and Tredici Secondi, o Un bipede implume ma con unghie piatte (Venezia, Biennale College Musica, 2019). Direct voice is given to the composer Marco Benetti, the librettist Fabrizio Funari, and the transgender baritone Emily De Salve, who contributed to the creation of these two works. As a result, multiple perspectives emerge on how a queer gaze could be articulated in today’s music theater , also in light of the shared issue of constructing one’s own artistic persona within the cultural constraints of the operatic production system.