Views from the island. Routes for a narrative of exile

Abstract

The space of the theater becomes a privileged place to observe, through new research paradigms, how reflections on precise social dynamics, such as the relationships between flight and return, can be developed through the study of artistic practices designed to produce those instances of reality capable of promoting new narratives and scenic perspectives. The relationship between theater and the dimension of travel will be observed in this article through three stage works: Davide Enia's L'abisso, Emma Dante's Esodo, and Turi Zinna's Una fuga in Egitto, which, although divergent in style, poetics and dramaturgy, are united by having traversed the theme of travel and migration starting from a South that, due to its contradictory identity and that natural theatricality of living, represents a stage of extremes that cross each other. For the three case studies, the search for frontier places through ethnographic experience, the interrogation of myth and transmedia narrative, testifies to the possibility of breaking the usual “paradigms of vision” (Moralli, Musarò, Paltrinieri, Parmiggiani 2019), triggering new narratives around the representational urgencies of contemporaneity.