"Let's start Bene": to empty the subjetc and reject the representation in the theater

Abstract

Testing himself with Artaud’s project and realizing the thought of Gilles Deleuze, in the Italian theatre of the sixties appeared the phenomenon of the most controversial and unclassifiable actor, author and director of recent European theatre: Carmelo Bene. The prolific playwright ―born in 1937 in Salento (province of Lecce, Apulia) the heel of the Italian boot (“Il sud del Sud”), and died in 2002―, is known by most as an ambiguous and particularly eccentric character who prevailed against the traditional theatre and against the avant-garde itself. Still nowadays, eighteen years after his death, he continues to arouse high interest and doubts.

His theatre rejects the text, the word with all its signifieds that are reproduced thanks to the traditional representation (with all its agents: author, director, actor and audience). Bene rejects a conception of art that in Western theatre has stagnated, perpetuating imitation according to Aristotelian precepts, thus preventing free and liberating creation. According to Piergiorgio Giacché, Carmelo Bene is the only one who places his actorism above any other role and theatrical vocation (that is, beyond the author and against the director) and accepts the actor’s loneliness to celebrate his freedom and that of theatrical art. However, Carmelo Bene also acts the liberation in the theatre of the signifiers on which he imposes his voice with his modulations and amplifications, to disappear and “lose himself” in the artifice of the “Actorial Machine”.