Flowers for Inmates

Krysia Bednarek: What is the idea behind your GAD Festival in Ferrara?

Marco Luciano: GAD is the name of the neighbourhood where we launched the festival. Stretching around the train station, GAD is a crossing point, very multicultural and riven by conflicts, but it’s also the city’s precious melting pot. It’s home to workers and poor people, immigrants and lots of children. We’ve decided to host the festival there in the belief that art is an important tool for resolving issues and revealing beauty.

KB: How did you build your programme?

ML: The three letters, GAD, also form an acronym: G for generation, A for environment (ambiente in Italian) and D for dance. In recent years, these three topics have been important for the young generation in the city and for us, so we used them to provide a focus for festival events that were meant to respond to the needs of the neighbourhood. And for that, we invited artists not only from Ferrara and from across Italy but also from Sweden, Poland, Japan, India, Tunisia.

KB: How did the neighbours react?

ML: The festival ran for two weeks and during this period the audience grew. We started with 60 people per show and ended up with over 200 people attending the final performance. So, we think the neighbourhood responded very well to our offering. The interest of the residents also grew thanks to the many activities our group had organized leading up to the GAD Festival. We see the arts events we present as a series of precious moments during which we can build a relationship with the audience rather than something we impose on them as mere arts consumers.

KB: Did you use any special tools to attract people?

ML: Yes. For example, we held a photo exhibition in urban space. We rented billboards to showcase works of a photographer from Ferrara, Daniele Mantovani, who had taken photographic portraits of the inhabitants of the GAD district. The exhibition was titled ‘Brisa far cla faza’ — ‘Stop Making That Face’. We did it to show smiles that flew in the face of the prejudice surrounding the GAD district, which is often shunned by other residents of Ferrara because of its bad reputation. So, it was more than a strategy for involving the neighbourhood, it was a strategy for involving the city. Another important thing was that all the shows were free to the public. For one thing, it was because the festival was held in a working-class area, and for another, we believe in the right of all men and women to access art, beauty and culture, as stated in Article 9 of the Italian Constitution, even though this does not happen all too often for many different reasons. As artists, we feel a responsibility to create places and moments of beauty, which are accessible to as many people as possible, and we are committed to doing so.

KB: How do you want to evolve the festival after the first year?

ML: We want our festival to be a short-term rather than a life-long project, so we think of a three-year span. Next year we want to focus on three other topics: gesture, action and dramaturgy. And the following year — on gender, art and democracy. It is not our goal to create yet another festival in Italy — we have a lot of festivals here and across Europe. Rather, we’ll keep holding our festival until we have something to say about culture and politics.

KB: Why did you decide to invite international artists to such a local festival?

ML: On one hand, we have a cultural system, especially in Italian theatre, in which it’s rare to welcome artists from other parts of Europe. For us, it’s very important that groups can meet in order to provide fertile ground for growth and exchange. That’s why we invited artists from other countries as well as a lot of young groups and artists. Moreover, it’s very important for us to offer our audiences, even those who can’t afford institutional theatre tickets, the best we can in terms of artistic quality. We believe that acting locally can make a difference on a bigger scale because the drop carves the rock.

KB: And what were the needs of the community?

ML: The majority of GAD residents do not go to the theatre because it is too expensive or because the idea of going to the theatre is far removed from their everyday lives. Perhaps they do not think that theatre is important to them and that they are important to theatre. So, the first thing was to create an environment where they could feel at ease and welcome, where they were not forced to adapt a certain position. We started by organizing a laboratory for children. It opened a week before the festival started and ran until the festival’s end. Many children from the neighbourhood joined it. Their countries of origin perfectly reflected the diversity of the neighbourhood: two of them were originally from China, two from Nigeria, the other five from Palestine, Morocco, Afghanistan and Italy. Involving children, of course, means involving their parents too, because they’d come to pick them up and then they’d talk about the lab at home. We also organized two community lunches. Each family brought a traditional dish. Before the festival, we went from door to door delivering invitation letters that we had translated into seven languages. In this way we engaged people slowly but deeply. In Italy, we are at a point where we need to try different strategies to resist and fight against distrust, the fear of one another.

KB: Do you think art has the power to do that?

ML: I may be a dreamer, but I believe that art, especially live performance, is the only place that gives us the opportunity to do that. The theatre is the mother of the arts. We had this philosopher in Italy, Stefano Rodotà, who once said in an interview: ‘The theatre is the polis.’ Thanks to the theatre, which takes up the legacy of ritual and celebration and becomes a place par excellence, you can envision a democratic, inclusive, welfare-based etc. world where a community can recognize and represent itself; a place where a community can confront its dreams and fears, problems and achievements, and embrace them.

KB: Was the festival funded by the state?

ML: We got 10,000 euros from the region Emilia-Romagna and 5000 euros from the Municipality. Of course, it cost a lot more, something like 70,000 euros. We used money from other projects. From an economic point of view, it may sound like a failure, but we decided to do it anyway, because for us it’s important to stay on this territory in this way: we see the GAD Festival as an investment in our theatre practice and cultural heritage. The project also provides a nourishing artistic context for us and for the community that welcomes us.

KB: This brings us to the next subject — the theatre you do with inmates in prison. Is it a workshop or do you make full productions?

ML: Our project in prison is called the Permanent Laboratory of Theatre Creation. We work in the prison three times a week, 11 months a year, with a break in August. We do it this way, because we don’t believe in short-term projects. During the laboratory we rehearse for a show that we later present to the audience.

KB: Does the audience come from outside the facility?

ML: Yes, the audience comes from outside and pays for their tickets. Paying for a ticket to see a show in prison has a number of different meanings and benefits for us. It means collaborating on the project, being ‘complicit’ in an artistic project with criminals, but it also serves to offer the audience a relationship based on the awareness that what they’re going to see is the product of a professional process; of a journey that the prisoners, the project operators and all those working in the prison have undertaken with seriousness and dedication. The prisoners are hired and paid for the performance days under contracts for actors required by Italian law. For prisoners, entering into an employment contract with an external company is an important tool that can be very useful for their assessment process.

KB: What production are you working on now?

ML: It’s a piece inspired by Maeterlinck’s book The Intelligence of Flowers. It’s about flowers and defiance. But we don’t stage the text. We start from some suggestions — a poem, a song, some physical work. The text and the dramaturgy come from an exchange with the prisoners. Also because a lot of them don’t speak Italian. I would be stupid if I came with a text and told them: ‘learn this by heart’.

KB: How does theatre influence life in prison?

ML: I can say without a doubt that theatre, at least in our experience in Ferrara, has had a profound impact on daily life in prison. More than 30 inmates participate in our prison workshop in various ways — a significant number for a prison population of 400. Theatre transforms the relationships between guards and inmates, and links people in other ways (for example, guards help build or repair the sets that are being made in the workshop), change perspectives and certainly ease the tensions that are inevitable in such situations.

KB: Who is your audience?

ML: After 10 years, we’ve built a trusting audience who come regularly from all around. To engage people, we also organize Q&As between inmate-actors and students two or three times a year. After the Q&As, we encourage the students to write letters about the show they have seen and then we deliver these letters to inmate-actors, so they can answer them. We act as mediators in this correspondence.

KB: Have you been working with the same inmates throughout the years or is the group in flux?

ML: Some of the inmates who attend the theatre workshop stay with us for a few months, while others, with longer sentences for more serious crimes, stay with us for years. Some of them have been working with me for 7–8 years, so we can work very well and very deeply with them — they become important reference points for newcomers to the workshop in this long process, passing on the working methodology they have experimented with. Some of them are very good actors.

KB: In what way is the theatrical process with inmate-actors different from the regular one?

ML: Their motivation is different: they really look forward to rehearsals. They are more focused because they have no distractions. It may seem paradoxical, but theatre is a place of freedom, which needs freedom in order to exist. The quality of their presence during theatre work is excellent because their urge to exercise the muscle of freedom is extremely strong. Obviously, there are several limitations: you work with people who spend 10 hours a day sitting down. Months and months without the chance to really move, to run, to touch a flower or look at the stars. That’s why my theatre work must be very precise and rigorous and if something comes to my mind after rehearsal, I can’t just call them and tell them to read something. I have to wait a couple of days until we meet again. They could be transferred, get sick or break a leg and you wouldn’t know.

KB: How do you pick subjects for the plays?

ML: The Emilia Romagna Regional Coordination of Theatre in Prison picks a common topic to be developed over three years.

KB: What’s the story of the Coordination?

ML: It was set up in 2011 by some of the theatre companies working in prisons in the region. Today, eight theatre companies working in nine prisons are part of the Coordination: Teatro dei Venti in Modena, C.A.R.P.A. e Teatro Nucleo in Ferrara, Teatro del Pratello in Bologna, Ma.Mi.Mò in Reggio Emilia, Le Mani Parlanti in Parma, Contatto in Forlì and Eugenio Sideri in Ravenna. The Coordination has been very useful in building a more solid relationship with the institutions, in establishing a dialogue on the theatrical practices that each group carries out in its own context and, of course, in building an adequate financial base for the project.

KB: Italy is unique in Europe in having so many theatres in prisons. Why do you think the practice has developed so much in the country?

ML: In the mid-70s, there was this big cultural and political movement called democratic non-psychiatry, founded by Franco Basaglia, a very enlightened doctor. The movement wanted to close psychiatric hospitals, and in order to do that, its members involved many theatre companies and groups in the process of healing the patients, running theatre workshops and making shows in mental hospitals. In 1978, the Italian government finally closed mental hospitals. That was a big achievement, but now there’s a big problem with mentally ill people and drug users, who have to be kept in prisons. Responding to this, many theatre groups adopted the political agenda of fighting against the ‘Total Institutions’. Some of them began to work in prisons. Italy’s first theatre in prison was started in the 80s. Eventually, university professors started researching prison theatre, demonstrating that it significantly reduces the reoffending rate. Normally, it is around 80%, but for inmates engaged in theatre work it’s around 22%.

KB: Is the Italian government interested in developing the programme?

ML: Look, if the government invests one euro in a professional theatre-in-prison process, they actually save two euros. Our theatre in prison is founded by the municipality of Ferrara and the region, but last year the Italian Ministry of Justice created a fund specifically dedicated to theatre in prisons, 500,000 euros per year. It’s not a lot, but it’s something. But with government money come government questions.

KB: So, there’s more money but also more control.

ML: Of course. Three days ago, the Ministry of Justice sent a letter to all the directors of prisons in Italy, in which they said that from that moment on, they would decide about all the cultural activities. It means that if you want to do even a little painting laboratory, the director must report this to Italy’s general administration of prisons, which will agree or not — everything is now centralized. It also means that the relationships we’ve spent years building in the prison we work with, with the inmates, the workers and the city itself, will become even more fragile.

KB: Your work is not only artistically and socially oriented but also network-building oriented. You’ve done research on Italian fringe theatre. What have you discovered?

ML: When we started A.R.T.I./Area Ricerche Teatrali Indipendenti in 2005 in Naples, we immediately began creating relationships to understand how the independent groups operate. At that time, we organized L’Indispensabile, a permanent festival of independent theatre, and hosted 300 groups in five years. So, the research we led in 2022 as part of the national project ‘Terzo Teatro e Teatro di Gruppo’ (Third Theatre and Group Theatre), together with the Barba–Varley Foundation, the Dario Fo–Franca Rame Foundation and Teatro Nucleo, came from the same idea — an attempt to understand what had happened with the group theatre. The idea of group theatre strongly evokes the period of the 70s and Eugenio Barba’s work. We wondered if it was still relevant. We started with an open call and invited all the Italian theatre groups that saw themselves as practitioners of group theatre to take part in three meetings that we organized in Ferrara, Gubbio and Lecce. We hosted 130 groups from all over Italy. We found out that most of their members were not part of the young generation. Only 20 groups had their own working space, 10% received grant money from the municipality, and the others — I don’t know how they survive. Maybe with the support of their families. Our findings were not optimistic.

KB: Are Italian fringe theatres collaborating with one another as part of a network?

ML: I think that the Italian theatre system doesn’t help groups, institutional or independent, to collaborate. The bulk of funding goes to the big institutional theatres, which is very dangerous for the smaller ones. The institutional theatres collaborate with other institutional theatres, the medium-sized theatres work with other medium-sized theatres, and the poor theatres work with other poor theatres. One can think ‘that’s only natural, isn’t it?’ But that’s not natural. In Italian theatre history, there have been great artists with big audiences who started at the bottom. And one reason their work could progress was because directors of big theatres were interested enough to come to see what was happening in the basements. Now it’s all very isolated, like islands. And there’s no money. And when you have no money, you cannot travel, you cannot meet other groups. That’s why in A.R.T.I. and CARPA we’ve organized a space, a festival, where we can host groups, so people have a place to meet each other. I think that the groups need to understand that the only way to survive is through collaboration.

KB: As an artist, what interests you in theatre at the moment?

ML: I see my process as a director and actor as one big continuing performance. I try to find the most coherent way in pedagogy, poetics, aesthetics and research. What can be understood through the theatre? What do times we live in need from us? What is our position? I don’t know. But I know that it’s important to feel a responsibility to search for answers. We’ve travelled a lot with the last two ARTI Teatro creations, produced by the CARPA Association. We performed in Greece, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Slovenia, Spain. One piece was dedicated to Pier Paolo Pasolini and the other to Van Gogh — two artists ‘suicided by society’. Together with inmates we are working on a play about flowers as an exemplum of rebellion: a flower offers people an excellent example of disobedience, courage, tenacity, inventiveness. It plans its own revolution on the quiet, starting from its roots, and so should the theatre of this challenging historical moment.