THE BASIC IDEA OF THEATRE

The basic idea of theatre is usually tied to the idea of ‘doing’. But, in reality, theatre is a continual erasing of the tracks in its own landscape. Nothing final will be put in the place of the already available. I asked myself whether the essential dimension of theatre isn't actually the ‘not doing’. Less alarm­ingly said, whether theatre isn't more ‘being’ than ‘doing’; whether the actor is more of a presence than an action.
In a project like lnvisible Cities, a group of people with different ideas and cultural back­grounds came together - artists, architects, theater people, authors. It didn't concern the preparation for a play and its staging in a traditional style, but rather the coming together itself in a certain place, in order to hear what this place had to say in our presence.
What counts is the landscape.
Not only the extenal one, the ‘natural’ or urban scenery; I mean the intenal landscape as well: the special kind of stage that is in each of us when we find ourselves in a  receiver's situation. Both of these landscapes - the intemal and extemal - would be thesame. ‘The body of the dreamer is the stage of dream’, said Géza Roheim. And Jakob Burckhardt: ‘We would gladly get to know the waves that we are drifting on at sea: but, we are the waves ourselves’.
I ask myself further whether these could be carried away by the wave, whether this crossing of the world could be a new condition of actors: one's ability to be present in the here-and-now.

Fabrizio Crisafulli, The basic idea of Theatre / Die Grundidee des Theater / L’idea di teatro, in Raimondo Guarino and Andreas Staudinger (eds.), Unischtbarestädte / Invisible Cities / Città invisibili: Fara Sabina, Klagenfurt, Malta, Alekto Verlag, Klagenfurt, 1993, p. 60.