TeatroNatura® in Feudozzo

Fragments of a discourse on the complexity in nature of an embedded knowledge: perceptive attention and bodily impulses, traditional singing and the narration of an ancient myth in natural spaces as a contribution to a new sustainability culture.

Abstract

O Thiasos TeatroNatura® answered the invitation to the Cammino Lter in Feudozzo, formulating a contribution that was artistic, educational and of common thought with which to meet a community of researchers from different disciplines interested in ecology and complexity. In researching new learning processes, epistemological models, and ways of interpreting and communicating a reality that is to be integrated with scientific learning models and transform their orientations, the perceptive, imaginative and empathic relationships with one's living body and the surrounding living place becomes of a crucial importance, especially in a natural context. The proposed experience points out the living quality of participation in the theater workshop and the encounter with the aesthetic dimension through a performance by TeatroNatura® with traditional polyphonic songs from rural cultures and the oral narration of an ancient myth. The face-to-face exchange of resonances and elements of different disciplines for a shared creation of knowledge becomes beneficial for the participants, and is an integral part of the theoretical vitality of the processes that unfolded during the meeting.

The hypothesis, to be examined more thoroughly, is that all these aspects can regenerate contact with the senses, the body’s memories, cognitive openness and flexibility, the poetic relationship with the archetypal figurations that live in Western culture, and in doing so start radically questioning the hegemonic patriarchal mind that condition all fields of recognized knowledge, which is fully shifted towards its intellectual, mercified and competitive aspect, to the detriment of the affective, sensorial and emphatic side. The centrality of scientific thought is not denied, but the aim is to reconnect it with the mysterious and vulnerable depth from which every human desire for knowledge comes. There is no real knowledge without any contact with that reality. To establish a new culture, we need to find a new way to make a successful alliance between science and artistic thinking and to open up to lived wisdoms, close to the health of the land of non-Western people. In this paper we consider the embedded knowledge of performative art as a contribution to common research: understanding how to reach a new ethics, the need for which has been inexorably highlighted by the current pandemic, centered on personal health, that of living beings and the planet we inhabit. Our intention is not to internalize moral dictates or uplifting intentions, but to challenge all forms of knowledge in order to find tools, languages, poetics and practices that work together to effectively take root – those forms first of all - in the care of the common good, namely in the human journey through wisdom for a generalized and personalized development of the art of living. We must learn to consider the presence at various levels of Nature in every cognitive act as essential and the hypothesis of an enlargement of the identity of humans to living beings, to learn to build an alliance among the living beings which is now indispensable. One of the questions that can no longer be postponed is on the tragic existential separation between knowing and being, both on an individual and cultural level, which prevents our civilization from acting for the common good.