The Errant Method as Children’s Art Theatre | A Lecture by CHIARA GUIDI

March 5, 2019 | 10 AM

Experimental Theatre, UNM

Free and open to the public

This lecture is focused on the most recent developments in the artistic research that Chiara Guidi has cultivated with the Socìetas (Raffaello Sanzio) since the 1990s, conceiving original forms of theatre for and with children. Inspired by childhood, Guidi’s works are preparatory processes for a radical experience of theatre, shaped around a direct relation between actors and children, midway between the origins of the creative act and an educational intent, outside of any kind of mystification or cultural mediation.

This long-standing research began with the Experimental School of Childhood Theatre (1995‐1998) and grew over the years with performances conceived around the ties between childhood and the voice, along the lines of fables, and culminates in the Errant Method.

 “The Errant Method brings into play both sides of representation, action and reception, including as part of the scene both the children’s gaze and their tendency to spontaneously take the initiative. The starting point is to build a relation between actors, educators, and children, within the field of the performing arts, in order to invert—in an errant way—a dynamics of teaching that goes from the known to the unknown. In this way, theatre adheres to the kind of inventive and pragmatic knowledge exercised by children, rejecting stereotypes of infantile imagination and taking up the primitive procedure of a tactile gaze. 

 Art invites us to rethink reality, and nourishes itself with specific questions in today’s context of widespread entropy and degradation of the image. The fable’s underlying compositional principles transform us and redirect our gaze, altering it, and calling on us to find a different awareness of our thought; calling for an oblique and maieutic gaze, that becomes concrete within a relation.”

—Chiara Guidi

Chiara Guidi, along with Romeo and Claudia Castellucci, in 1981 was one of the founders of Socìetas Raffello Sanzio (now renamed Socìetas), the Italian company that, above any other, has been at the forefront of the international theatre scene since the early eighties. She was the soul of dramatic rhythm and vocal composition for the company’s productions, directing numerous plays and researching each actor’s spoken part. Author and producer of sound theatre, since the 1990s she has also created an intense artistic experience with children as part of her research and analysis of the relationship between voice and childhood which has earned her several awards, including an Ubu Prize 2013.

This lecture is part of Chiara Guidi’s Residency at the University of New Mexico hosted in partnership with Revolutions International Theatre Festival and Tricklock Company. This project is made possible with the generous support of New Mexico Arts and is presented in collaboration with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Los Angeles.