If you close your eyes, does theatre disappear?
English

If you close your eyes, does theatre disappear?

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art
culture
history

We used to say that theatre is the place of gaze. Nothing to object to this definition, as long as its partiality is recognised. What happen instead is a misunderstanding: we confuse the word "show" with the word "theatre". However, if you close your eyes during a show, does theatre desappear? Of course not. Keeping eyes closed, you can have the access to all that invisible universe of which theatre is composed, formed by immaterial elements like sounds, rumors, silence, oral word.

It's probabily for this reason that theatre has been creating a long relashionship with radio from the media's origin to now, especially in this difficult period, with all cultural buildings in lockdown and without possibilities of making live shows with audience. At the same time, radio starts a new life: it is changing from flow radio to on-demand radio, to adapt itself to the new way of using content and new users' habits on internet. One of the most evident radio's development is the new format and language of podcast. Yes, I wrote format and language, because podcasts aren't just a way for radio survival, but above all an indipendet method of audio creation and distribution, with autonomous roules.

Radio drama's productions started when radio originated ('20th of 1900): the first radiodrama was Danger by Richard Hughes on air on BBC (1924). Perhaps, the most famous was War of the Words written and performed by Orson Welles (USA): it was created as a typical radio program and the speaker told about aliens invasion, so the listeners belived that the news was true and they got crazy! Then there were been a long period without any particular radio - theatre experiments, but today - because of the lockdown situation and the revival of interest to the art of listening - theatre re-starts to create invisible shows. Here in italy the research about new possibilities of audio creation in contemporary age is still in its infancy, looking to history to rediscover tradition. I think theatre in Italy has only begun to explore podcast as a new language and opportunieties to create a new way of participating together in a performance even when you are not together in the same room. But, It's a beginning!

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