In a theatre workshop, should the focus be on the process or on the product? While the human and social sciences tend to privilege the processual dimension, and the realm of “pure” art requires greater care for the final product, today cultural and artistic institutions also find themselves facing the need to develop specific skills in managing participatory processes. The encounter between pedagogical, artistic, and social forms of knowledge thus makes it possible to strengthen and qualify project design, promoting a convergence capable of addressing the urgencies of the present. This integration responds to the growing need for transversal skills, interdisciplinary practices, and pathways in which ethics, aesthetics, and community regeneration can intertwine, expanding the impact of actions in the field of adult education. It is from this urgency that the design of Sulle Spalle dei Giganti. Arte di Comunità per ripartire dalla Xylella (On the Shoulders of Giants. Community Art to Start Again from Xylella) was born – an Erasmus Plus project dedicated to adult education – which began with the International Laboratory “Radicate”, curated by Viviana Bovino and Gregorio Amicuzi (International Laboratory Residui Teatro LIRT, Spain). (1)

The theatre laboratory “Radicate” emerged precisely from this tension: to design a context – an international residency, a “temporary community” of artists and citizens – and at the same time to expose oneself as body and voice within a collective field. It does not arise as simple activism, but as a field for the reworking of meanings (Massa, 2001, p. 36), where work on texts, theatrical expression, and psychophysical training become devices of transformation. “Radicate” sought to adopt this perspective: a theatrical practice that is, first and foremost, education and self-transformation. On a symbolic level, the plague was the guiding metaphor in addressing the theme of “roots” as a Mediterranean symbol compromised by the epidemic.

“The plague is revelation”. If the plague is like theatre, what happens to theatre when it stages the plague? – asks Antonacci (2001, p. 108). What remains, then? Death or purification? What is certain is that the individual who comes into contact with the plague undergoes irreversible changes linked to self-determination. Yet it is still a matter of “insisting on life,” even when the Real of trauma prevails and breaks into the symbolic order. These are the questions addressed by the International Laboratory Residui Teatro (LIRT). (2)

Founded in Italy in 2000 and based in Madrid since 2007, LIRT works professionally on stage creation within the genealogy of group theatre and the Third Theatre – that current which, since the 1970s, has taken performance “outside the theatre,” into schools, hospitals, prisons, parks, and crisis areas, with aims that go beyond the mere production of shows. Not by chance, in 2004 – on the fortieth anniversary of Odin Teatret – Franco Ruffini placed LIRT among the Third Theatre groups (Amicuzi, 2025, p. 2) (3). In this sense, LIRT’s identity is expressed along five converging directions: live creations; research and writing; international networks and encounters; pedagogical projects open to all ages, backgrounds, and states of health; and community art interventions where art becomes a tool for caring for community relationships.

The initial proposal was a Residency addressed to artists, cultural practitioners, and educators from the area. During preliminary meetings, a clearer image of the type of intervention emerged: not a single destination – namely a “simple” Residency – but the creation of suspended bridges between artists, educators, and citizens. For LIRT, the main pedagogical bridges are:

1. between training and creation;
2. between different disciplines;
3. between cultures, particularly between East and West;
4. between theatre and the community.

For over a decade, under the artistic direction of Gregorio Amicuzi and with Viviana Bovino, LIRT has refined “Bridges. Theatre meets the community”, a format that regenerates itself each time through contact with different places, mainly in Europe and South America, often with the presence of an Eastern artist. LIRT works in metropolitan cities and small villages, schools and hospitals, indigenous communities and urban peripheries; above all, it is the prior experience with Odin Teatret’s Barters and the Festuge of Holstebro that shaped the Laboratory (4). Cultural barter – the exchange of forms and knowledge between the artistic group and the community – is not a folkloric frame, but a method: the minimal device that enables reciprocity, shared storytelling, and care (Amicuzi, 2025, p. 3).

The Bridges/Ponti format is residential, lasting ten days (about 90 hours), combining actor research-creation and community co-creation. Not two parallel tracks, but a single weave, where scenes arise from training practices and deep encounters with people and places. Central to the various communities are the figures who “hold the bridge”: the bridge-person (“host”), often a former participant, who connects networks and trust; some key people recognized by the community, often indicated by the host; and finally the “good foreigner,” namely the external company that brings method and perspective, protected by the host. The phases of the Laboratory can be summarized as follows:

1. preparatory listening to collectives, associations, and key people on the shared theme; mapping of spaces “necessary” for the dramaturgy;
2. psychophysical training: body work (breathing, fascia, alignment; vocality, rhythm, polyphonies), extra-daily principles, theatre anthropology;
3. dramaturgical development: individual and choral scenes; first barters (actions, songs, forms of knowledge);
4. transfer to scenic locations: adapting the material to the environment, not to “decorate” it, but to let it speak;
5. final event: itinerant or site-specific, with participation and co-presence of artists and inhabitants.

The public call for the Radicate residential training was answered by multidisciplinary artists and cultural practitioners (11 people, aged between 25 and 60) from different regions and from abroad, with very diverse backgrounds. After the participants’ arrival, the large circle opened at Campo dei Giganti – the first act of community: artists, craftspeople, pedagogists, citizens. Each person was asked what they could offer: a song, a craft, a story, a practice for the success of the final “celebration.” “We almost never use the word theatre: ‘celebration,’ ‘encounter,’ ‘exchange’ are the terms we have learned to prefer over the years” (Amicuzi, 2025, p. 5). This is indeed what LIRT asks of hosts when contacting village residents: we rigorously use the word “celebration.”

Participants arrive at the laboratory each carrying materials prepared during their journey (a memorized text, a folk song, a “green” garment, instruments, a notebook) to optimize the orientation of intention. The first entrance into Campo dei Giganti, which will host the final performance, takes place in silence. Place and bodies listen to each other. The site is treated as a living stratification (historical, hydrological, geological, biological, energetic).

Every morning the work begins punctually, barefoot and in comfortable clothes: breathing, alignment, body work, extra-daily principles, vocality, and polyphonies. The training has a genealogy that, as is well known, is rooted in the theories of Stanislavski and Grotowski: from the analysis of action and the construction of the physical-psychic score, to the “negative way” that purifies the actor of automatisms to free availability, precision, and presence (Barba, 1992). The work integrates contemporary techniques on breath, fascia, and energy, so that technique does not remain a mere repertoire of exercises but becomes a practice of subjectivation: a passage capable of transforming the everyday into the extra-everyday, reaction into action, representation into presence. Each exercise introduces a small imbalance to generate new organization: limit, fear, play. This is not neutral training, but a psychophysical process (Massa, 2001, p. 35) that educates divergent thinking, opens alternatives in the face of risk, and fosters the emergence of sincerity. It is in this space that the “new tribe” takes shape: a collective bond that makes it possible to build dramaturgy in a short time, avoiding superficial collage and anchoring creation to a transformative experience.

Working on the dramaturgy and scenes of the final performance, the small rural arena is first abandoned; the show will be itinerant, with the audience invited to move among the olive trees throughout the entire field. On stage and around the stage appear the community contributions born in the initial large circle: the accordion of a migrant returning to Salento; the civic voice of an activist farmer; the ritual whitewashing of an olive tree; stone balances and lamentations in Griko language (5); Lecce stone craftspeople and the participation of a primary school; a monologue addressed to a tree; the works of a visual artist who builds the set; a suspended sculpture by a local craftsperson; and, in the final scene, the bareback ride of a white horse by a very young girl from the village. Gregorio Amicuzi’s direction thus integrates the proposals of artists and locals, while Viviana Bovino prepares songs and choreographic materials. Negotiation is constant, a process that permeates every day of the Laboratory. Scenic precision – hythm, detail, care in the passage from the general to the particular – meets the needs of the community: the professional actor creates a safe space for the inhabitant; costumes and unforeseen events become material for negotiation (Amicuzi, 2025, p. 9). Here the stage reveals its political value in the etymological sense: an encounter among citizens who rework symbols and images.

At the conclusion of the performance, attended by more than a hundred people, the convivial moment continues late into the night, culminating in the reintegration into nature of a wild creature – a ritual that the organization carries out with the collaboration of specialized operators. Simply to remind us that one insists on life.

The morning after the performance comes the circle of restitution. Technical, ethical, anthropological, political, and poetic aspects are read together. As often happens, someone offers to become the next host: the bridge extends, the spiral restarts, and planning begins again. This is the meaning of radical Care toward social landscapes. “Radicate” is not limited to preserving the memory of the olive trees, but to rewriting it. In a Salento marked by Xylella, theatre returns as a popular language and an autopoietic and critical device: the community gains the possibility to look at itself and sets itself in motion again through resignification, retrospectively.

1.On the Shoulders of Giants. Community Art to Start Again from Xylella is an Erasmus Plus – Adult Education project, led by Campo dei Giganti(Lecce), with Residui Teatroas partner. It is structured around three main activities: artistic residencies (visual and performative); workshops; and digital dissemination through the implementation of the digital mapping of the olive grove and the community.

2.“L.I.R.T. is the child of those movements, whether a legitimate heir or not. LIRT has considered itself ‘Third Theatre’ since 2004, when Franco Ruffini, during an event held in Rome on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Odin Teatret, identified it as a Roman group representing Third Theatre, showing an excerpt of a performance to Eugenio Barba. It was not our choice, yet _ with a young and ignorant stubbornness – we immediately recognized ourselves in it and immersed ourselves in it” (Amicuzi, 2025, p. 2). Amicuzi’s and Bovino’s references relate to a project document, still unpublished, which includes the laboratory report and a critical reflection by LIRT on the outcomes of the laboratory in Salento, as well as a self-reflection on points of contact with other international laboratories.

3.The Festuge is a large festival organized by Odin Teatret in the city of Holstebro, Denmark. It brings together local and international artists and citizens, takes place throughout the entire city, and unfolds at all hours of the day.

4.“We created an artistic and pedagogical device centered on a theme of interest to the host community; a space in which to offer, receive, and share knowledge and creations with a desire for transformation” (Bovino, 2025, p. 1).

5.Salentine Griko is a variety of Modern Greek spoken in the area of Grecìa Salentina.

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