L’arte dell’attore secondo Armando Punzo. Da Venezia 1999 a Venezia 2023

In 1988 Armando Punzo, director, playwright and actor, crossed the gate of the Volterra prison, where he founded the Compagnia della Fortezza, the first and still longest theatre experience in a penitentiary institution. In thirty-five years, he has transformed a place of punishment into a center of artistic research, obtaining the highest Italian and European prizes and recognitions, including the recent Golden Lion for Career Achievement at Venice Biennale Teatro 2023, and achieving a goal pursued for over twenty years: the construction of the first permanent and professional theatre in the world built in a prison (projected by the architect Mario Cucinella, with delivery scheduled for 2025). Questioning the category of “social theatre” in which the director’s work is often framed, this essay offers a first and unprecedented reconstruction of his path from the point of view of the relationship between direction and acting pedagogy. The historical reconstruction also includes the artist’s fundamental training which took place in the early 1980s with the GIA - Gruppo Internazionale L’Avventura (born from artists who had worked with Jerzy Grotowski and who conducted research on perception inspired by the principles of his para-theatre) and it then goes on to touch upon turning point experiences, such as the one at the 1999 Venice Biennale, to finally describe the most recent developments of his working method with the actors of Compagnia della Fortezza, based on a close relationship between performance and dramaturgy.