Lino Guanciale: "Culture gives references, and we need it more than before. But we need protections."

After extremely tribulated months, the performing arts sector restarted at the end of spring, albeit with many uncertainties and a great many difficulties. And the situation created by the Covid-19 pandemic has brought out more than ever the precariousness of the sector, as well as the precariousness of culture in general. Why, however, is culture so important at this juncture, why do we need it so much? And what should we do to ensure its future? We talked about these issues with actor Lino Guanciale, starting with the latest show he staged last weekend at the Arena del Sole in Bologna, a reading of Bertolt Brecht’s Dialogues of Refugees. Here is what he told us. The interview is edited by Ilaria Baratta.

Lino Guanciale. Ph. Credit Paolo De Chellis

IB. At the Teatro Arena del Sole in Bologna, you brought to the stage (until Oct. 11) Bertolt Brecht’s Dialogues of Refugees , which you called “a text of crisis, a text generated by a state of emergency,” since it was made during the writer’s own experience of exile. A text born out of change, which is connected to the pandemic that has affected the whole world in recent months. Why then isDialogues of Refugees so timely especially at this time? What feelings in common with current events does the text highlight?

LG. What the text has in common with our contemporaneity is its focus on absolute uprooting, in the sense that the two protagonists have literally been uprooted from their world of belonging, democratic Germany, which in turn has been completely annihilated and uprooted just like all those who were forced into exile, like Brecht, by the Nazi fury. Evidently this reality, this uprooting of the two characters, who are by the way very different from each other (and in their world of yesterday would never have spoken to each other, since one is a real proletarian, and the other is a scientist whom we intuit to be upper-class), has a lot to do with what we all, today, are paying on our flesh, because we too, in some way, have had the world we had until February 2020 ripped away from us in terms of security and references. There exists for all of us today a state of emergency, that is, of permanent distress, which we find ourselves having to learn to manage. We are therefore in a condition that is certainly unexpected, and this sudden disappearance of previous references has much to do with what happens to the protagonists of Refugee Dialogues. The historical differences are obvious, but what we have lost since February is the granitic certainty that history was now over, that all in all it was an indefectible progress of Western civilization in continuous development and growth. And instead we have learned that this is not the case: this awareness of our precariousness is also something we absolutely have in common with the protagonists of this Brecht text.

He chose to read Brecht’s text on Rai Radio3 on June 15, on the occasion of the reopening of theaters after months of forced closure due to the health emergency, and now the new season of the Arena del Sole Theater has opened with this very play. In both cases it was chosen for a restart of the world of theater and culture. How important is culture to restart?

It is fundamental because “restarting” means “starting again in some direction,” and it is in this sense that culture becomes decisive, because what direction to take we are able to imagine, and then to do concretely. We give ourselves references, orientational coordinates, and in my opinion it is the cultural scene that provides these coordinates, because it is through culture that the analytical vision of both the future and the present and also the past is composed. It is through the movement of the arts, through the movement of the sciences, from the humanities to the natural sciences, that we are able to construct a trajectory to take for the future, or at least that is how it should be. It should not be only the yardstick of certain interests, of certain short-sighted conveniences (because all in all calibrated to the instantaneous) that leads us into our existential dimension. Today, in fact, to listen to him, there would be an even greater need than before for the presence of culture as a dispenser of references for the future.

The health emergency has highlighted even more all the issues related to theater and live performance. Would you like to tell us about that? What do you expect from institutions?

What has emerged is what we actually all knew existed, which is that we are now a country without a real system of effective safeguards to protect intermittent work such as the work of the performing arts sector. Lacking this set of structures (in terms of social security, in terms of shock absorbers, in terms of case law inherent in the defense of certain rights in the event of illness, job loss, and so on), an emergency condition has come along that has wiped out the fragile balance that had been built up, probably also from this great liquidity contractual liquidity in the industry, which all in all we artists also indulged in to some extent, trusting that this liquidity would then translate into freedom of movement, into value. When the emergency came upon our whole reality it created unimaginably serious consequences, because in show business trusting that liquidity was wrong. And it was wrong on the part of entertainment workers and on the part of institutions. Only now, or rather during the lockdown, have they concretely witnessed the landscape of ruins that, all things considered, was under the rug before, but it is not as if it did not exist. To put it more clearly, a wind has begun to blow that has uncovered all the contradictions. What certainly must not happen is that we go ahead with the construction of more buffer measures for the sector, of more instant assistance. We have to go to the root, we have to get to the bottom of a legal system, a system of laws that protect intermittent work in the entertainment industry. It also means for artists, for technicians, for all workers in the sector, to take on the responsibilities that follow from the recognition of certain rights. But institutions are absolutely called upon to give this not only to entertainment workers, but to the country, because without this system of protections rooted on the French, Belgian, German model, countries where this system of protections exists in a more serious, the future is desertification of the industry, because none of us can know how long it will last or even how long we will last, because doing our job under these conditions is very, very difficult.

Lino Guanciale and violinist Renata Lackó in Dialogues of Refugees. Ph. Credit Paolo De Chellis

Almost four months have passed since the theaters reopened. How do you see the current situation? How has the audience response been?

The response of the public has been there, net of the fear and fears that a large segment of the public (I am thinking of the older ones, perhaps traditionally tending to subscribe to large or medium-sized theaters) has shown, because it is legitimate to be afraid of going to a closed place, where you are, for hours, with so many other people. We are actually discovering perhaps that a theater, where you are spaced out and masked, is likely to be ... safer than many other places. Given this, the audience, obviously in my personal experience, is responding, in the sense that they have started going to the theater again. However, what makes the difference is the perspective from which you look at things: I have started to do evenings again, to do shows in the theater, I have also started to do some directing for Emilia Romagna Teatro, however, I also realize that mine is a somewhat privileged situation: actors who we could define as attractive from the market point of view and attractive to the public are working (and have started working again). That the system is somehow broken down, albeit among billions of unknowns, is healthy, but we also need to think about all those workers (among artists, technicians, stage-related professions) who are at home instead. Theater and dance are the sectors that are suffering the most, while, on the other hand, to some extent, film and television sets have resumed work. One should not be fooled into thinking that everyone has restarted. We decided to symbolically mark the date of June 15 with the radio staging of Dialogues of Refugees also to signify, together with Radio3 and Emilia Romagna Teatro, that it was a problematic restart that could take place, in certain contexts and under certain conditions, but that it absolutely did not mean a return to normality. You are a long way from normality, but unfortunately you are also a long way from having clear and reliable directions that can guarantee that theaters that want to restart can do so, with only the responsibility on them to try to optimize their resources, not with the certain abyss in front of them of seeing their resources exhausted or their possibilities annihilated.

To conclude, his next play My Infinite End of the World will be about apocalypse, precariousness and the possibilities that open up from the end. Another play that ties in with the pandemic crisis. Would you like to tell us about it?

My Infinite End of the World was born during the lockdown from the meeting (via Zoom for that matter) between myself and Gabriel Calderón, a brilliant Uruguayan playwright, who as a synthesis of the dialogue that took place between the two of us distilled this extremely intelligent and I think also intelligently funny text, which on the one hand presents examples of various apocalypses experienced not only by humanity, but by planet Earth in general, and on the other tries to help the viewer problematize the theme of the end in the closest possible way, that is, to bring into everyone’s lives the theme of the end of something and the beginning of something else. Intertwined are triceratops and pterodactyls gazing dreamily at the meteorite that is about to end their existence on Earth and the vicissitudes of a family grappling with the end of its progenitor. The actuality of the pandemic condition is never overshadowed in the text: some of the signs refer to our actuality, but the relationship to the actual is rather nuanced, because what Gabriel has managed to construct is, I think, a more general discourse about how many removals, how many frustrations generate the fact that we cannot relate to the end of things. Whether we’re obviously talking about death or whether we’re talking about the exhaustion of a cycle of our own lives, however, I think an important message to give is that often what we think of as an end is perhaps the crisis most full of opportunity. Even taking the example of the discourse on entertainment workers that was mentioned just now and about which there would still be so much to say, well... if not now when: for decades we’ve been circling around it, we haven’t been able to focus on defining instruments of protection, now we’re really obliged to try to give them to ourselves. I think this is somehow not a nice chance (because there is really nothing nice about what is happening), but a chance that history gives us to show ourselves up to it.

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