This is what unites Amsterdam and Milan

There is a threshold that interests me more than the stage itself. It is the one just before it: the door of a theatre in a neighbourhood where, officially speaking, no theatre should be allowed to exist. A three-kilometre-long avenue separating the centre from the outskirts, surrounded by offices, and a neighbourhood labelled as the worst in the Netherlands.

Have a listen to the English-language podcast I made about it:

And yet, right there, two people decided to open a space and keep it open. This episode starts with a very specific question: what actually happens when an audience is no longer just an audience?

The anthropologist Victor Turner had a name for that moment: communitas. By this he meant that temporary, almost clandestine sense of community that arises when a group of people find themselves together on a threshold, in a moment detached from the usual rules of social life, and in which, for a brief moment, they are no longer divided into roles, classes and functions. For Turner, the theatre is one of the places where this suspension can still take place.

The scholar Jill Dolan brought this idea even closer to contemporary theatre by discussing the utopian performative: those brief moments during a performance when the audience gets the feeling that a different way of being together might be possible.

I wanted to juxtapose two theatres, each of which, in its own way, seems to create precisely this sort of moment. PimOff, in Milan, on the very southern edge of the city, in a neighbourhood – Gratosoglio – which the writer Jonathan Bazzi has almost described as a geographical purgatory between the city centre and Rozzano. And ZID Theatre, in Amsterdam-West, in what for years was labelled the worst neighbourhood in the Netherlands; not because of violence, but because of poverty – the sort of poverty that denies access to everything, including culture. When I arrived at ZID Theatre, following my two-year stint at PimOff Theatre, I asked myself: to what extent is what I experienced at PimOff specific to Milan, and to what extent is it a struggle that repeats itself?

Two different cities, two different languages, two different histories. But when I spoke to my former colleague Antonella Miggiano, project manager at PimOff, and to Karolina, director of ZID, I kept finding myself hearing the same words – almost identical – coming from different people. But communitas does not happen by itself, simply by opening a door. It has to be built up, often through lengthy processes of co-creation. Karolina talks about workshops organised together with refugees, on board a ship housing 1,500 people, to develop the content of a performance together (not for them, but with them). Antonella talks about theatre courses where the fees are calculated based on families’ incomes, because a working-class neighbourhood isn’t engaged through a one-off discounted ticket, but through a relationship that endures over time.

In both cases, not only is an image created, but the conditions are also laid for the emergence of that temporary community, which communitas, even beyond the usual boundaries of a theatre audience. What both theatres seem to have understood is that inclusion does not mean lowering artistic standards. On the contrary, it means breaking through what Karolina calls the ‘fourth wall’: not just in a technical sense, but as a metaphor for all the invisible walls that exclude certain bodies, certain

to keep certain stories and lives out of the theatre. There is a moment in Karolina’s interview where she describes a gathering between local residents and people from the centre of Amsterdam, who came together to ask what the word „freedom“ means today, whilst, as she puts it herself, ‘the world around them continues to burn’. And perhaps it is precisely there, in that shared, fleeting moment, that one catches a glimpse of the utopian performative.

These conversations have taught me that not every city and every theatre is the same, but that they do face similar challenges and are trying to find different solutions through art a community to create, in places where art shouldn’t really even exist.

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