Il didatta, lo sciamano e l’interprete: Le baccanti euripidee secondo Luigi Squarzina

Abstract

The contribution’s goal is to piece together the critical analysis project at the root of Squarzina’s directorial work on The Bacchae staging at Teatro Stabile in Genoa 1969. This preparatory path gives origin to a vast ramification of contacts with artists, organizers, contemporary scholars which led to an extraordinary cultural revolution both as an individual and as a group point of view. Squarzina started an important theoretical reflection about his job in the theatre which is collected in his essay, The teacher and the shaman (1969), a milestone for the comprehension of critical directing in the xx century. Squarzina’s interest about ancient civilizations was at the origin of his collaboration with Edoardo Sanguineti (author of the new Italian version of Euripides’ theatrical text) and renewed the cultural relation with the Greek philologist Benedetto Marzullo – started in 1958 with the world premiere of The Misanthtrope by Menandrus – which brought to the establishment of the first graduation programme in Arts, Music and Staging Disciplines at the Department of Humanities in the University of Bologna (1970).