Roger Bernat, Roberto Fratini Serafide: FORMS OF PARTICIPATION, workshop

April 21st, 11.00-18.00

In his recent works Roger Bernat has constantly experimented and put on trial the formats, protocols, modes, fashions and prejudices of a theatricality grounded in participation, immersion and interaction.

We will present through describing the works themselves, the meaning of Roger Bernat’s pieces in the context of the interactive trend; to analyze the genealogy of participation in theatre and performance; to understand the multiple features that allowed it to settle in the present map of the poetics as the new genre par excellence; to detach and describe the ideological reasons of its success; to expose its mantras, its religious aspects, its conceptual and political traps. We will try to retrace the link of participation with the existential and poetic origins of contemporary performance, mainly by discussing such notions as truth, immediacy and spontaneity. We will also see how the formats of participation are in many aspects but the result of the special metamorphosis those notions underwent by pressure of the postmodern paradigms.