Armando Punzo, a shaman in the prison

Naturae - Armando Punzo 

Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù 

Although art lovers know Venice best for its art and architecture biennials and its film festival, La Biennale di Venezia, the organisation responsible for these three events, has also been organising theatre, dance and music festivals every year for years.

Especially in the 70s, the Teatro Biennale hosted the most important international representatives of the performing arts of the time, from Robert Wilson to Peter Brook, from The Living Theatre to Jerzy Grotowski. In those years, Ariane Mnouchkine staged L'Âge d'or (The Golden Age) by a canal, John Cage and Merce Cunningham staged their works in Piazza San Marco and Brook in the courtyard of a monastery. Like the Dance and Music Biennials, the Teatro Biennale, instead of taking over the city as it did in the 1970s, has recently been using the 300-400 year old Italian Navy shipyard buildings in the monumental Arsenale area, which the Biennale di Venezia uses specifically for art and architecture biennials.

Although the Teatro Biennale has not lost its international character in recent years, it stands out for its focus on the training of young Italian artists through the Biennale College Teatro. So much so that the president of La Biennale di Venezia, Roberto Cicutto, in his very brief opening speech at the awards ceremony, after announcing that the Teatro Biennale would receive a larger budget this year and in the years to come, said that the more important goal of the general artistic directors of the performing arts biennials, beyond presenting very good shows in their field, is to create a fertile environment for future works with projects like the Biennale College.

Each year the Theatre Biennale also awards the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and the Silver Lion. The recipients of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement over the past ten years are as follows Christiane Jatahy (2022), Krzysztof Warlikowski (2021), Jens Hillje (2019), Antonio Rezza and Flavia Mastrella (2018), Katrin Brack (2017), Declan Donnellan (2016), Christoph Marthaler (2015) and Jan Lauwers (2014).

Golden Lion’s Ceremony. 

From the left: Gianni Forte, Director of Theatre Sector (ricci/forte); Roberto Cicutto, President of Biennale di Venezia; Armando Punzo, Golden Lion winner; Stefano Ricci, Director of Theatre Sector (ricci/forte)

 Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù 

This year, the 51st edition of the Biennale took place over a longer than usual period of 17 days, from 15 June to 1 July. The provocative and fearless duo of Italian avant-garde theatre ricci/forte (Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte) who took over the general artistic direction of the Biennale for four years, were introduced to Istanbul audiences through the New Text New Theatre Festival in 2013.

After Blue and Red/Red, the duo chose Emerald as the title for their third year, believing that emerald green symbolises the spring awakening of Theatre as a platform for political and poetic resistance, now saturated with the images and passive appeal of digital technology and more than ever committed to stimulating the imagination of the audience. 

With this mission, the duo invited Romeo Castellucci, Tiago Rodrigues, Boris Nikitin, Mattias Andersson, Bashar Murkus & Khashabi Ensemble, Tanya Beyeler & Pablo Gisbert (El Conde De Torrefiel) and Noémi Goudal/Maelle Poésy. In addition, a large part of the festival performances consisted of works from the Biennale Theatre School. It was also noteworthy that the Biennale Theatre School included a module entitled Performance site-specific.

This year the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement was awarded to the Italian theatre director Armando Punzo and the Silver Lion went to the Flemish collective FC Bergman.

Armando Punzo receives the Golden Lion 

Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù

I had never heard of Armando Punzo before, perhaps because his work is rarely performed outside Italy. This is for the same reason that Punzo won the Golden Lion in Venice: he has been working with prison inmates almost from the beginning of his career, for 35 years. 

After becoming familiar with Punzo's background and his art thanks to the Biennale I think it was very significant that Punzo was awarded this prize. In the Italy of recent years, where a far-right party has formed a government, where dozens of refugees drown or are left to die every day in the seas off the coast, ricci/forte write in their motivation for the award to Punzo: 

"In a country that struggles to come to terms with human rights – where ideas of brotherhood, love and solidarity crumble like pastry – Armando Punzo attempts to convey prison life and its frontiers through artistic and geographical isolation. Driven by the need to establish is own, original creative identity, and far from the friction of trends – with no freedom, paying no lip service to power, and by building bridges that overhang he prosaic, bourgeois world – Punzo ventures into territories that always twist away from everything else. Through Theatre he breaks down barriers and accepted truths; and like a wise goldsmith of languages, he sifts through what he finds to filter out a renewed Man. When the latter has begun to thrive, harvesting what has been sown, he rises up full of defiance and courage in his knees, ready ot stand tall again in the face of Reality." 

ricci/forte's judgement was evident from the uninterrupted applause of the mostly Italian artists and members of the press who filled the magnificent Sala delle Colonne in Ca' Guistinian, the institution's main building, where the Biennale’s Award Ceremony was held.

Armando Punzo, Golden Lion winner with Compagnia della Fortezza 

Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù 

Armando Punzo (1959) began his artistic career in Naples, the city of his birth, before moving to Volterra in Tuscany in 1983. In 1989 he began working with the inmates of Volterra prison and founded the Compagnia della Fortezza. The many shows he staged with this company won him many awards at the UBU, Italy's prestigious theatre awards. After years of performing inside prisons, in 2003, thanks to the implementation of Article 21 of the Italian Penal Code, the company began to tour regularly outside prisons in Italian cities. Over the years, Punzo has played a leading role in the development of many initiatives, such as the European project "Theatre and Prison in Europe", led by Italy and involving prisons in France, Spain, Sweden and Germany.

One of the Italian theatre critics following the Biennale told me in a water taxi on the way to a performance that in Italy some prisoners are allowed to leave prison during working hours of the day to earn money, on condition that they spend the night back in prison. The actors of the Compagnia della Fortezza also benefited from this practice, as they earned money as professional actors. When they went on tour in Italy, they spent the night in the prisons of each city. As there is no such rule in Europe, the troupe has never been able to tour outside Italy. The only exception was San Marino, a small country surrounded by Italy. surrounded by Italy, but even then the prisoners spent the night in the nearby Rimini prison.

Naturae - Armando Punzo 

 Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù Punzo's

Naturae, a Compagnia della Fortezza production, was the opening play of the Biennale. Naturae was staged in the Teatro alle Tese, a large black box theatre space combined and transformed from four 16th-century warehouses which were used to stretch out sails in the Arsenale.

The huge stage, surrounded on three sides by the audience, was completely covered with white salt from Volterra. Punzo himself was on the stage, greeting us with a red ball in his hand. As we took our seats, he handed us the red ball as if to say: "Come on, join me in my game, let's ignite this vein of creativity, this excitement, this passion in us together".

Once everyone was settled, Punzo gave silent instructions with his hands, arms and sometimes his whole body, showing us the images in his imagination, directing the figures that appeared in the six entrances and exits between the audience tribunes and their movements on the stage. First, he placed a man dressed in black and a woman dressed in white on one side of the stage, bringing them fruit on trays and drinks in glasses. On another side, two figures arranged the books they had brought with them in one of the many objects scattered around the stage, made of hollow cubes with defined edges. Images, motifs and figures that emerged from Punzo's imagination, triggered by the books, covered the stage in time.

Naturae - Armando Punzo 

 Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù

Naturae was a feast born of his and the actors' imaginations, but also of ours; it was a carnivalesque parade with 40 performers. Naturae was a celebration of life, of imagination, of the fire, the spark, the joie de vivre that sustains us and keeps us alive. Kafkaesque figures on the one hand, figures inspired by Far and Middle Eastern cultures on the other, demonstrations of strength and endurance on the one hand, romantic encounters on the other, music, poetry and sound, all together, side by side, on a white canvas, forming a calligraphic painting.

Perhaps the weakest aspect of the show was that, as there was no conflict or tension in this painting, it drifted into a state of inertia over time. But it didn't matter, because the most striking thing about Naturae was that Punzo's face and eyes were smiling, in other words he was happy, while he was constructing all these movements, moments, situations and figures on stage, "organising the possibilities" as he put it. Doesn't he already say in his texts of recent years that we must transcend Homo sapiens and reach Homo felix, so perhaps he had already gone beyond the search for happiness and found it in this carnivalesque painting on stage.

Naturae - Armando Punzo 

 Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù 

How could he not be happy? As he said in his speech after receiving the award, 35 years ago he asked to be admitted to the Volterra prison, surprisingly after twenty days he was allowed in to "put theatre to the test" and since then every day he goes to the prison at 9:00 a.m., goes out for lunch, comes back at 3:00 p.m. and sometimes works in the prison until 9:00 p.m. 

Punzo is happy that, with more than 80 prisoner-actors who have worked with him for 35 years, he has shown and continues to show that it is possible to create art and the freedom of theatre in a place designed to destroy human beings. For Punzo, one of the clues to freedom on the road to happiness must be hidden in his answer to a question in the short meeting after the ceremony in his description of the ideal theatre director: 

"I don't believe in a concept of directing where everything is ready in the mind and unchangeable, I don't see myself as a director in that sense, I see myself as an organiser of possibilities; as the person who gives you the chance to organise spaces where everyone can propose something. 

I create spaces of freedom, that's what directing is for me. And in this sense, directing is a chance for me, because in a project where everything is defined in advance, the environment that allows for the possibility of things that you have not foreseen or thought of, but that others bring to the stage, has disappeared. The idea of the director as an absolute role, responsible for everything and knowing everything, has nothing to do with real theatre, in theatre everyone finds their own role and place, the important thing is how to create such an environment."

Punzo said that he created Naturae at the end of eight years of work, during which he first spent two years working on Shakespeare, then two years working on Borges, and then had to take a break because of the pandemic, and continued as follows:

"We could not leave it, it grew with us, we grew and developed with it. We talked about it, we read about it, we looked for images, we went on like that for months. First we established the main idea, the hypothesis of the work, then the actors made suggestions without knowing exactly where it would go, and in this way we continued the process."

Naturae - Armando Punzo 

 Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © Andrea Avezzù

In his speech after receiving the award, Punzo revealed his two new goals, which I believe will take Homo felix to the next level: To build a permanent theatre space inside the Volterra prison and to tour Europe with the Compagnia della Fortezza.

From a shaman who advises us "Don't look only at the dark curves, there is the possibility of light and hope", only such daring and vast projects could be expected; I am sure he will realise them as soon as possible...

[The Turkish version of this text was published in unlimited on July, 18th 2023.]