Alberto Pagliarino

The experience of cure and dying today is almost entirely delegated to the medical approach to health. Hospitals are exclusive and dedicated locations, islands in the city. Can the theatre enter them and be vehicle of human and social participation? Is it possible to re-establish an overall dramaturgy of dying? Does the condition of the people who live the disease as patients, nurses or doctors, contain a view of life which interests all of us? The project Cantiere Teatrale San Giovanni Antica Sede originates from a research by the Teatro Sociale e di Comunità which was started in 2006 by Alessandra Rossi Ghiglione and the Teatro Popolare Europeo at the Oncologic Hospital San Giovanni Antica Sede of Turin. The social theatre organized dramas acted by communities, laboratories with patients and hospital operators, readings in the Day Hospital lounge, scenographies, shows, big ritual events open to citizenship and organized by a wide network of people. It’s been an anthropological reflection and a commitment to artistic work for a theatre of the health, at a level of psycho-physical well-being and at a symbolic level of health-gaining for the community and of its civilization.