There’s a threshold that interests me more than the stage itself. It’s the one right before it: the door of a theatre in a neighbourhood where, officially, theatre shouldn’t exist. A three-kilometre avenue separating the centre from the periphery, surrounded by offices, and a neighbourhood that has been defined as the worst in the Netherlands.
And yet right there, exactly there, two people decided to open a space and keep it open. This episode starts from a very concrete question: what actually happens the moment an audience stops being just an audience?
Communitas
The anthropologist Victor Turner had a name for that moment: communitas. Meaning that temporary, almost clandestine community that forms when a group of people find themselves together on a threshold, in a time suspended from the ordinary rules of social life, and for a moment stop being divided into roles, classes, functions. Theatre, for Turner, is one of the places where this suspension can still happen.
And the scholar Jill Dolan brought this idea even closer to contemporary theatre, speaking of the utopian performative: those brief instants, inside a performance, when the audience feels that another way of being together might be possible.
I wanted to put side by side two theatres that each seem to build, in their own way, exactly this kind of moment. PimOff, in Milan, at the far southern edge of the city, in an area - Gratosoglio - that the writer Jonathan Bazzi has described almost as a geographic purgatory between the centre and Rozzano. And ZID Theatre, in Amsterdam West, in what was for years branded the worst neighbourhood in the Netherlands; not for violence, but for poverty, the kind of poverty that strips away access to everything, culture included.
ZID in Amsterdam
When I got to ZID theater, after my experience working for two years at PimOff Theater, I found myself asking a question: how much of what I lived through at PimOff is specific to Milan, and how much is a struggle that repeats itself?
Two different cities, two different languages, two different histories. But when I spoke with my former colleague Antonella Miggiano, project manager at PimOff, and with Karolina, director of ZID, I kept catching myself recognising the same words, almost identical, coming out of different mouths.
But communitas doesn’t come into being on its own, simply by opening a door. It has to be built, often through long processes of co-creation. Karolina talks about workshops run together with refugees, aboard a ship that housed fifteen hundred people, to build together (not for them, but with them) the material of a performance. Antonella talks about theatre courses whose cost is calculated on families’ income, because a working-class neighbourhood isn’t included through a oneoff discounted ticket, but through a relationship that lasts over time.
Breaking the wall
In both cases, what gets built is not just a performance, but the conditions for that temporary community, that communitas, to form even outside the usual margins of a theatre audience. What both theatres seem to have understood is that inclusion doesn’t mean lowering the artistic bar. It means, instead, breaking what Karolina calls the fourth wall: not only in the technical sense, but as a metaphor for all the invisible walls that keep certain bodies, certain
stories, certain lives outside the room. There’s a moment in Karolina’s interview where she describes a meeting between residents of the neighbourhood and residents of central Amsterdam, gathered together to ask what the word freedom means today while, as she puts it, “the world around them keeps burning”. And it’s perhaps exactly there, in that shared, temporary instant, that you catch a glimpse of the utopian performative.
These conversations taught me that not every city and theatre are the same, but they share similar issues and try to find different solutions to build communitas through art, where art should not even exist.
