THE BODY ON STAGE – La Piccioletta Barca

On Saturday 16 May some young people from Piccioletta Barca, after a year of work, staged a theatrical show for which they wrote the text themselves, weaving together the work done by the Academy and the Filoteca in 2025/2026 on the theme of Leg­ge. I do not want, here, to propose a story of the undertaking, but rather – having finished the carousel of emotions of those who witnessed a small miracle – to collect some thoughts on what the theater has generated, in a rather unexpected way, in the children and in all of us.

I believe that anyone who does or has done theater knows the magic of staging: the courage to expose oneself, the challenge of becoming something other than oneself. The laborious construction of the scenes and the long succession of tests, experiments, second thoughts, when the curtain opens, express all their power, in an explosion of personal and common energies accumulated for months. The theater scene, when the day of the execution arrives, seems like a garden in spring, which in an instant makes a beauty hidden for months blossom.
The shows of the Piccioletta Barca boys are certainly all this, but not only and, perhaps, not above all. Since the first experiment, born from the meeting with Improvvisa Compagna di Vignarello, the idea has never been to open a theater school, nor to organize an amateur company, but – first of all – to tell a story (in 2024 the story of Vajont, in 2025 the theme of energy, this year our journey around the theme of law). In short, we did not intend to do anything other than what we have always done: to intertwine our present with the great stories of humanity and seek in these a way to illuminate the former. The passion for theater came, so to speak, as a second step: for some kids it was overwhelming, for others a welcome discovery, but the group did not gather around the love of acting (only some of them), but around the shared desire to tell stories. At the same time, it is undeniable that this way of telling stories, that of the theatre, is different from all the others for a far from banal reason: not the words, but the body itself, the body on stage weaves the thread of the stories.

Every time the word “culture” is pronounced, inevitably, the intellect, the head, the thoughts come to mind. On the other hand, for several centuries now reading has become a silent operation: if in the fourth century Augustine was amazed to see Ambrose of Milan reading without moving his lips, starting from the 12th century thought ends up being completely separated from the sounds and the bodies that emit them. The same goes for studying: adults’ advice to repeat it out loud is mostly ignored and, when it isn’t, appears to many children to be forced. The idea of ​​the intellectual, then, often takes us back to a slightly hunched character, probably wearing glasses, who has sacrificed physical training and, perhaps, also his passion for his wardrobe to study.
For years, however, in Piccioletta Barca, culture has had to do with bodies: from how we sit to how we dress, from the habit of eating compotes to the resistance of walking in the mountains, from the cheerful beauty of our headquarters to the Christmas tree decorated together. I still remember, on my very first holiday, the enthusiasm of a girl who for the first time discovered what it meant to have dinner all together in a relaxed way, participating in a single conversation, with a well-laid table and lit candles. It is in this space that has been open for many years, made up inseparably of bodies and thoughts, that the theatrical adventure has taken place, which the experience of our Piedmontese actor friends has been able to bring to levels inaccessible to us.

What struck me most about the kids’ show is that – although some are definitely gifted – most of them are not, as they say, born actors. Some, very shy by nature, wanted to play important and exciting parts; others, by nature awkward, had the task of staging delicate and complex movements, almost dance steps; someone, by nature not accustomed to studying poems by heart, has learned difficult lines, without even the help of metric and rhyme. Looking at them, I couldn’t help but think of myself when I was their age: I was clumsy, uncoordinated, I couldn’t do a lot of things. It was a question of body, not of thought or even of feeling. Or, better yet: a question of the body and, therefore (through this), of thought and feeling.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that the place of memory is not the brain, but the hands, feet, arms and legs; according to the great reflection of the German philosopher, one of the evils of modernity was the separation of thought from life and its generative and, at the same time, chaotic energy. The theater experience helped us understand this: the most important ideas become ours only when they pass through the entire body. It is in the body that the slowest but, precisely for this reason, most definitive transformations take place. A thought quickly slips away if it does not enter the flesh.
If the kids were able to stage a non-trivial reflection on the theme of the law it is because their and our bodies were involved. Bodies that every Saturday morning, instead of lazing in bed, get up and make their way to our office, bodies that learn to sit for two hours, to take notes in a notebook, that learn the refined (and rare) art of listening. But also bodies that overcome the embarrassment of speaking, that feel listened to and welcomed. And, above all, bodies that try to do difficult things, things that don’t work at first, that seem beyond their strength, like the works we propose to them. We would be naive if we thought that the miracle of their growth was primarily due to the depth of our reflections: the secret is another. The secret is to allow them to try, to make mistakes, to try again, to laugh when things don’t go as they would like; the secret lies in the certainty that kids can have that our bodies, bigger than us, are always there, no matter what the cost; maybe tired from the long day at work, sometimes a little disheveled from how life is going, but always, always present. Even the contents we offer them are generated by faithful, long work, which is born in our own bodies that read, study, underline, write; the works that we talk about on Saturday mornings have passed through our bodies and our minds: every time we bring them the joy of something that we have discovered and that has thrilled us, first.

In short, what the kids experienced by putting themselves on stage is the magic of theatre, but even before that it is the magic of culture, which is realized every time that something difficult, something that our body is not very good at doing, through tenacious, faithful, but also happy work, suddenly becomes easy. When this happens, then the change is real, stable and everlasting. You wouldn’t even be able to say when and how it happened, but the miracle happened: a thought, an idea, an intuition has finally become yours, so totally yours that it is your own body that puts it on stage.