A city completely overwhelmed by the joy of living where imagination would take over from reason was an unconfessable fantasy of mine that I saw mostly realized in the festival convened at the end of the Seventies by CRT, Research Center for the Theater, where comedy and clowning were the most important aspects: buskers and bunglers came out of the circus tent to put on a show in the streets of the Chiesa Rossa district, on the outskirts of Milan.
It was not simply a matter of ignoring the tradition of the theater with its stage, but of confusing the scenes with real life and the response of the spectators was complete and liberating. After all, aren’t we all actors of tragedies, comedies and melodramas even in our daily lifes?
We were spectators of a new upside-down theater, full of oddities, in the middle of abandoned meadows and farmhouses, where the monotony of things was radically changed; the actors of that free and experimental show came from all over Italy and Europe, and, without being agitators of the people but making people laugh, they stimulated that critical sense still present in people that substituted imagination for logic, improvisation for direction, gesture for words.