Teatri del mondo nella città di Grotowski : gli italiani ai festiwal del teatro aperto a Breslavia (1967-1981)

The student theatre conrmunity, which had been developing in Poland since 1954 or thereabouts, rapidly became an important movement of artistic exploration. Until the end of the 1980s, however, the countries of the Eastern Bloc were separated from the West by a political wall. The Communist authorities admittedly wanted to boast of the high quality of the artistic achievements of the Polish People's Republic, which is why student theatres, alongside those of Grotowski, Kantor, Szajna and Tomaszewski, often performed behind the Iron Curtain. This was not, however, a two-way relationship. Polish audiencęs, which had co-created the student theatre movement, rarely had the opportunity of confronting the avant-garde achievements of Western theatres. This situation was changed by the 1967 student theatre festival in Wrocław, whose later editions were called the Open Theatre Festival. For the firsr time Polish audiences saw well-known avant-garde theatres, especiallv those that had shaped the counterculture nlovenrent. The confrontation of their achievements with presentations by Polish groups turned out to be extremely inspiring. From the first edition, Italian groups were among the guests of the festival. The presentations of the Centro Universitario Teatrale di Parnra (Teatro CUT) and the Ouroboros Centro de Ricera Teatrale from Florence seem to be particularly important. In 1969 Wrocław also hosted a visit by the Teatro Libero from Palermo, founded by Beno Mazzone, an extremely radical group at the time. I will attempt to briefly discuss their perfornrances presented at the Wrocław festival, as weil as their impact on the development and transformation of Polish theatre.