Horacio Czertok Recounts. A Theatre That Breaks Down Walls: “Mir Caravane” in the History of Teatro Nucleo

Abstract

The article introduces, structures and offers an account by Horacio Czertok, the actor and director who founded Teatro Nucleo together with Cora Herrendorf in 1974, of his personal and theatrical journey. The group, one of the best known Italian ‘theatrical enclaves’, originated in Buenos Aires. It had to leave the city in 1976 due to repression by the Argentine dictatorship. Since 1977 it has been based in Ferrara. His story is here retraced by delving in particular into the experience of Mir Caravane, an itinerant festival organized in 1989 with companies from the Western and Eastern blocs, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the French Revolution and before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The account highlights encounters and turning points in the history of the Nucleo, its way of thinking about theatre, its relationship with the Italian cultural context (and with scholars like Fabrizio Cruciani and Ferdinando Taviani) and with literary and theatrical international culture (from Borges to the Living Theatre). The article, which also aims to observe the relationship of a ‘historical’ theatre group with its present, is an attempt to contribute to an ‘internal’ history of the theatre, close to the concrete life of theatremakers.