The Living Theatre Archives at the Fondazione Morra house a range of materials pertaining to the theatre group from 1969-2015. The collection began with the numerous events promoted and organised by the Foundation from 1995, when the Company staged two performances at the Teatro Mercadante in Naples, then, in 2003,the exceptional retrospective Living Theatre: Labirinti dell\u2019Immaginario, with poetry readings, concerts, happenings, and the world premiere of Enigmas, supporting the production and dissemination of their theatrical and artistic work up to 2015.<\/p>\n
The Living Theatre Archive at the Fondazione Morra consists of texts, documents, notes and correspondence,and the personal writings of Judith Malina as well as photographs and slides, posters, invitations, newspapers, books, magazines and video recordings. The collection also has a large section dedicated to costumes and props from some of the performances, in particular The Yellow Methuselah, and Masse Mensch.<\/p>\n
The Fondazione Morra, always keen to promote artistic heritage as the basis for a different approach to research in late twentieth-century performing arts, has engaged Prof. Lorenzo Mango, Professor of History of Modern and Contemporary Theatre at the Orientale University of Naples and Director of the Theatre Department of the Nitsch Museum in Naples, to set up the Living Theatre Archive. This archive, in addition to constituting a home for documents, will be a Living Archive with the aim of keeping the group\u2019s work alive, but also \u2013 moving beyond mere conservation \u2013 inspiring activities of various kinds in the spirit of the Living Theatre\u2019s idea of theatrical revolution.<\/p>\n
Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n The Living Theatre (founded by Judith Malina and Julian Beck in 1947) is one of the theatre groups that contributed most to shaping the identity of theatre in the second half of the twentieth century. It is no exaggeration to argue that contemporary theatre would not have been the same without the Living Theatre. The Living Theatre was founded in the late 1940s in the United States by a young painter, Julian Beck, and Judith Malina, the most inventive and audacious student of Erwin Piscator\u2019s Dramatic Workshop, and distinguished itself from the start thanks to its love of experimentation, innovative staging, and the creation of a theatre where the technical and formal are closely tied to life itself. For the Living Theatre, the terms \u2018art\u2019 and \u2018life\u2019 have always overlapped to the point of becoming indistinguishable. If this was particularly evident in the 1960s, when the Living Theatre, upon moving to Europe, brought about a radical shift in the way theatre is understanding and practiced on our continent, the desire to blend art and life is a concept implicit in the name the company chose to adopt: living theatre.<\/p>\n The archive<\/strong><\/p>\n The Fondazione Morra has acquired a substantial part of the Living Theatre Archives, a precious and unique testimony of their history. Living Theatre archive material can be found in various parts of the world, but that of Naples is, together with those of the University of Yale and the Lincoln Center in New York, the most complete. The three archives integrate to form a comprehensive documentation of the Living Theatre\u2019s work.<\/p>\n The Living Theatre Archive in Naples is, therefore, a documentation centre of global importance.<\/p>\n\n