A Theatre of Many Dimensions: The Italian New Spectacularity and the Inhabitable Image

This essay investigates the use of space in the Italian New Spectacularity of the early 1980s; in particular, it takes as its subject some of the early productions of two companies, La Gaia Scienza (Rome) and Falso Movimento (Naples). In these works the use of theatrical space creates an "inhabitable image"—an image invested in continuously illuminating and crossing between the properties of two- and three-dimensionality, between the properties of real and unreal space. In analyzing these works, the essay explores the resonances between the inhabitable image and the languages of site-specific, intermedial, and immersive practices. It then threads the concept of inhabitability through Fredric Jameson's views on postmodern spatialization, and asks whether these performances could be seen as taking creative advantage of what he describes as a "bewilderment" of the spectator. It concludes with some hypotheses regarding the utopian impulse behind the inhabitable image: the transformed space of the theatre is likened to similar transformations in architecture to wonder whether, although in both fields certain experiments were regarded as fanciful, they were expressions of a kind of utopian thought which, however soft or weak, may still hold political potential.