From the Venice Ghetto to High Security Prisons: Processes of Spatial and Multilingual Dramaturgies in the Work of Compagnia de’ Colombari

This article looks at the site-specific work of multilingual performance company Compagnia de’ Colombari and examines the transgression of boundaries between audience and performance spaces in a few flagship productions. Led by artistic director Karin Coonrod, Colombari regularly engages with reconfigurations of the canon in relation to adaptation practices and has produced a rich body of work that subverts American and European classics from the vantage point of marginalized cultures and communities. Preoccupied with fluidity and multidimensionality, Colombari has reconfigured the representation of race and gender in several productions. Most notably, texts&beheadings/ElizabethR takes an irreverent look at Queen Elizabeth I by illuminating diverse aspects of her persona, and Strangers & Other Angels, where a transnational and intergenerational company including professionals and amateurs, children and animals are creating an extravagant procession inspired by the medieval mystery plays. As well as casting an African American woman as God and having angels hailing from four continents in this itinerant production across the piazzas of Orvieto, Colombari’s version of The Merchant of Venice interweaves five different performers in the role of Shylock, whose gender, age and ethnic diversity mirrors the multiple perspectives of spectatorship invited by the company and is metaphoric for an inclusive and democratic approach to theatre-making. Drawing on notions of ‘Barrack Dramaturgy’ alongside current thinking on deterritorializing the stage, the article draws attention to process-oriented and montage-based methods that prioritize nomadic, non-linear and non-narrative structures. Thus, it articulates a multidimensional and polyphonic approach and sheds light on the ethos of a company that argues for the porosity of boundaries between space, text, movement and music.