The acting movement in the sketches by Duilio Cambellotti for Syracuse

Abstract

The role of the theatre director is a recently established figure. In fact, since the time of the Greek tragedians, it is mostly the author himself who gives the actors gestural indications, while a real geography of almost recurrent and stylized movements is most often noted laterally or incidentally in the text.At the beginning of the twentieth century, the extension of the visual imagery and the taking charge of the historical repertoire require the care of a more complex directorial institution, especially when the author is no longer present to give indications, nor his annotations in the margins of the text are any longer sufficient to define a movement that is no more just convention.
When the Roman artist Duilio Cambellotti (1876-1960), designs the scenes for the first editions of the Ancient Drama Season at the Teatro di Siracusa, from 1914 until 1948, the role of the director is not yet institutionalized, al-though it was recognizable the need for a stylistic and technical guide to the movements of actors. So, many times the scenic sketch, almost as a necessity, prefigures the move-ments of the director, not only from the technical point of view of a simple "geography" of stage, but above all from the stylistic point of view, in a visual and gestural unity.
Through the examination of some sketches by Duilio Cambellotti, the paper highlights how this practice is symptomatic of the prevalence of the interpretive aspect over that textual and how the visual project of the show is no longer the result of a single worker (generally anchored to the pictorial magisterium), but rather the result of a multiple synergy between three-dimensional and four-dimensional apparatuses