The Italian League for Theatrical Improvisation, draws on many years’ experience in the field of communication in the business sector. Based on the relationship between actors and audiences, it is transferred to the relevant contexts through the flexibility of the methodology of improvisation. The character specific to this type of theatrical training – which has also become a basic choice in the practice of work in our company – is a playful approach in the broadest sense of the term. Agood improvvisatore is capable of finding solutions to unexpected situations, making decisions, using the information and abilities one possesses (creativity, intuition in actions and relationships, the ability to listen, the experiences that underlie everyone’s training and experience). The essential features of the work on improvisation can be summed up as follows: Communication, Creativity, Listening, Integration, Action on the Styles of Relationships and Contact, Action on the Dynamics and the Cohesion of Work Groups. Fields of application to business range widely: from convention to training and intervention in the social field. This approach does not form part of the traditional methodologies of intervention in business, but it supplies tools that are well-suited to the new needs. It responds innovatively and effectively to changes in the quality of business relationships and enables staff to cope with and manage creatively the difficulties imposed by the rapid and continuous transformations of society.

This paper runs through some personal memories of almost twenty years and the evolution of the relationship between the theatre and business with its needs in training, communication and problem-solving. It ranges from the period when ‘Business Theatre’ did not constitute either a clear and experimentable concept, and even less a conflict of copyright until the subsequent emergence and progressive development of a new practice that saw theatres and businesses open their doors to each other, often through the mediation of the immense archipelago of training. And with the memories there emerge questions and also doubts that have accompanied my exploration of a territory at first unknown and alien and then gradually more familiar, interesting and stimulating. There follow, finally, some concluding observations that are intended as a small contribution to a discussion with a great variety of accents and points of view, about the present expansion of the phenomenon, which is as dynamic as it was slow in germinating in Italy.

Activating theatrical communication in a business, both as a premise for the creation of a real community of workers and as the result of a possible community in action, satisfies the profound urge for relationships inherent in today’s society and world. A ‘bottom up’ business theatre can help to eradicate the roots of disquiet and malaise and restore the circulation of an ethical paradigm, starting from the aesthetic experience of an enacted and participatory theatre, not merely contemplated, so restoring the individual to his/her reality, infusing new strength and bringing about change.

The new hero of our time is the homo sentiens, bulimically in quest of a hyper-emotive dimension. After the aegis of rationality, emotion is therefore the key word for our century and its unceasing motion is a manifestation of individualism. But the emotional sphere lacks the complexity of the affective sphere, which pertains to collective dynamics, debate and dialectic. Individual expression and collective requirements are the nodal points of the business theatre experience, a form of training that acts on the business universe to reveal the web of connections between the Self, the Other and Reality. The case history examined is based on many years’ work with the Gruppo Norman, an Italian group for the dynamic management of real-estate assets, a firm with a strongly humanistic culture. The paper ranges from creative workshops to the foundation of the first Permanent Business-Theatre Company, which staged the theatrical production Rumors, freely adapted from William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, at the Teatro dell’Arte-CRT in March 2006.

A small web agency is taken over by a big firm. The staff is expanded with the arrival of new professional figures and the consequent necessity of forming a team in which roles and responsibilities are clearly defined. To overcome the problems of relationships, a series of encounters are proposed to the people involved in the process of transforming the business. The encounters are structured making use of the techniques of a theatre workshop, with a close concern for interpersonal and group dynamics. The introduction of the sphe- re of role play and performance made it possible to deal indirectly with critical situations and accelerated an otherwise long and laborious process.

Numero tre del 2005 della rivista "Comunicazioni Sociali"

This paper is a first step towards a systematic study of amateur movies from the technological point of view. While they follow a marginal path – though, on the temporal level, one that parallels mainstream cinema – amateur movies have existed and developed ever since movies were first invented. There were many attempts by the industry to ‘shrink’ film into a smaller format that would be cheaper and more accessible and extend the market for sales of film together with projectors and movie cameras, but most of them were failures. The historic breakthrough for amateur films came in 1922: the almost simultaneous introduction of safety film in 16mm format by Kodak and 9.5mm by Pathé spread amateur movie-making across the United States and Europe. Then in 1932 came 8mm film, which partly ousted them and remained the standard amateur format until 1965, when Super8 appeared and ushered in home movie-making as a mass phenomenon in some countries until it was pushed aside by video technology.

From the end of the Twenties, the motion picture company Pathé-Baby begins to distribute its own products in Italy. Despite the difficulty to supply an exact description of the diffusion of Pathé-Baby’s appliances in Italy, this essay aims at going through the kind of offer, the forms of promotion and the conversational level reached by the amateur practice and, eventually, the figures and institutions that, until the mid-Thirties, constantly used, though not in a widespread way, motion-picture cameras, projectors and their attachments manufactured by Pathé-Baby.