Poesia in atto: Summoning the Body, The Originality of the Voice, The Presence Condition in Act of the Totus Corpus

In the beginning, poetry was an art expressed through oral composition and song; a practice that was passed down from generation to generation. It was committed to memory with no physical transcription. The invention of the syllabary by the Sumerians (4000 B.C) led to new achievements, allowing for abstract and intangible concepts to be conceived and written. Reading and writing began and spread, and from this point on, poetry began its evolution from oral to written. Poesia in atto, as a post-performative poetry, with an etymological and ontological approach examines Mesopotamian and ancient Greek poetry, some of the Marinetti approaches in futurism, Antonin Artaud’s space poetry, and the Performance poetry of the eighties in America. The term Poesia in atto was used for the first time in the Italian language in the PhD thesis of Leili Galehdaran, in the Sapienza University (Rome, Italy) between 2009 and 2013. The English term chosen is ACTIOn Poetry. Actio is a theater acting technique that incorporates all the factors of the metalanguage, tone, gesture that accompany the speech. This descriptive article (extracted from a thesis based on descriptive - empirical method) through an etymological and ontological approach, examines poetry between Mesopotamia and ancient Greece, some of the approaches of Marinetti's futurism, Antonin Artaud's space poetry and American performance poetry of the 1980s. It presents characteristics and parameters, new and integrated, which are the result of a rereading of theoretical essays and speeches and of the product of the poet's personal experience. The explanation of its principles and particularities was done through trial and error and laboratory analysis on poems, exercises and tests before the performances and during their execution. To obtain the personal acting ability, the scope of the essays has been expanded thanks to experimental studies on the works of others; Works that were not in the field of poetry or performance poetry but theatrical works that were produced with the artistic research of post-dramatic theater groups that worked on poem as a theatrical text and focused on sound, voice, music and noise as well as on auditory aspects and have been studied on a case-by-case basis. Thus, for the section of voice, vocalism and acting, Ermanna Montanari, the actress of the Teatro delle Albe, was taken as a perfect example to study and imitate. For the section of the body, the opinion of Cesare Ronconi, director of the Teatro Valdoca was chosen as a good example for studying the body. For the sound and noise section, a work by Chiara Guidi of the Sosciètas Raffaello Sanzio was chosen to deepen the techniques and classify the types of sounds, noises and listening. Poesia in atto is a post-performative poetry based on the ancient foundation of orality, rhetoric and Khonyagari (minstrelsy), and its Trinitarian components are body, voice and presence. Poesia in atto is a poem extracted from the voice and the present and living body of the poet, for the present and living body of the public, therefore it is the art of the body and not just the art of language. It is a poem that, while being free from pen and paper in its composition, not only has all the formal components of poetry in general, but also has something more than what existed in its essence and origin but has retained itself in the time and in the domain of writing. The poem in act is a poem of singing aloud, and since writing is no longer the main and pivotal factor of the poem, other parameters such as: voice, sound, noise, music, gesture, mimicry, movement, space and light in the poetry composition process have the same value as language, and this value of the elements leads to the construction of a plural body, a multidimensional space and, ultimately, a totus corpus in action which is poetry. Therefore, considering the fundamental and innate differences between Poesia in atto and Performance poetry and the misconceptions that their performative commonalities create, this article introduces Poesia in atto and discusses the following: What are the differences between Poesia in atto and Performance poetry? The main differences can be noted between Poesia in atto and Performance Poetry, which are rooted in the foundation of the poem: In Poesia in atto, as in Performance Poetry, the poet is not whom that performs the poem, but is an intertwined and transformed part of totus corpus; Language in ongoing poetry has changed the genre of poetry; The executive structure of the Poesia in atto derived from this language which has been a change of genre is not something subsequent and added to the post-compositional process; therefore, although the executive structure of the Poesia in atto is more intertwined in the language, and the totus corpus is more complete and united, only one executive form will be possible for a poem. The results obtained in this descriptive article reveal that Poesia in atto is not a performance of written poetry. Instead, it is a poem inseparable in its performative structure and incomparable in its components of body, voice, and presence. Poesia in atto is created in Totus Corpus (a total body), inseparable from its components, all at once to re-embody the essence of poetry in the presence of the audience through performance. One of the literary achievements of Poesia in atto is the expansion of literary techniques and the invention of new metric of poetry which also offers a new art of rhetoric.