museum


	tepotratosS [TEatro POpolare TRAdizionale TOScano] Museum of traditional Tuscan popular theatre

Jousts between knights who, chanting verses,
fought each other with wooden swords,
witch-plays, bonfires, rounds with the collection bag,
all these have been called
‘traditional popular theatre’
by learned men
who studied them with detached curiosity
as relics of ancient rituals
kept alive by ignorant peasants.
These learned men did not understand that these customs
of waiting for the spring
and singing in the May
and dancing and duelling in the threshing yard
were a way of living life
and of experiencing beauty and art
a different way to ours,
which can still enrich our world.



					Visiting TEPOTRATOS is not like visiting a museum, it is a sensory experience which carries us back to the atmosphere of popular theatre and to its cultural and social context. The display is set up ‘theatrically’, and you have to be prepared to watch a show, or even to take part in a show, forgetting just for a while the fact that you are in a hurry. In these display rooms, not only are you immersed in the associations created by the voices, sounds and images which emerge one after the other, but you also have to move around following the indications offered by lights which invite you to peek behind wooden walls or which highlight hidden corners that gradually reveal themselves. You are invited, in fact, to interact with what you see, and to let yourself be moved by it.

							The entrance, with its TV screens broadcasting contemporary images from all round the world, is the prologue to this ‘play’ – it is the modern world from which visitors are arriving and which they quickly leave behind them when they enter … … the Camera Obscura, in the play’s first ‘scene’. In the half-light, where you can sit down, you hear voices and noises of activity, you see pictures and objects from a world which no longer exists. The objects have to be tracked down, hidden as they are in niches in the walls, and under the seats, almost like archaeological finds. From time to time, jarringly, modern reality breaks in with ironic advertising messages. The Sound Corridor is Scene 2. You go through a colourful space decorated with pictures of damsels, knights and saints. Voices declaiming poetry from Dante and Ariosto alternate with other voices singing snatches of popular theatre. In fact the stories dramatized in ‘Bruscello’ or ‘Maggio’ theatre are often taken straight from epic poetry and other ‘high’ literature. All you have to do is spend some minutes slowly walking through. The Interactive Room is the biggest and richest of the scenic displays. The room is dominated by two ‘concretions’, sculptures within which articles from peasant life are trapped like fossils. The wooden panels conceal a large collection of peasant working tools and everyday objects. In the well (where you have to step up and look inside) the stream of history is flowing, with brief fragments of rural life. On the floor there are images of the twelve months of the year: by stepping close to them, one by one, you trigger the projection of photographic and filmed records of different types of popular theatre, of the tasks and traditions which occur, or occurred, in Tuscany at various moments of the year. After you have seen December, the lights come on in … … the Transparency Room, to underline the fact that the actors in all these shows where ordinary working men, not professionals. Here there are also some theatrical props on pillars. Then … When you want to see me again, look within your heart, and you will see me, because living things do not die, and we are all branches of the same tree with its roots in the sky.

And to reach where the ‘roots’ are you climb the spiral stair which embraces the oak tree placed in the centre of the building ‘with its roots in heaven, as a sign of hope’. A climb which can be like a series of blueprints, leading to an overall view of the whole museum concept. At the top, you can watch a brief video, composed mainly out of the play which the Poor Theatre of this village put on in the summer of 2002, and which deals with the relationship between the people of Monticchiello and their museum.
Finally the Relief Map Room offers the chance to learn some more about traditional popular theatre. The posters contain quotations from texts written by scholars of popular theatre and traditions; and in the middle of the room a model of Tuscany in relief explains the distribution in time and in territory of the various types of traditional drama. By pressing the buttons beside the relief – each button referring to a different dramatic form you can see relevant parts of the map light up, and read what appears on the monitor screen.
At this point the visit is over, and you can go back to being in a hurry. But first, if you like, you can leave a record of your presence in the Visitors’ Book on the table in the corner.

Thank you!


	tepotratos Monticchiello - Granaio del Teatro

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