A novel transformative approach to Performing Arts Education inspired by P.P. Pasolini's "Manifesto Theatre": An embodied approach to permanent education

This proposal deals with the “Manifesto per un nuovo teatro” (Pasolini 1968) considered for the first time as an innovation for pedagogy and education in both Italy and Europe (Gianeselli 2022; 2023). Pasolini suggests actors to become “transparent on thought”: the “cultural rite” is a permanent workshop for a linguistic, ethical, and political re-education for society. So, the “embodied word”, if properly analysed and actively discussed during and after the action, is the toll for the stimulation of all the different intelligences. Pasolini seems to anticipate in his "Manifesto" the Transformative Learning Theory of Mezirow (1975; 2000), the Trans-Ontology of Nancy (1996; 2019), and the enactive approach. The educational praxis that we suggest through performing arts responds to Mezirow’s aims to transform personal and social bias, beliefs, ideologies, and our research has produced particularly relevant results: about 277 students have obtained a higher level of concentration and a rather relevant activation of their cognitive and metacognitive processes undergoing the training derived from the Pasolini’s Manifesto Theatre. Students have also become aware of the fact that their bodies express a “singular plural” and that they are related to each other. So, this praxis helps to understand how we daily perform a “coming into contact” and a “touching” that is a political act changing our lives and our reaction to otherness. This research, based on a Mixed-Method design, allow to build an educational paradigm that, linguistically analysing the discourses of the performing arts, engages on several themes: from the cogent ones that invest the pedagogy and the psychology of learning to the political, ethical and civic ones, up to those of transfeminism and intersectionality for a society that can make transformation not only its utopian vocation, but its simplex reality (Berthoz 2009) through a conscious embodied cognition.