SETTE MEDITAZIONI SUL SADOMASOCHISMO POLITICO (1979) Italian 2-fogli poster
Rome: Commune di Roma, 1979. Vintage original 55 x 39″ (140 x 100 cm.) Italian poster, unfolded, with minor crinkling and surface loss, very good or better.
Poster for a 1979 Roman theatrical run of the Living Theatre, an avant-garde theater company founded in New York City by Julian Beck in 1943.
“Seven Meditations on Political Sadomasochism was a show of street theater which was performed by the company Living Theater since 1973… It is part of a series of Living Theater’s political street theater performances collectively referred to as The Legacy of Cain.
“The spectators were proposed, in sequence, seven types of actions or statements concerning different topics and which had at the base a relationship identified as a sadomasochistic type:
— Sexual love and its dynamics of domination and submission
— Government authoritarianism (slave-master relationship)
— Private property and its influence on human relationships
— The power of money and its ability to dehumanize people
— Law enforcement violence and torture
— Capitalism as a culture of death
— The revolutionary change
“For each of these meditations, after or during a scene, the actors addressed the audience asking the question: ‘What can we do?’ and therefore trying to start a constructive dialogue with them. Particularly impressive was the torture scene, where the actor had to hang from a bar upside down, naked and with an electrode inserted into the anus. This scene brought the Living various accusations of obscenities, but it was now typical of the group to stage real inventories of horror and repression, in an absolutely realistic way.” (Wikipedia)
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