2 of 3: The Initiatory Magic of Franca Rame

Hi again dear Earthlings:

as promised, here goes the second visit of my mentor and initiator Franca Rame.

Enjoy!

The Initiatory Magic of Franca Rame

The second visit was on the occasion of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Dario, in 1997. His awareness of his wife’s talent and lack of embarrassment at publically recognizing it turned on my interest in them again. I never had the shadow of a doubt that the Prize was deserved. I just realized how often collaborative efforts are overlooked in the arts and humanities. And was

impressed with his eagerness to redress this. I thought, “well, perhaps now he knows his wife is an author, and they’ve co-evolved as a dyad to feel comfortable about it.” This compelled my attention for an article on the integration of their respective creative energies in works that neither could have managed without the other. The result was the article “From The Lady Is to Be Disposed of to An Open Couple: Franca Rame and Dario Fo’s Theater Partnership.” In Open Couple, I felt an affinity for Franca’s character, and her obsessions with her partner’s affair-persons. Their pheromones were in the air, and “pussies” were hiding everywhere: in a shoe, on the soap bar. She sensed their sadness and felt called to rescue them, as I also have in my early experiences of amorous inclusiveness. This guided me to appreciate the rhetoric of polyamory, a responsible form of non-monogamy that assuages competition and rivalry. The lovers of one’s lovers are called “metamours,” or lovers by interposed person.

In the interim period between then and now, I became interested in the creative output of their son Jacopo Fo. I designed a research project around the intentional community

of Alcatraz, visited repeatedly and wrote about it. I was curious: “how would someone growing up in a theater family handle communal life?” As I found out, Jacopo invented Alcatraz as the answer. It combined the joy of living in nature with the expanded sense of “family” that theater companies are organized around. It offered education in the arts of loving and sexual expression within a closed dyad. And training in the arts of keeping one’s personal ecosystem healthy and well balanced. It was for me a step in the path of exploring forms of sexual fluidity and amorous inclusiveness that respect the integrity of dyadic relationships, and their respective cultural variants. That resulted in the article “Holistic (Dis)Organizations: Gaia at Alcatraz, Italy,” in the open-source journal Rhyzomes, 2005. All of this helped me assess a cross-cultural understanding of intentional and open lifestyles and eventually coalesced in my overarching interest in Ecosexuality.

To be continued a week from now. Come back for the “second visit” on December 2, 2014.

Namaste,

SerenaGaia

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, PhD

Author of Gaia, Eros, and many other books about love
Professor of Humanities, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez

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