‘An Old Man Emanating Kindness’: Dario Fo at ISTA, 1996

Extract

In 1996 the Polish theatre scholar Juliusz Tyszka was present at the gathering of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in Copenhagen. Here, Dario Fo – in company with his wife and theatrical partner Franca Rame, also a contributor – was among the few invited to participate in both sessions of the conference: ‘Performers’ Bios: Whispering Winds of Theatre and Dance’ and ‘Theatre in a Multicultural Society’. Though already seventy years old and still in recovery from a recent stroke, Fo was incapable of confining himself to a conventional lecture, but (against his doctor's advice) combined his talk with performing the points he was making, whether imitating the curves of a voluptuous girl or enacting a speech in his universal ‘language’ of ‘gramelot’. He was to live on for another twenty years before his death at the age of ninety on 13 October 2016, outliving Franca Rame by just three years. Juliusz Tyszka, an advisory editor of NTQ and a regular contributor to the journal, is head of the Unit of Performance Studies, Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland.