When the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville returned from his long voyage to the United States of America in 1832, his study of this nation took the form of a two-volume essay on the country’s newly born political system. In this work, that would become one of the fundamental texts underpinning the contemporary Western world’s political vision, Tocqueville described a new model of representative democracy. Its origins lay in the customs, traditions, ideas and collective thought of these European colonies that had now been liberated and were headed towards a future of refoundation and freedom. American democracy – the first in modern times to be built on a vast scale and with radical intentions – had been established thanks to the phenomenon that Tocqueville defined as its Puritan Foundation – the contribution, that is, coming from Puritan communities in laying the groundwork for a true, evangelical equality between human beings. The topic that truly interested Tocqueville, however, was not America but democracy itself, which he minutely probes with anatomic precision, fascinated by the rebirth in this virgin new world of a political model that had been worn out by the passing centuries in Europe. De Tocqueville observed the potential of a young democracy, even while pointing out its dangers and limits, such as the tyranny of the majority, a weakening of intellectual freedom when faced with populist rhetoric, and the ambiguous relation between collective interests and individual ambitions. At the same time, in the New World, Power once again called into question its own representation. In classical Greece, Tragedy represented the necessary alter ego and the shadow of Athenian Democracy: with Democracy in America Romeo Castellucci follows De Tocqueville’s example and places himself in the time that precedes Politics. Once the Greek root has been severed, we arrive at the time that comes before the Birth of Theatre, in the instant of indeterminacy in which naked feet still tread on the smouldering ashes of the Feast that has by now been abandoned by the Gods, without yet knowing the beginning of Tragedy, created by Man. A work that traces the origin of a forgotten celebration, a rite that still has no name, in which Theatre renovates its primary function: to be the necessary and obscure mirror image of the arena for political struggle, and reflect the forms of society of the human race.

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