From home to stage: creative aging through the Teatro Umano method

This contribution examines practices of creative aging in contemporary theater through the community-based creation method developed by Teatro Umano under the artistic direction of Rita Wengorovius. The study brings together community theater, documentary/autobiographical theater, and body studies with interdisciplinary contributions from cultural gerontology and the neuroscience of creativity, proposing theater as a device of presence, embodied cognition, and the production of social bonds. Based on an action-research approach and qualitative analysis of processes (rehearsals, exercises, biographical materials, emerging dramaturgies, and testimonials), the text discusses how projects such as From Home to the Stage – Creative Aging and Theater by the Phone reconfigure social narratives of old age, shifting older adults from the position of “objects of care” to that of authors/performers and cultural producers. It argues that the aging body, understood as a living and sensitive archive, produces dramaturgy and embodied knowledge, activating a poetics of time that is simultaneously aesthetic, ethical, and political.