The Revival Of Futurist Theatre In The 1920s

Abstract In the 1920s, Futurist activities flourished throughout Italy and extended to the farthest corners of the peninsula. Year after year, new local branches sprang up in smaller cities and even in provincial towns, with the result that the movement increasingly lost its early character of a compact, centrally funded organization run more or less single-handedly by its original founder. Although Marinetti was still in charge of the headquarters - which he moved from Milan to Rome - he had only nominal control over the large number of artists operating under the Futurist umbrella. Many of the first adherents of the movement had in the meantime gone their separate ways. Quite a few of the remaining artists had changed their political allegiances (often from the Left to the Right). But there was also a new generation of Futurists, usually only in their early twenties, whose political and artistic concerns were very different from the ‘old guard ‘ gathered around Marinetti and the journal Roma futurista. Many of them maintained only loose contact with the headquarters, some even operated more or less independently. Primo Conti remembered the days of internal debates and dissentions: ‘Futurism was like a bar, where you could come and go at will. The thing that attracted us most about it was its anarchical feeling, this sense of unlimited freedom, which also allowed us to be against Futurism.