Reinventing Drama with Toni Negri: Fragments from Two Working Sessions on Swarm with Barbara Nicolier

Abstract

Antonio Negri's theatrical collaborators Barbara Nicolier and David Tuaillon situate Negri's recent turn to stage drama, which has so far produced the Trilogy of Resistance (Swarm, The Bent Man, and Cithaeron) and the Trilogy of Critique (The Laughing Man, Renzo the Partisan, and Prometheus), in relation to classical Greek tragedy and recent political theater (Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller). In a transcription of their free-form working sessions on Negri's first play, the three discuss a number of intersecting themes and methods: dreams as a source of critical or creative thought and militant organization or action, Buenaventura Durruti and the Spanish anarchists, contemporary forms of alienation and exploitation, the differences between writing Empire and writing drama, typologies of militancy, Brecht's The Measures Taken (also known as The Decision, Die Massnahme), and Müller's Mauser.