Il corpo archetipo di François Delsarte

Investigating the relationship between bodily movement and internal dynamics, François Delsarte shows how, in the modern individual, the intus/ foris correspondence is polluted by the intervention of ratio and habits that have been consolidated over the development of civilisation. Yet there is a sort of “true” and “sincere” kinetic language, although it is only present in a fragmentary manner in everyday reality and can only be grasped in an intuitive, non-intellectual way. These are gestures that escape the individual will and manifest the affectus in its ideal and archetypal form. Consequently, Delsarte can compose a phonetic-gestural dictionary in which every gesture becomes a perfect echo of the inner activity. This procedure is functional to the training of the actor and the construction of a phonetic-gestural score for a given character, but also, more generally, it is aimed at building a “second nature”, that is, at shaping “other” bodies, different from those contaminated by the historical nature of man, close to the original and archetypal dimension of the human being.