The Search for Sinergenza: Creating Theater in a Workshop

To describe the way a performance takes shape within a theater workshop, I often use an image: an explosion in reverse.

An explosion begins at a single point and scatters fragments in every direction. In a workshop, the opposite happens.

At first, the fragments are everywhere: a gesture that emerged during a game, a line spoken in an improvisation, an unexpected character, a movement, a rhythm, an image, or a relationship between two students.

None of these elements yet makes up a performance. Over time, however, they begin to move closer, reshape one another, and converge toward a shared form.

To name this process, I invented a word: Sinergenza.

The term brings together two concepts: synergy, the meeting of elements that together produce something greater than the simple sum of their parts; and convergence, their gradual movement toward a common point.

Sinergenza is not a matter of collecting many fragments and placing them side by side. It means recognizing their possibilities and bringing them together until they form a coherent work, built through everyone’s contribution.

There Is No Picture on the Box

The process may resemble assembling a puzzle, but there is one fundamental difference: we do not have the final picture in front of us to reconstruct.

The pieces themselves have yet to be created, and no one knows exactly what picture they will form.

This does not mean that the process has no destination. The destination is clear: to create a performance that works, that has form, rhythm, and coherence, and that can communicate with its audience.

What I do not know beforehand is the route we will take or the exact form the performance will have when we reach that destination.

The first phase of the workshop must remain open-ended. Materials are generated, possibilities are explored, and unexpected paths are followed.

Worrying about the final form too soon can bring the exploration to a halt. If every exercise has to confirm an idea that has already been decided, the students are not creating: they are merely supplying the workshop leader with material that the leader has already chosen to use.

At a certain point, however, that movement must change.

As the performance date approaches, the fragments must begin to converge. They need to be observed, revisited, transformed, and connected.

If convergence begins too early, it stifles discovery. If it never begins, the result remains a collection of exercises without a form.

Sinergenza emerges from the balance between these two movements: first allowing the fragments to come into being, then finding a way to bring them together.

The Workshop Leader Knows the Destination, but the Route Changes Every Time

I explain it like this in my workshops:

“I am like a guide. I know where we need to go; it is the route that changes every time.”

When the people change, the journey inevitably changes. Every group has its own energies, abilities, vulnerabilities, imaginative worlds, and ways of relating to one another.

When I begin working on a performance, I genuinely do not know what it will become. I allow the participants to amaze and surprise me, because the process must grow out of their responses.

This does not mean giving up responsibility for the outcome.

I guarantee that we will reach the destination. It is my responsibility to recognize the route as we travel it, keep the work from scattering, and guide the fragments toward a performance that works.

This is exactly the opposite of what happens when the workshop leader already has a finished script, knows what every scene should look like, and tries to steer the participants toward the result already in mind.

That is mediation reduced to its lowest level.

The workshop leader may still produce an orderly performance, but they are not teaching the participants to create theater. They are teaching them to reproduce the leader’s theater.

Where there is no awareness, students become tools in the adult’s hands. They are not the active authors of the process, as they should be.

A guide knows the destination but observes the people they are accompanying and chooses a possible route with them. A guide does not put them on a bus and drop them off in front of a result that has already been built.

Recognizing the Fragments

The workshop leader must observe what emerges, recognize the fragments that possess theatrical power, and remember them. The leader must then bring them back, develop them, place them in relation to other material, and find the point at which they can fully express their value.

Once, during a workshop with elementary school children, we were looking for questions that a curious giant might ask while observing nature.

A child said:

“But are butterflies flowers that have learned to fly?”

I could not have prepared that line in advance. I could not have asked for it or predicted it.

The child had not created a complete scene. They had created a fragment of beauty and theater.

The workshop leader’s task is to notice it. The leader must know how to preserve it, develop it, and place it where it can enter into dialogue with everything else.

If I had already been working from a fixed script and toward a predetermined formal destination, that line might never have found a place. I would have lost exactly what keeps a workshop alive: the possibility that a participant might create something I could never have imagined.

Not Beautiful or Ugly, but Well Made or Poorly Made

In my work, I often repeat that in theater there is no such thing as beautiful or ugly; there is only what is done well and what is done badly.

A fragment created by a student is not wrong simply because it does not immediately fit with the others. It is not the student’s responsibility to know where it will belong in the final construction.

That responsibility belongs to the workshop leader.

If the fragment appears fragile, confused, or disconnected from the rest, the leader must work on it, transform it, and find the form and position that will allow it to work.

There are no useless contributions. There are only contributions that the workshop leader has not yet understood or has not worked on deeply enough.

This does not mean that every proposal must remain exactly as it first appeared. A gesture can be given to another student, a line can return in a different context, and two ideas can merge and become something that no one had imagined alone.

The fragment’s value remains. Its form and placement may change.

Different Responsibilities, Shared Authorship

Every student is a co-creator, called upon to produce fragments of theater. The workshop leader is responsible for recognizing and assembling them in the best possible way, giving them a clear, coherent, and artistically sound form.

The two roles are distinct but complementary.

Co-creation does not mean that everyone must decide everything, that every choice must be put to a vote, or that the workshop leader must give up artistic responsibility.

It means that the performance genuinely grows out of the material produced by the students, rather than from a finished project that the workshop leader later tries to make look collective.

In my practice, this approach ensures that the students feel fully involved.

From the first session, I am clear and honest: I do not prepare the performance in advance and then find a way to make them like it, one way or another. The performance will grow out of the work we do together.

The students recognize this. They can see that I do not have a hidden solution toward which I am trying to steer them. They see their proposals enter the process, evolve, meet one another, and become essential to the final construction.

That is why they recognize the performance as something they genuinely helped create.

From the First Fragments to Autonomy

With younger children, much of the material emerges during play before they recognize it as theatrical material.

A child may intentionally invent a gesture, transform an object, or create a relationship without yet knowing that the discovery can be repeated, modified, and incorporated into a larger construction.

The workshop leader takes that fragment and gives it back to the child and the group. The leader has them repeat it, connects it with another action, and shows in concrete terms that it can become theater.

This is an initial form of authorship. The child discovers that what they have created does not disappear when the game ends, but can be recognized, shared, and transformed.

With age and experience, students learn to generate material more and more intentionally. They begin to recognize for themselves what works, revise their own proposals, and connect them with those of others.

Gradually, part of the composition process can also pass into their hands.

The workshop leader’s ultimate goal is not to make students dependent on the leader’s ability to recognize and assemble. It is to accompany them until they can build their own theater independently and with full awareness.

When the Fragments Become a Work

Sinergenza is not a magical moment when everything fits together without difficulty.

It requires observation, experimentation, transformation, and precise choices. A gesture may pass from one student to another. A line may take on a new meaning. Two apparently distant fragments may suddenly find a connection.

At some point, the group stops talking about “my scene” or “my idea” and begins to recognize the performance as a shared work.

That is when the explosion reassembles itself.

The students do not disappear into the final form. They can recognize their own fragments while also seeing that those fragments have become part of something that no one could have created alone.

The destination has been reached, but the route could never have been predicted.

This is Sinergenza.