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Yet this overlap is far from a holistic conflation of the two movements, so radically different were their aims. Whilst Futurism tied itself to a strongly patriotic sense of Italian nationalism (a trait that led to a smooth transition into Italian fascist politics of the 1930s), French anarchism, by contrast, prided itself on disengaging with any overarching authoritarianism, be it national or otherwise, and therefore inclined itself towards a more localised, communitarian sense of rebellion. Although their differences are manifold, both movements hold at their centres a desire for revolution in which art is situated as a central protagonist. In both cases, Futurist and Anarchist art became symptomatic of the movements' wider desire for political and social liberation, as Varias puts it, "Paris' fin-de-siècle character was also evident in the struggle for stylistic freedom and aesthetic expression that its avant-garde poets, painters, and sculptors led against the conformist demands and. the rigid, oppressive forces of traditional standards"4. In his essay Avant Garde Theatre Sound, Adrian Curtin outlines exactly how this anarchistic avant-garde approach then impacted Futurist theatre fifteen years later, "these avant-gardists did not wish to maintain theatre as a rarefied space that keeps the world outside the darkened auditorium at a remove. Rather, they wished to incorporate the stuff of the street, the noise of the world, the clash of ideologies, and the richness of the everyday into their performances"5. Curtin here hints at the key role of theatre in bringing together the street and the stage, providing a unique vantage point which allows the viewer to look upon the positions of politics, art and utopia not as compartmentalised but rather as fluidly inter-active within French and Italian cultural systems. The theatre, therefore, will provide the backdrop for this essay in order to understand the cross-disciplinary nature of the three key themes and their relative interpretations under anarchism and futurism.