.
This essay will therefore make one overarching contention, supported by three arguments. Overall, the intention is to demonstrate, through the lens of the theatre, that French anarchism laid the social, political and aesthetic foundations for the subsequent Italian Futurist movement. This will be explained in four ways; firstly, by introducing the idea of the theatre as the most appropriate intersection between the realms of art and life. Secondly, to compare and contrast the relative utopian visions of both movements through their theatre. Thirdly, to illustrate the interactivity between theatre and politics; how both movements aestheticized their politics, and politicised their aesthetics to different ends.
This essay will take theatre, then, as the primary symptom, the litmus test which reveals the relative directions and emphases of both French Anarchism and Italian Futurism. But what is it about the stage, both the interactions performed on it and the audience's engagement with it, that imbues it with the revolutionary potential to intersect the political, social, artistic and utopian domains? One of the theatre's great advantages as a means of communication over other art forms is the engagement of empathy, as Garcia Lorca attests "theatre is poetry that gets up off the page and becomes human. And as it does so, it talks and shouts, weeps and despairs"6. In his essay Engaging Audiences, Bruce McConachie takes a cognitive approach to look at the way audiences psychologically interact with performers, to explore why the theatre is such a powerful social, political and utopian tool. According to McConachie, "spectators do not wait to deploy empathy, but engage it unconsciously right from the start of every performance"7. In this way, empathy bridges the subject/object gap between the stage and the audience, rendering it difficult to categorise, (by nature of the empathetic cognitive links between spectator and performer) as a separate artistic realm, detached from life.