The essay recalls the experience of body theatre conducted by Michelina Capato Sartore in the Milan-Bollate prison. The project was part of a more
general programme that, based on medium security, considered inmates as people to be re-educated and enhanced, favouring the formation of cooperatives
aimed at fostering activities focused on professional integration, as well as recreational, cultural, and family relationship support. In particular, the cooperative e.s.t.i.a., carried out actions of an artistic, educational and cultural nature.
The theatre training offered by the cooperative proceeded on a dual track: a
technical-artistic direction, which provided detainees with professional training as sound, lighting, and stage technicians, and an educational one, which
trained them as theatre operators in areas of social hardship and marginalisation. Thanks to Michelina Capato Sartore’s extraordinary activity as an artist and
pedagogue, it was possible, within the walls of a prison, to cultivate theatre as the
art of bodies in multiple unforeseeable forms. Thus, the theatre at Bollate, with
its numerous performances and workshops, has constituted concrete and living
proof of the liberating power of theatre.