The crucial yet underestimated role played by our bodies in the production of language and culture lies at the heart of the calls for reform in the foreign language curriculum that we are witnessing, especially since the 2007 MLA report stressed the need for a renewed FL curriculum able to produce “educated speakers who have deep translingual and transcultural competence” (“Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World”, 3-4). Performance and theater theories, which have long argued for the co-constitutive nature of discourse and embodied practice, of semiotics and materiality, can definitely help us strengthen this call. Engagement with theater and performing arts in the foreign language classroom has been repeatedly praised for promoting inter- or trans-cultural approaches. Since cognitive psychologists started studying the developmental aspects of drama in the 1950s and 1960s, research on drama in education in general, and in more recent years on drama in foreign language and culture teaching in particular, has been constantly growing; various scholars have analyzed its manifold pedagogical potentials, which include, among many others, embodied learning, the dissolution of cognitive barriers, the fostering of cooperation among students, and the development of critical thinking. My presentation will briefly summarize the work that has been done so far on the topic and will then introduce the educational praxis I am trying to develop for the Italian language classes I teach, which is based on three core pillars: language as embodied practice (from Aristotle’s mimesis to Diana Taylor’s repertoire); language as cultural practice (see Mauss’s understanding of education in particular); and language-learning as liminal play in the classroom’s stage (see Richard Schechner’s conception of liminality and play). In dialogue with what Prof. Marini-Maio has written on empathy (“Re-creating Antigoni: Promoting Intercultural Understanding through Empathy”; published in Dramatic Interactions, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), I argue for a teaching practice that integrates performance in foreign language and culture acquisition through a constant attention to issues of empathy and detachment, a practice inspired by the pedagogical theories of theater practitioners Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal, who both strived to achieve a pedagogy of inclusion aiming at inherently aesthetical embodied knowledge through a removal of the coercive production/consumption economy of the bourgeois theatrical experience built on empathy. The educational potential of artful pedagogy rests in the liberation of thinking that artistic endeavors encourage not when merely witnessed, but when personally experienced. This is what thinking through theatre and performance has to offer to foreign language and culture teachers and learners: the disposition not only to productively problematize everyday life through our minds, but also to explore ideological and cultural structures through our own bodies. 

The theatre, sum of all languages, helps make dialogue possible. 

If I do not understand the word, I understand the gesture; 

if not the gesture, the sound; if not the sound, the silence;

 if not the silence, the tone; if not the tone, the movement. 

If I understand none of that, I understand the whole, 

which is greater than the sum of its parts. 

Our communication is rational, aesthetic and sensory; 

conscious and unconscious. The mind also speaks through the senses. 

(Boal, Aesthetics of the Oppressed, 116-7)