Identity, writing, performance: Marco Paolini, actor and author

Marco Paolini is one of the most representative actors and authors of the so called "teatro di narrazione". This article will focalize upon some of the main features of his poetic, as an actor but also as a writer: the complex and articulated dynamics through which he comes to a (more or less) definitive written text, even if when on the stage he shows extraordinary capacities of improvisation; the strong relationship between him and his public, to whom Paolini always addresses consciously and explicitly with gags and "lazzi", also taken from the tradition of Italian popular theatre; the "language of the body" that Paolini uses, on the stage and on the pages of his printed books, and that (in a personal way) mixes Italian, venetian dialects and echoes of poets and writers of the tradition of the Italian literature.