In 1972 the outskirts of Turin were all fields and farmhouses, barns and cattle, the last pastures. There was a peaceful invasion in one of these enormous farms that had long been uninhabited. There were very many of the Granserraglio gang, with the help of the “Gruppo dei Cinque di Torino”.

The farmyard was our home for several months. The sleeping bags that we laid down took up the exact same places as those of the original tenants – the cows. We hooked our little lights onto the long linear hayloft and they lit our long interminable nights of invention and of political and artistic discussions. There were ideas on top of ideas to check the day after in that place, in that same place. The Spettacolo in Cascina was the Granserraglio’s first total theatre performance and carried strong environmental implications. Everything that remains of the farm was used, from the enormous threshing floor to the roofs, from the barns to the numerous windows of the inner facades, and from the hay loft to the manure pile. It was a performance staged on a shoestring. Its signs and symbols looked forward to the way of understanding the staging that was to come. It was environmental theatre, happening, performance, painting, music, gesture, dance, and sculpture without borders or limitations. This was the stepping stone to our future way of acting.