«Appunti da un sogno». Tra narrazione e messinscena di sé: un’esperienza.

Between May 2013 and September 2014, 23 people met every Tuesday in a small theatre in the city of Oristano, Sardinia. They formed a rather heterogeneous group of women and men (it included some patients at Oristano’s Mental Health Centre, some healthcare professionals, a painter, and two actors), who gathered weekly to share ep- isodes of their lives. Eventually, in that space of liberty centred on the exploration and narration of the self, small dramatized fragments of life interwove up to the point of becoming a movie. These pages attempt to recount what happened within this free, creative workshop, and assess the methodological considerations which preceded (and followed) this experience of self-narration, self-care and self-staging. The aim of my contribution – which has the hybrid nature of both a narrative and critical writ- ing – is to shed light on some mutual correspondences between autobiographical methodology and acting practices (the search for sensory and emotional memories; the processes through which memory is recalled, manipulated and led from a descrip- tive to a symbolic level; the importance of the relational dimension) and to highlight their fruitful cooperation in considerably problematic contexts, in which individuals mostly need to give new meanings to their existential path.