Gianna Cicali

What is the greatest challenge in your field?
One of the greatest challenges is to provide my students with enough background to understand the specific topics. The other challenge is to make my students understand the role of theater in the past. We have an idea of theater, contemporary theater like Broadway for instance, but in the Italian Renaissance in particular theater was a very different thing. There is quite a difference between us and them, the people in the past. It gives us the opportunity to understand the history. Because, through theater, you can approach different disciplines. You can approach literature, art, architecture, history of course … to understand theater, you must have a multifaceted approach. And I have to say that it’s really out of any rhetoric that my experience with Georgetown students has been beyond my expectations. … One of the best experiences is when students come back and love Italian culture and love beauty, but not just for the sake of beauty, but because beauty is a messenger for something else. This is really rewarding. … Working with Georgetown students, I have a lot of optimism for the future.

What is most difficult about teaching?
Teaching, in general, is quite a challenge. It is not just to provide an amount of data, but is to put the data in the right context. And also to understand who are your spectators, who are your students. So, you can’t recycle the same syllabus for every class. Every class will be different from the other. Of course, the structure will be the same, but I think that teaching is also learning. You are not a good teacher, in my opinion, if you are not open to learning from your students. This is my teaching philosophy. When I step into the classroom, I try to always be ready to learn from my students. Here, we have a very good opportunity, because it’s a very international community. You can learn a lot from your students, and hopefully I have something to teach them. Teaching is an exchange. If you want to teach from above to someone who is below, you are a bad teacher. There is always something to share.

What is the most fascinating question in your field?
The most interesting and difficult question, if you look at theater in the past, is how was theater actually in the past? Because we don’t have any video recording! How was a Renaissance play? How was the performance of the actors? This is quite challenging research, because you have to go through many different sources: texts, archival documents, diaries, letters, paintings, and trying to make these different sources communicate with each other within a scientific frame. I would pay I don’t know how much money to have the chance to see a play at the court of the Medici family in Florence during the Renaissance. So, for a historian of theater of the past, our challenge is to put together different sources and trying to reconstruct what the performance was like.

What would be your ideal course to teach?
I would like to have a wonderful Italian actor and Kevin Spacey. Even if he’s not an Italian actor, my ideal course would be on the TV series, “House of Cards.” If I had to be very honest, this course would be entirely on “House of Cards” and Kevin Spacey’s performance. Because I think that his performance is simply sublime. I saw the original BBC series, but I think the American one is far superior, from a dramaturgy point of view, from a rhythm point of view. So, I would like to teach a course (now, I’m joking of course), starting from the origins of theater how we could arrive to this kind of performance. What happened in between?

What drew you to Georgetown? Have Jesuit ideals affected your teaching?
I think and hope that the Jesuit educational way has affected my courses. As I was telling you before, I try not to see the students as just an entity to learn, learn, learn and that’s it. I try to see it in a holistic way that is the way of our Jesuit fathers. For example, if you have a student and you see that the student is not sleeping or is very stressed and you don’t care, you are a very bad professor. Because, even if he or she has a row of As, you should ask if everything is alright and how the schedule can be changed. The dialogue between different cultures is really important, and I try to make the environment in my classrooms really friendly. We are there to share a learning experience. And I hope I succeed.

What would you do if you weren’t in academia?
Years ago, I would have said that I would be a wine farmer in Tuscany. But now, I’m not sure anymore. But something with agriculture, something that grows. I don’t know, fruit, corn, something with real contact with nature.

Interview by Sheena Karkal