Abstract

Starting from the appearance of pop music, in the middle of the last century, new hybrid performative models find within the theatrical tradition an antecedent. This paper aims to take in consideration some notions developed in the last twenty years within cultural studies, theater mediology and performance to test their functioning and the their hold to understand pop performance. We will therefore examine the notions of intermediality performance, post-operistic theater, and gestus to figure out how they work concretely starting from the work of the Roman performer Achille Lauro. Lauro’s performances are paradigmatic cases ad they function as litmus paper to understand not only the performer’s work but at the same time the functioning of pop performances and their relationship with social reality. Furthermore, pop performances allow us to understand some mechanisms of the construction of identity both on the social and medial level, showing how in them we are always faced with hybrid models of production of meaning that act on the intermedial and transmedia level.