To describe the human dislocation caused by war, climatic disaster, and economic exploitation in our modern, unequal, globalized societies, Zygmunt Bauman has proposed to speak of “‘human waste,’ or more correctly wasted humans (the ‘excessive’ and ‘redundant,’ that is the population of those who either could not or were not wished to be recognized and allowed to stay).” The presence of “human waste” seems to be an unavoidable feature of the present, something that goes beyond our possibilities for action: “an inescapable side-effect of order-building … and of economic progress.” Bauman nevertheless suggests. way out: “to take another, and somewhat different look at the allegedly all-too-familiar modern world we all share and inhabit.” In other words, the problem should be regarded with. distanced gaze that would “den gesellschaftlich beeinflussbaren Vorgängen den Stempel des Vertrauten wegnehmen, der sie heute vor dem Eingriff bewahrt” (“remove from those incidents that can be influenced socially the stamp of familiarity that protects them against intervention today”). The last statement is paragraph forty-three of the Kleines Organon für das Theater. Short Organon for the Theater) in which Bertolt Brecht placed the task of revealing the world's alterability at the center of the “Theater des wissenschaftlichen Zeitalters” (“theatre of the scientific age”) that he, with an eye to the social sciences, aimed to found.

In what follows,. will show what coming to terms with this aspect of our social reality has meant in the experience of Teatro Due Mondi, an Italian theater group established in 1979 in Faenza (Ravenna), which in recent years has made of the work with non-actors an essential part of its artistic activities.