Paolo Grassi: A Cultural Manager Ahead of his Time

In 2020, being a cultural manager is a fashionable profession. Actually, cultural activity in general is appreciated more for its trendiness than its expansion. Paolo Grassi was a cultural manager ahead of his time. He began his activity around the middle of the 1900s, a period when the combination of culture and economics did not yet exist. He broke down the structure of how theaters were organized in his time, which were the children of closed attitudes linked to Fascism, and he built new ones, aimed not only at artistic growth, but economic growth as well. The idea that took hold during his leadership was that of art intersecting with society, for which it feels a great sense of responsibility. His way of being a cultural manager teaches the need to manage a theater as if it were a business: it is indispensible for the machine to be functional and sustainable. At the same time, in order for a theater to be an effective and efficient business, the person who manages it, before considering the work in a strict sense, must first of all know the world of theater well, with its problems, human dynamics, and difficulties.

In the field of theater, the manager has a very broad task, that does not entail only possessing technical skills and applying them to managing the business, but also requires personal involvement, the result of gradually entering the area of the stage. Without this ethical drive and profound knowledge of cultural work, the manager’s activity would be pure administration, that risks being harmful and sterile. Without careful attention to business continuity, the ethical and cultural drive is unable to produce results. So a cultural manager must be very familiar with the entire mechanism of a theater company and have great passion for its activity, the true essence of the engine that drives it.

In the contemporary situation, it is easy to define Paolo Grassi as a “businessman.” His actions were aimed at guaranteeing the continuity of artistic activities, safeguarding cultural work, but at the same time constructing the reputation and image of the theater among the public: punctuality, cleanliness, and maniacal attention to processes. He recognized the importance of the unitary nature of the company. Thanks to him, the space in via Rovello became the Piccolo Teatro, a brand that would last well beyond the time of those who brought it to life.

The desire to develop a democratic and popular audience drove all of his choices: for the first time the theater sought stakeholders, not settling for people walking through the door, but aiming to identify new resources in both human and economic terms. This seems obvious today, in a time when we speak obsessively of audience development and audience engagement. He did it for his entire professional life.

This way of understanding theater and this pro-active behavior were not common in the institutionalized culture of the time, and even less so in theater, that was a reflection of society. They were the subject of international discussion, however. Paolo Grassi was not part of any European current, but decided to join an international circuit: the theater was not just via Rovello, but all of the places in the world he wanted to reach. This idea is also taken for granted today, both in terms of the geographic range of action, and the importance of communication. Today it seems evident that communication is an integral part of any business project, and we may smile at how in order to draw people to the theater, Paolo Grassi essentially organized flash mobs among the groups of people in front of store windows. For his time, these were radical innovations. Today, artistic personnel and other workers travel and interact with other cultures almost daily, thanks to new means of communication; seventy-two years ago, Paolo Grassi organized the first European tours of the Italian theater.

We remember Paolo Grassi as an innovator who loved theater, who was able to combine institutional and artistic aspects with society, maintaining constant attention to management aspects in the various entertainment businesses in which he worked (Piccolo Teatro, La Scala, Rai), and regenerating that type of work into a new form of democratic, institutional, inclusive, and economically sustainable culture.

"Through theater, I think of everything else," he loved to say. He did not mean only the physical space, which he identified as the theater of via Rovello, but also the filter that can be used to interpret the civil, social, and political world. The theater is the leitmotif that permeates reality, and if followed, reveals its deepest essence.

Many institutions exist today that set the goal of forming young cultural managers. The first is the Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi, founded in 1951 by Paolo Grassi himself, who understood the need for training and the importance of surrounding himself with competent people who could continue his life's work. The Paolo Grassi Foundation also works in this direction: the voice of culture aims to give young people theater and the tools to experience it, to learn and understand in its most playful form; so they can identify the leitmotif of their lives and follow it.

Francesca Grassi promoted and participated in the establishment of the Fondazione Paolo Grassi – La Voce della Cultura as a founding member. As the Chairwoman of the executive committee, she dealt with all of the most important projects carried out by the Foundation.