The non-profit organization Il Cane di Pavlov (Pavlov's Dog) was founded in Turin, Italy in 2011, and has been active in the U.S. since 2013.
Its mission is to support interdisciplinary cultural projects in which theater serves as a pivot between cinema, music, literature and architecture to create enhanced theatrical events.
Ultimately, Pavlov's Dog aims at promoting traditional performing arts through exciting, immersive experiences that combine elements of each discipline with an avant-garde twist.
Explore select projects here.
Why the name "Il Cane di Pavlov"?
The name is a reference to the experiments that Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov conducted on dogs in the early 20th century, and which led him to discover what is known as the "unconditioned" or "Pavlovian reflex" – something that also applies to human beings in certain ways.
By associating the offer of food with the sound of a bell, Pavlov tackled dependent/ independent animal behavior and succeeded in getting the dog to react to the sound of the bell in some way or other, even when food was not given.
Testing the spasmodic desire of the animal was clearly a sadistic behavior on the part of the scientist. This calls to mind the process of the artist/ writer. Like Pavlov’s dog, the artist's mind is often a slave to the creative process and to those reflexes that inspiration can produce: the need to come back to the same concepts, to the same words and to the same characters, before being able to pull off a different behavior.
Just as The Dog depends on Pavlov and advances the scientist’s discoveries about behavior, so the artist is often stubbornly dependent on his or her work (he or she is not free of it)—or on whomever commissioned that work—and is only a medium for creating an event to be performed for an audience, and at the service of a community in perpetual transformation.
Associazione Il Cane di Pavlov | Via Carlo Alberto, 18 – 10123, Turin, Italy
CF. 97757440017 | Email