The Festival Program

...a thought that has characterized this past year of artistic reflection. What does it mean to talk about love, through art, in a world dominated by words like "war," "emergency," "crisis," and "extinction"? What can be the role of art, theater and, in its small way, figure theater in this discourse? This year's Festival attempts to emphasize the theme of inclusivity and confrontation as inescapable roots of daily, peaceful coexistence, and it attempts to do so through one of the richest and most heterogeneous programs, capable of connecting different artistic worlds not only as languages but also as generations. This edition of the Festival, in fact, sees represented all the traditional techniques of Italian Figure Theater and beyond: the puppets, the puppets, i puppets sicilians and the guarattelle Neapolitan puppets. At the same time, they also have in the program a representation of excellence the shadow theater, the theater of objects, the theater on black, and in general the more contemporary panorama of this theatrical world. The confrontation between these languages, however, does not take place in an oppositional dynamic between new and old, between experimental and traditional, but rather intersects these elements by bringing different generations into dialogue. And so, a technique such as traditional puppetry now passes from the hands of a historical family like the Gran Teatro Burattini Niemen to those of the very young Valerio Saccà, the new representative of the Lombard mask of the Meneghino; up to the experience of the Spanish puppeteer Paz Tatay, who will open the confrontation to a European tradition of figure theater. the language of shadows is now proposed in the historical guise of the Teatro Gioco Vita, an internationally recognized excellence, now in that of the more contemporary and emerging company Unterwasser. The themes are also transversal: war, the brutality of war, will inhabit the scene of the "ready-made" objects of Israeli Ariel Doron as well as the shack of Parma puppeteer Patrizio Dall'Argine. Finally, the attempt to "include" in the broadest possible sense will touch on the most sensitive issues of disability with the international project Sixth Sense Theatre, but it will also take the form of broader and more radical thinking and an attempt to open more or less theatrical spaces to a real tout public, capable of welcoming different generations of spectators, without sharp separations between targets and labels. A theater of all and for all, this is our idea of love for this Festival.

The Artistic Direction