Santarcangelo 39
International Festival of the Theatre in the square
Thirty-ninth Edition, 3rd-12th July 2009

Artistic direction by Chiara Guidi/Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio with the co-operation of Massimo Simonini/AngelicA
Critical-organizational co-ordination of Santarcangelo 2009-2011: Silvia Bottiroli, Rodolfo Sacchettini, Cristina Ventrucci

I can’t tell whether this is a commonly shared experience, but whenever a sound moves me, then I see.
To tell you the truth, nothing changes in the area surrounding me, but the shape of my thoughts; sometimes a story comes out, but it disappears immediately; sometimes a small tear is opened and the world becomes visible again, only filtered by a sort of amnesia.
Everything happens very suddenly and for a very short time, just like a bird song, it begins and stops, immediately absorbed by the higher leaves from which it came. Nothing is nearer, nothing is clearer, but the space, which was unchanged, undergoes a movement which the memory can store. Yes, the leaves were singing.
I refer to the concrete action, to the complete presence, without a before and an afterwards, the aesthetic experience and not the ascetic contemplation.  Seeing a sound. Seeing versus believing.
Some of us, just like a machine coming out of the soul, can conceive and express  the strength of a space, they can make it possible, visible; this is what happens with the theatre, with the first light appearing on the stage, which is capable of creating a place filled with promise.
Santarcangelo 39 starts here, from this perceptive angle borrowed from music and the theatre is the room where all metamorphoses caused by the exchange between feeling and seeing occur.
Just here, in the first Italian city which, although without a single theatre, managed to establish a theatre festival thirty nine years ago, artists are invited to occupy its gardens, houses and corners. The widening and the bending of such a vision don’t create new areas, but it is possible to see what was already there through new eyes.
For this reason we will occupy Santarcangelo, and, in order to see it as being “immense”, we will have to walk and move along the routes marked by the drawing of the works which will be materialized only here; as a matter of fact, works will remain unknown, hidden into the artist’ imagination until the day they will be displayed.
We will walk along the areas by using the immediate sensation of lost powers, tiredness, as a way of knowledge capable of bending the limbs and curving the trajectory by following the gaseous state of the music in its never-ceasing production of space.
This Festival strongly faces the failure theme deriving just from this evanescence of music which emanates by eclipse.
We might state that there is nothing so far. The strength of this Festival – if any – will be the music which surrenders to the shape impressed by each creative sign made by the listener, like the air cavity surrounding the actor on stage.
Well, in the end, I just wanted to say that you are the artist, you, the spectator.
And perhaps also this: artist, you are a citizen.

Chiara Guidi

Page under construction

progetto grafico Marco Smacchia - ideazione Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio
foto Untitled (Crowd 1), 1992, “City of Shadows” series, Alexey Titarenko, Courtesy of Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York, NY, www.nailyaalexandergallery.com

Santarcangelo dei Teatri
via Costa, 28
47822 Santarcangelo di Romagna
Phone: +39 0541 626185 - Fax +39 0541 620560

Contacts

Artistic Direction Chiara Guidi (2009), Enrico Casagrande (2010), Ermanna Montanari (2011)
Critical-organizational coordination Silvia Bottiroli, Rodolfo Sacchettini, Cristina Ventrucci
Technical coordination Marco Olivieri, Fabrizio Orlandi, Fabio Sajiz
Organization Simona Lombardini
Production Sonia Bettucci
Administration Tonino Rossi
Fund raising Ludovica Parmeggiani