2011

Since I started thinking about the festival, the figure of the actor has been the guiding image of all my inquiries: the actor as a concrete emblem of doing-undoing-redoing, the actor who brings in the spectator, without whom there's no theatre. Now the skeleton and measure of the stage, now crisis point, now off-key, now margin, forme the actor is word-chasm, with the anarchic rigor of his voice: a "coming forth', the manifestation of being, in its modesty, in its indecipherable sexuality. The actor eludes the tracing for novelty and, as an expert of the emotions, knows how to draw us into the depths of the psyche. We're not talking about tradition and avant-garde, which in most people's eyes are useless categories. We're not talking about weight: the actor has no weight in the merrymaking of the media. On the contrary, what strikes me is his airy being, his riding along brazenly and lightly. In ancient Greece actors were called "technicians of Dionysus": the "technique" was at once art and knowledge, the word indicating the creative and constitutive act of theatre. Now, at last, I have the mop of this year's festival In front of me: It hasn't been a conceptual itinerary for me but, if anything, a tortuous peregrination, letting thunderbolts of theatre pass through me, with the Intention of devising and accompanying brief hiatuses suggested by or to the artists, a work, a reflection, an ongoing research. The nature of Santarcangelo zoos is "choral; and not only because there will be many choirs shrouding the town, the political horizon of that community to which theatre has alluded since its origins: choral is the same way in which the whole design has taken form, in the dialogue I've assiduously held with the artists over these years. And at some time, the festival also reveals a clearly "vertical" nature: the choirs will be alternated by monads, the world-figures of artists whose solitary work questions us overbearingly. A verticality made evident by its meandering from theatres to piazzas, to balconies, to gardens, to winding ravines populated by actress-singers and musicians, right down to the "muezzin" of poetry who, every evening at twilight, will be singing his "thanks" incomes from the civic tower, the highest point of the town.

ERMANNA MONTANARI
Artistic Direction

July 8 - 17, 2011