2014
11 - 20 luglio
direzione artistica SILVIA BOTTIROLI
codirezione artistica Rodolfo Sacchettini
BECOMING TIGER, BECOMING CLOUD
A festival is or might be an invitation to leave ourselves behind, not in order to become someone else but to simply become: a pure movement of abandonment towards what we are or what we know and openness to a possible future.
First and foremost, Santarcangelo 14 is an invitation to become a tiger, non-tamable animal whose intense gaze is impossible to defy and whose sheer presence turns any kind of landscape into a forest. As a tiger, the festival becomes a universe, a complex discourse that measures itself with theatre and, more challengingly, with reality. It becomes a wild creature that holds its head up high, never backs down and never gives up. Many of invited artists deal with history and the political dimension: they affirm the centrality of the theatre as the place of the radical, revolutionary and childish interrogation of what was and what might have been otherwise (La Re-sentida); they tamper with the celebration of the past and with European geography by facing the present with eyes wide open (Valtor Stlis and Teatro Sotterraneo); they transform the public space into a dangling and fragile stage where, between politics and fiction, one can elaborate possible ways of experiencing the future (Motus). Others focus on the community and on the scene as the place where it is their turn to speak: they orchestrate a chorus with our incessant talking (L'Encyclopedie de la parole); they present themselves, unexpected guests, in non-theatrical contexts inviting each and every one of us to think of new possible politics, of new ways of cherishing out relations (Sarah Vanhee). in other cases still, reflecting the design of this year's program that is strongly centered on certain actorial and theatrical extremes, they abandon both scene and representation in order to adventure into other spaces and practices related to the act of inhabiting, the construction of an architectural habitat or an intent involving a specific location. They transform the piazza, both center of the festival and the city, into a meeting point where spaces are constantly reformulated (Mael Veisse); they involve architects and landscape designers and invite the citizens to re-think certain locations in form of possible "moving gardens" (Leonardo Delogu / Dom, with Gilles Clement and CoLoCo); they transform Santarcangelo's elementary school into a temporary exhibition, an immense installation that gives voice to both individual and collective memories and traces an intricate map of existence (Are you lost?).
Santarcangelo 14 is also an invitation to become a cloud, atmospheric dimension, climatic variation, fragile and powerful creation, a moment of pure potentiality, As a cloud, the festival operates a sudden change of temperature, and triggers an unsteadiness that allows us to propel into the unknown. It is a phenomenon that can appear only in a state of risk and loss of control, as suggested by the Piattaforma Della Danza Balinese, imaginary space founded on imaginary resources, inhabited and shared by artists and curators. It is first and foremost a trap that sweeps everything it encounters into a generic, open exoticism, simultaneously engaging in a rigorous and political discourse about dance. Even the ephemeral Nomadic School behaves like a climatic perturbation, landing in Santarcangelo with a work that borrows its title from French artist Pierre Huyghe's film The Host and The Cloud.
The numerous works that have chosen the festival as their origin live suspended hanging onto the realm of the possible. As we write they are suspended into the opacity and turbulence of the “before”, and while coming to life they will transform Santarcangelo into a city in state of creation: a temporary collectivity that does not strive for a recognizable identity that rather for the act of going out, of throwing itself into an adventure.
In the limited spaces of a reality that offers no escape and in the predetermined finiteness of its unfolding, a festival can, or maybe has to, foster bravery and uncertainty, in order to conjure an act of imagination of the possible, of surrender to the unpredictable.
Now, it is up to us, each and everyone and all together, to respond to this invitation becoming a tiger, becoming a cloud.
Download the catalogue
direzione artistica SILVIA BOTTIROLI
codirezione artistica Rodolfo Sacchettini
BECOMING TIGER, BECOMING CLOUD
A festival is or might be an invitation to leave ourselves behind, not in order to become someone else but to simply become: a pure movement of abandonment towards what we are or what we know and openness to a possible future.
First and foremost, Santarcangelo 14 is an invitation to become a tiger, non-tamable animal whose intense gaze is impossible to defy and whose sheer presence turns any kind of landscape into a forest. As a tiger, the festival becomes a universe, a complex discourse that measures itself with theatre and, more challengingly, with reality. It becomes a wild creature that holds its head up high, never backs down and never gives up. Many of invited artists deal with history and the political dimension: they affirm the centrality of the theatre as the place of the radical, revolutionary and childish interrogation of what was and what might have been otherwise (La Re-sentida); they tamper with the celebration of the past and with European geography by facing the present with eyes wide open (Valtor Stlis and Teatro Sotterraneo); they transform the public space into a dangling and fragile stage where, between politics and fiction, one can elaborate possible ways of experiencing the future (Motus). Others focus on the community and on the scene as the place where it is their turn to speak: they orchestrate a chorus with our incessant talking (L'Encyclopedie de la parole); they present themselves, unexpected guests, in non-theatrical contexts inviting each and every one of us to think of new possible politics, of new ways of cherishing out relations (Sarah Vanhee). in other cases still, reflecting the design of this year's program that is strongly centered on certain actorial and theatrical extremes, they abandon both scene and representation in order to adventure into other spaces and practices related to the act of inhabiting, the construction of an architectural habitat or an intent involving a specific location. They transform the piazza, both center of the festival and the city, into a meeting point where spaces are constantly reformulated (Mael Veisse); they involve architects and landscape designers and invite the citizens to re-think certain locations in form of possible "moving gardens" (Leonardo Delogu / Dom, with Gilles Clement and CoLoCo); they transform Santarcangelo's elementary school into a temporary exhibition, an immense installation that gives voice to both individual and collective memories and traces an intricate map of existence (Are you lost?).
Santarcangelo 14 is also an invitation to become a cloud, atmospheric dimension, climatic variation, fragile and powerful creation, a moment of pure potentiality, As a cloud, the festival operates a sudden change of temperature, and triggers an unsteadiness that allows us to propel into the unknown. It is a phenomenon that can appear only in a state of risk and loss of control, as suggested by the Piattaforma Della Danza Balinese, imaginary space founded on imaginary resources, inhabited and shared by artists and curators. It is first and foremost a trap that sweeps everything it encounters into a generic, open exoticism, simultaneously engaging in a rigorous and political discourse about dance. Even the ephemeral Nomadic School behaves like a climatic perturbation, landing in Santarcangelo with a work that borrows its title from French artist Pierre Huyghe's film The Host and The Cloud.
The numerous works that have chosen the festival as their origin live suspended hanging onto the realm of the possible. As we write they are suspended into the opacity and turbulence of the “before”, and while coming to life they will transform Santarcangelo into a city in state of creation: a temporary collectivity that does not strive for a recognizable identity that rather for the act of going out, of throwing itself into an adventure.
In the limited spaces of a reality that offers no escape and in the predetermined finiteness of its unfolding, a festival can, or maybe has to, foster bravery and uncertainty, in order to conjure an act of imagination of the possible, of surrender to the unpredictable.
Now, it is up to us, each and everyone and all together, to respond to this invitation becoming a tiger, becoming a cloud.
Silvia Bottiroli
Download the catalogue