SHORT THEATRE 11 – KEEP THE VILLAGE ALIVE
We have often wondered about the things we do – the way we do them and their meaning – as show business workers, individuals and as a group. Even more often, we have wondered about the importance of the place where those way and meaning should be imagined and realised.
This year, Short Theatre 11th edition is inspired to the concept of space, its arrangement and possible perspectives. Man perceives space as intrinsically precise because at the same time it belongs and eludes him, it is complicated and controversial, it is limitless and it crosses all borders.
We chose it as our starting point. This is the place we will try to find a name for and then forget it, so as to go beyond it, to make it explode, to take care of it and make it survive anything, even its inhabitants and visitors: KEEP THE VILLAGE ALIVE.
The village we intend to keep alive is a place where language becomes poetry and poetry can say the truth. It is also a temporary and well-defined place we have been setting up every year since 2006, called Short Theatre: a wandering village, a resting place for nomads, a home for travelling storytellers.
This has been Short Theatre’s aim for the last 11 years: to be a place and time where a community of artists, spectators and show business workers can reunite. A community in search of the right distance between observer and creation. Short Theatre is a lens through which we can closely look at national and international live performances, and is also an opportunity to analyse the present state of performing arts, their forms, meanings and future possibilities. Short Theatre is at the same time a village, its inhabitants and foreign visitors.
The 2016 edition has the same features of the place where it is held: a home for the live show community to return to for a few days a year. Can a village return home? Can a community be inhabited? KEEP THE VILLAGE ALIVE is the answer.
The will to resist and defend, to investigate, to discover, to enthusiastically dedicate ourselves to something essential: the care of our desires and possibilities. And these desires and possibilities will become real in MACRO LA PELANDA and other locations from 7 to18 September.
Performances, meetings and conversations, training and vision programmes, djsets, concerts installations: these will be the main attractions of the village. It is impossible to chart such a vast territory, articulated and complicated by city planning.
In some areas of the village, though, everything suddenly makes sense: performances turn into political reflections about forms of representation and ways to share thoughts and intentions; the search for a language able to become the voice of theatre, precious for its musical structure; the currents that meet, as the currents of a river flowing through the city centre and as expressive forms that mingle keeping their own identity.
The performance and the spectator continuously look for each other and get lost, run after each other, as in a role-playing game involving all villagers.
Short Theatre does not build defensive walls and this year will welcome the invasion of artists and their projects, both renowned and emerging – many of them for the first time in Italy. The connection with the European art scene is more solid than ever, some partnerships have grown stronger and new ones have been established with art institutions, organizations and cultural institutes from different countries. Short Theatre is also part of several European networks that support the circulation of young international artists and their works. A strategic as well as an ideological positioning, with the wish to turn the ideas of mobility, risk and building-together into something real; looking at borders as marks to be taken care of and reconsider rather than something to be subjected to.