EUROPA! EUROPA!

EUROPA! EUROPA! is the common thread running through the season. We must talk about Europe today. We feel it is more essential than ever to devote an entire year to a theme that affects us all closely and is redefining new political, economic, social and cultural geographies. We, who were born in Europe, who grew up with the idea, with the ideal of Europe, think it is right to talk about it again, and again, despite or precisely because it is at a fragile and complex moment. And we want to talk about that Europe which was born from the war, which grew up with the ideals of democracy, which is immobilized in the face of new scenarios that are difficult to predict, in the language that belongs to us.

We want to follow the flow of celebrations, anniversaries and commemorations – the so-called English re-enactments – that mark our time and our memory, but also imagine and invent possible scenarios. Because from Europe we have internalized the open borders, the cultural routes, the possible networks, and we can no longer do without them.

WAR, DEMOCRACY, URBAN and NOW will be the focuses that will decline our idea of Europe, today that Brexit is a reality, that populism is at the gates and with it thousands of people. The challenge is open, with all the risks that this entails.

With the 2017 edition, ZONA K’s theatre and multidisciplinary season reaches its 5th year of activity. An important anniversary for an activity that has grown fast, so fast that every now and then it overwhelms and surprises even us. An anniversary that we are happy to celebrate also thanks to the Sandra Angelini Prize awarded by Retecritica for the Best Organizational Project 2016.And thanks to the collaborations with old and new friends that this year allow us to realize a truly extraordinary season: C.L.A.P.Spettacolodalvivo, Danae Festival, la Casa della Memoria, Olinda, Stanze and Triennale Teatro dell’Arte.

FOCUS WAR

To speak of war is to speak of Europe because it was out of war and a century torn apart by conflict that the idea of a united, united, rich Europe finally took shape. A prerequisite for the longest period of peace the continent has ever known.

Today we celebrate the centenary of those wars and relive the events in commemorations, historical essays and films.

But how far back is the past? To what extent is that war, which seems so distant with its trenches and bombardments, really so? Do the contemporary wars that surround us really belong to another world?

From these questions, a reflection on today. On the Europe that does not know about bombing but closes its borders, on the responsibilities that each of us could have, on the choices we would make. On war as the ineluctable destiny of new economic, financial and media Real Politik.

Events:

9 – 11 February 2017 h. 20.30
FRIENDLY FEUER (a European polyphony) by Isola Teatro (IT)
[performance]

CANCELLED FOR TECHNICAL REASONS
Murx den Europäer! Murx ihn! Murx ihn! Murx ihn! Murx ihn ab!
[Video version of the performance]

15 February 2017 h. 18.30
THE IMAGE OF WAR BETWEEN HISTORY AND PERFORMANCE
[meeting with aperitif].

16 – 17 February 2017 h. 20.30
IL GRANDE RIFIUTO by Ligna (DE)
[performance]

18 February at 20.30, Sunday 19 February 2017 at 17.00
LEĢIONĀRI. Diskusija ar kaušanos by Valters Sīlis (LT)
[performance]

27 February – 1 March 2017 h. 20.00
A HOUSE IN ASIA by Agrupación Señor Serrano (ES)
[performance c/o CRT Milano Teatro dell’Arte]
A project by ZONA K and Triennale Teatro dell’Arte

KIDS Events

12 February 2017 h. 15.30
THE STRABOMBA organised by Emergency
[workshop 6 – 10 years free]

12 February 2017 h. 17.30
ALL THE INVISIBLE CHILDREN
[film from 12 years old]

Isola Teatro (IT)

“In an unstable Europe marked by a crisis that has become a permanent existential condition, the tragedy of the individual, whatever his national and linguistic identity, in the face of a ferocious modernity, speaks to us and about us more than ever,” says director Marta Gilmore. “The enemy, the other, the borders, now that people die to enter Europe and end up choking on debt to stay there, are words that deserve new questions, nourished by the awareness of a past that is still painful”.

Friendly Feuer is a show/performance for a collective writing on the relationship between the Europe of today and that of a hundred years ago, at the dawn of the First World War.

The lens through which to look at the events of that time is the condition of those who tried in vain, more or less consciously, to escape that “total war”: deserters, soldiers suffering from war neurosis, soldiers from opposing sides who made informal truces, and so on.

On stage, the many possible declinations of the “friendly fire” that gives the work its title, in a fragmented and choral narration, a European polyphony with an aesthetic sensitivity that uses contemporary languages to dialogue with history, avoiding the rhetoric of celebrations. Thus the individual stories of desertion, war neurosis and suicide are juxtaposed with questions relating to a precarious and in its own way ferocious present.

Concepts such as enemy, foreigner, cowardice, courage and homeland are combined in the past and present, without providing exhaustive answers. Meanwhile, the interpreters switch from one language to another, mixing different dialects, in memory of a generation of often semi-illiterate infantrymen who went to arms in the ‘world of yesterday’.

Direction and dramaturgy by Marta Gilmore based on a collective writing; with Eva Allenbach, Tony Allotta, Armando Iovino, Marta Gilmore, Vincenzo Nappi; technical director Andrea Gallo; production Isola Teatro; with the support of Centro Didattico Musicale, Rome; Crowdarts, under the High Patronage of Istituto Svizzero, Rome.

Isola Teatro began its activities in 2005, with the staging of L’Isola, by the South African playwright Athol Fugard, directed and translated by Marta Gilmore. Since then, the company has staged La strada ferrata (finalist for the Premio Scenario 2007), with which the group began to measure itself against a work of collective writing and dramaturgical construction. This path continued with Brucia. In 2010 the group debuted with Senza Lear, a rewriting of the Shakespearean tragedy from the point of view of the king’s three daughters, a project that won the Lia Lapini Prize 2009, and took part in the REACT! project promoted by Santarcangelo dei Teatri. In 2015 the collective took part in the project Caryl Churchill, Non normale non rassicurante, curated by Paola Bono, with Bluemotion, Accademia degli Artefatti and La casa d’argilla teatri, curating the mise en espace of Sette bambine ebree by Caryl Churchill. Her latest production, Friendly Feuer (a European polyphony), premiered at the E45 Fringe Festival in Naples 2015.

Volksbuhne Berlin (DE)

Due to technical problems, the video version of the show has been cancelled.

The video version of a cult show in the history of German theatre, which was part of the permanent repertoire of the Berlin Volksbühne for 14 years.

In 1993, the work by the then little-known Christoph Marthaler – which takes its title from “Indian Song” by the poet Paul Scheerbart (meaning something like “Do away with the European! Do away with him! Do away with him!”) – succeeded in capturing the profound sense of the decline of the GDR: the fatality, the absurdity, the waiting, the bureaucracy, the inscrutability. The description of an existential condition that has not aged with the years and has proved to be pregnant with meaning for the European citizen in general.

“Murx” is a play that contains all the distinctive elements of what later became Christoph Marthaler’s famous theatre. Anna Viebrock’s staging, the waiting room, the large wall clock with the inscription ‘so that time does not stand still’, which is missing some of the dropped letters, the people dressed in thin 1970s tracksuit jackets, the thick glasses, all brought back an imaginary world of the GDR that has never ceased to exist on stage and in people’s minds since.

Without words, only sung, duration 120 min

Direction: Christoph Marthaler; Set design and costumes: Anna Viebrock; Music: Jürg Kienberger, Christoph Marthaler; Dramaturgie: Matthias Lilienthal; Production: Volksbühne Berlin

The representation of war between history and performance

Imagining an event that should have happened without it happening, enacting a re-enactment, a re-enactment, to make us participate. Imagine how our actions as ‘improvised diplomats’ could have changed the course of history to resist that war which changed the political geography of Europe.

How has our perception of war changed? Now that diplomacy seems to have disappeared and war no longer has clear fronts and borders?

A discussion with Alessandro Colombo Professor of International Relations at the University of Milan, Giovanni Scirocco Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Bergamo and the LIGNA Collective.

Free admission

Ligna (DE)

The German collective Ligna brings to the stage a vision, a possible European History that never took place.

In August 1914 a congress of the Second Socialist International was planned in Vienna with the aim of reacting to a possible start of the Great War with a general strike, which would hopefully collapse the infrastructure of the countries involved and prevent the start of the conflict. The congress and the strike never took place. The speeches and speeches of the participants in the congress had already been written, the requests for permission formulated and submitted, but the war anticipated and cancelled their implementation.

On the occasion of the centenary of the First World War, The Great Refusal explores the individual and collective possibilities of refusal through the re-enactment of a story that never took place and whose end is unknown.

The audience is invited to take part in a historical fiction: the congress of the Socialist International will take place in Milan, opening up a parallel universe in which war is questioned as an unavoidable destiny. Everyone will be confronted with a series of ‘resistance exercises’, a training of individual and collective poses and gestures of rejection.

Il grande rifiuto is the result of a series of research residencies in Bolzano, Bologna, Genoa and Reggio Emilia that took place in April 2015.

In Italian

Creation Ole Frahm, Michael Hueners and Torsten Michaelsen; artistic coordination and Italian production: Elena Basteri; Emanuele Guidi; Elisa Ricci Co-production partners: ar/ge kunst Bolzano / Bozen; Festival Transart Bolzano / Bozen; Santarcangelo 2015 Festival Internazionale del Teatro in Piazza 45th Edition; On; Fondazione Luzzati – Teatro della Tosse; Terni Festival Internazionale della Creazione Contemporanea / Teatro Stabile dell´Umbria. Supported by: Goethe – Institut Genua; Goethe – Institut Mailand; Nationales Performance Netz (NPN) International Guest Performance Fund for Dance. Support for the residency programme: Goethe – Institut

The LIGNA collective has existed since 1997 and is made up of artists Ole Frahm, Michael Hueners and Torsten Michaelsen, who began working at Freies Sender Kombinat (FSK), a non-profit public radio station in Hamburg, in the early 1990s. Since 2002 their work has focused on creating ephemeral situations that involve the audience as an active group, a combination that produces unpredictable and uncontrollable effects that challenge the management of space. One of the examples of LIGNA’s use of media is Radio Ballet (2002), in which radio listeners are offered a choreography of forbidden gestures in places that previously seemed public and are now under control, such as stations or shopping centres. Other projects such as The new Man (2008) or Oedipus (2010) question the space of theatre as an apparatus that shapes subjectivity. The latest works The last Commune or Secret Radio (both 2014) instead invite participants to stage complex interactions in a public space that only gradually reveals itself as such.

“Supported by the Nationales Performance Netz (NPN) International Guest Performance Fund for Dance, which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media on the basis of a decision made by the German Bundestag.”

Valters Sīlis (LV)

The play – a rare and striking example of contemporary political theatre that tackles the turmoil of history by stepping outside the realm of narrative and denunciation – is based on a real event.

In 1945, one hundred and sixty-seven Baltic legionnaires were the subject of a dispute between Sweden and the Soviet Union, when the latter requested their extradition to the Stockholm parliament, in order to judge them (and send them to death) for their relationship, in most cases forced, with the Nazi army.

Leģionāri is constructed as a discussion, in which two young people debate, in different languages, this historical fact, which is also conjugated to the present and given back to the spectators, inviting them to take their own position, and generating a reflection on the hurt feelings, betrayals and offences of which human history is made, finally opening up the eternal dilemma between the freedom of individuals and the freedom of society.

An example of post-dramatic theatre, the show asks what really happened, why, and whether it could happen differently today.

In English with episodes in Latvian, Swedish, Finnish and German.

Dramaturgy Carl Alm, Ieva Kauliņa, Kārlis Krūmiņš, Valters Sīlis direction Valters Sīlis with Carl Alm, Kārlis Krūmiņš scenography Ieva Kauliņa lights Jānis Sniķers, Māra Jarovoja

Valters Sīlis (1985) Latvian actor and director, graduated in directing from the Latvian Academy of Culture in 2012 and works both in small independent theatres (Dirty Deal Theatre, Theatre Ģertrūdes ielas teātris) and at the National Theatre in Riga, establishing himself as one of the most promising directors of his generation. Leģionāri is created together with the actors Carl Alm and Kārlis Krūmiņš, who are to all intents and purposes co-authors of the show.

Agrupación Señor Serrano (ES)

A project ZONA K and TRIENNALE TEATRO DELL’ARTE
From the leading group of the Catalan scene, Silver Lion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

New world wars. Some say the third one is already underway. Some say it’s already underway. Some say it’s being told in fiction and TV series. There are those who are doing dress rehearsals. The boundaries between reality and fiction are blurring in our globalized world.

Even on the theatre stage, the levels of narration and representation are multiplying, creating new perspectives, effects and revelations, also thanks to the use of new languages and technologies. The Catalan collective unleashes on the stage of A House in Asia an explosive device that recounts the most important manhunt of the 21st century: the location and capture of Osama Bin Laden.

Three houses, the same. The house where ‘Geronimo’ (nickname given to Bin Laden by the US Army) is hiding in Pakistan. An exact copy of that house in a military base in North Carolina. A third house, always identical, reconstructed on a set in Jordan, where a film is being shot. A sheriff obsessed with a white whale. Cowboys and Indians. Planes and beers. Copies, strategies, reproductions and cheeseburgers.

With its unmistakable artistic mode of scale models, video projections, live direction and performance, Agrupación Señor Serrano presents a “theatrical western” in which reality and its copies are confused, drawing a merciless pop portrait of the post-9/11 decade, a seed for the 21st century.

In English, with Italian subtitles c/o TRIENNALE TEATRO DELL’ARTE

Creation Àlex Serrano, Pau Palacios, Ferran Dordal with Àlex Serrano, Ferran Dordal, Alberto Barberá production and assistant director Barbara Bloin, video realization Jordi Soler production GREC 2014 Festival de Barcelona, Hexagone Scène Nationale Arts et Sciences – Meylan, Festival TNT – Terrassa Noves Tendències, Monty Kultuurfaktorij, La Fabrique du Théâtre – Province de Hainaut

Agrupación Señor Serrano – Silver Lion of the Venice Biennale 2015 – Founded by Àlex Serrano in Barcelona in 2006, Agrupación Señor Serrano is a theatre company that produces its own shows based on material taken from contemporary reality. It uses some of the most innovative technical means and traditional tools to constantly redraw the boundaries of its theatre. It makes use of numerous artistic collaborations and combines in its productions theatre, performance, live video, sound, scale models, to stage stories capable of telling the contradictions of contemporary human experience. Evolution, globalisation and survival are among the main themes dealt with in the latest productions. Today, the core of the group is composed of Àlex Serrano, Pau Palacios and Barbara Bloin.

FOCUS DEMOCRACY

In 1988, Gorbachev saw in the Great European House, founded on democratic values even before economic values, the idea and the direction to be followed for the construction of a great European continent.

Thirty years later, the great expectations seem to have imploded and the new ‘great sickness’ is increasingly the victim of populist attacks.

How many ‘exits’ await us? Is this then the result of democracy?

There are those who say that voting no longer leads to anything, that power now lies elsewhere, in the upper echelons of the economic powers. There are those who believe, instead, that it is still possible to make a difference. Demographic and sociological analyses show that the categories most at risk (the poor, the unemployed, the elderly) are the most distant from the ballot box, and that the spread of democracy is leading to an ever-widening economic gap in society.

So where does democracy lie? In complex bureaucratic institutions with no direct relationship with the citizens, but who nonetheless adorn themselves with the name of representatives of the people, or in the voice of new nationalist and revanchist barkers with no vision of the future?

“Tocqueville said: “To go forward, one must learn to look far. We want to try to look far ahead, with the disruptive force that only the artistic imagination can have. We want to seek affinities, accept changes, broaden our view by testing alternatives that are more or less possible in view of the future, not only the immediate future, but also the more distant future.

The events:

17 – 18 March 2017 h. 20.30
SOME USE FOR YOUR BROKEN CLAY POTS
Christophe Meierhans (CH/BE)
[performance]

17 – 30 March 2017 h. 10.00 – 19.00 (Mon – Fri)
Poster(s) from pro-EU/anti-Brexit campaing!
Wolfgang Tillmans
[photo exhibition]

19 March 2017 h. 18.30
LA POLITICA E’ REALE?
[incontro con aperitivo ]

19 March 2017 h. 20.30
NO55 ASH AND MONEY di NO99 (EE)
[film]

from 23 March every Thursday until 15 June 2017 h. 20.30
EUROPA A DOMICILIO/HOME VISIT EUROPE
di Rimini Protokoll (DE/CH)
[theatrical board game for 15 spectators c/o private houses]
In collaboration with STANZE .

29 – 30 March 2017 h. 20.30
INTIME FREMDE di Welcome Project (DE)
[show]

Eventi KIDS

19 March 2017 h. 11.00
THE MOVIE BAND La democrazia si fa musica
organised by ZONA K with Francesca Badalini and Monica Galassi
[workshop 4 – 7 years]

26 March 2017 at 17.00
EUROPA A DOMICILIO/HOME VISIT EUROPE
by Rimini Protokoll (Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel) (DE/CH)
[theatrical board game for 15 people – 11<14 years + adults c/o private houses]
In collaboration with STANZE

Christophe Meierhans (CH/BE)

Some use for your broken clay pots is a performance that involves the audience in a collective debate lasting about two hours, around an imaginary democratic system that the performer tries to “sell” to his audience as a better alternative to our current democratic regimes.

The script of the performance is a real constitutional book imagined for a democratic state, made available to the audience during the performance. This constitution and the democratic institutions it prescribes were developed and written in close collaboration with a team of jurists from several Belgian universities.

It is a work of ‘constitutional fantasy’ that includes all the organs, procedures, assemblies, rules and regulations necessary to define a complete democratic system that is, in theory, functional. It was developed with the intention of producing something as different as possible from our current regulations, to discuss what democracy represents using a possible logic of defence from the public, through a method that is as rational and strong as possible.

Some use for your broken clay pots is thus an exercise in constitutional creativity. Challenging the ability to imagine an alternative to our current (universally understood) political system, artist and spectators together confront the limits of our understanding of democracy, experimenting with an amusing, surreal and highly topical idea of participatory performance.

In Italian

Conceived, directed and with: Christophe Meierhans Dramaturgy: Bart Capelle in collaboration with: Rudi Laermans Advising team: Anne-Emmanuelle Bourgaux(ULB), Rudi Laermans(KU),Jean-Benoît Pilet(ULB),Dave Sinardet(VUB) Constitutional jurist: Anne-Emmanuelle Bourgaux Scenography: Sofie Durnez Conception & graphic design publication: The Theatre of Operations Illustration: Nuno Pinto Da Cruz Co-production: Kaaitheater(Brussels), Workspace Brussels, Vooruit Arts Centre (Ghent), Teatro Maria Matos (Lisbon), BIT Teatergarasjen (Bergen), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels) Production: Mokum / Hiros with the support of: de Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie & Government of Flanders Production Italian version: ON (Bologna) with the participation of Festival di Santarcangelo (2015)

Christophe Meierhans (Geneva; Brussels) works with and through performance, public space, installation, sound, music and video. His work mainly consists of developing strategies of intervention in everyday life, through the manipulation of accepted conventions, social habits or simple customs. Fragments of reality become the framework for artistic operations that redirect banality in order to make it reappear from unexpected angles. His work raises questions about norms and conventions, confusing a random context with different ones, and confronting the viewer with something else, with the strangeness of being in the “wrong” place, or the possibility that the place may become something different. In 2015, he presented the project Some use for your broken clay pots at Santarcangelo.

Wolfgang Tillmans (DE)

“Dear friends, […] we have reached a critical moment that could prove to be a turning point for Europe as we know it.
turning point for Europe as we know it. […] Brexit could mean the end of the EU. It is an imperfect institution, but on the whole it stands for a democratic worldview, for human rights and fosters cooperation.”

With these words, German artist and photographer Wolgang Tillmans, winner of the Turner Prize, decided to take the field in May 2016 with an anti-Brexit advertising campaign.

Hundreds of posters, with slogans capable of attracting the attention of young people in particular, invaded the streets of the UK in an attempt to stem the rejection of Europe. Today, in the light of the facts, Tillmans is not backing down and is continuing the project in a Pro-EU version.

Is politics real?

A fake populist party, which appeared within a few weeks in 2010 in Estonia, received thousands of members and was given 20% in the pre-election polls. How was this possible? What role did the media play and what is our perception of politics? How much does political language now use the tools of fiction?

NO75 Unified Estonia touched on the fears and hopes and embodied the manipulations and delusions that underlie politics. Could it happen elsewhere today?

We talk about it with Daniel Vaarik (one of the creators of Unified Estonia) and Marcello Maneri (professor of Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes at Bicocca University). The meeting will be moderated by Danilo De Biasio.

Free entrance

NO99 (EE)

In 2010, the Estonian company Theatre NO99 staged a production that brought the whole of Estonian society onto the stage.

NO75 Unified Estonia is the name of a fictitious political movement created by the company that a large part of the audience accepted as a real political force. In an original way it combined theatre, performing arts, politics, media and civil society.

For 44 days – from the first press conference to the founding convention of the fake party (attended by more than 7000 people) – the project was filmed to become a documentary. NO55 Ash and Money is the first film by Theatre NO99. It is a documentary that tells the story of how NO75 Unified Estonia was conceived, through interviews with those who worked behind the scenes but also with many politicians who collaborated and witnessed the process of creating the biggest performance event seen in recent European history. NO75 Unified Estonia encapsulates the fears and hopes, the manipulations and disappointments that underlie politics in our contemporary democracies.

A huge simulation of hyperpopulism to reflect how much excessive populism there is in reality. The documentary shows the variety of emotions and dramatic vicissitudes experienced by the creators of NO75 Unified Estonia.

NO55 Ash and Money has received recognition and acclaim at the numerous film festivals where it has been presented around the world.

In Estonian, subtitled in Italian

A film by: Tiit Ojasoo, Ene-Liis Semper Filming: Rein Kotov Sound: Harmo Kallaste Editors: Rein Kotov, Ene-Liis Semper Executive Producers: Piret Tibbo-Hudgins, Rein Kotov Production: Allfilm and NO99

Theatre NO99 is a company and theatre based in Tallinn, Estonia. Founded in 2005 under the leadership of Ene-Liis Semper and Tiit Ojasoo. Theatre NO99 has immediately enjoyed international success at various European festivals. Over the years it has been a guest at Wiener Festwochen, Festival d’Avignon, HAU Berlin, KVS Brussels, Münchner Kammerspiele, NET Festival and Golden Mask in Moscow. It has produced works of great variety in form including many international co-productions. Since its foundation it has been expressly stated that Theatre NO99 will only do 99 productions and then it will be dissolved.

Rimini Protokoll (DE/CH)

A Rimini Protokoll [Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel] production.

What is Europe really? A geographical border, a cultural identity, a coalition of states? It is often said that Europe is too theoretical an idea for individuals to talk about from their own experience. Rimini Protokoll contrasts this abstract idea of Europe with the individuality and intimacy of a private flat. 15 people take part in a living room performance, a sort of guided role play, which interweaves personal stories and political mechanisms of Europe in an attempt to answer the question: how much Europe is in all of us?

Each show takes place in a different house, travelling through hundreds of flats all over Europe, building a network that extends from door to door across the continent rather than starting from a centre.

The elements and images collected during the visits will be shared, anonymously, online at www.homevisiteurope.org, thus implementing a constantly developing European archive.

In collaboration with STANZE

c/o private houses in the city of Milan
The exact address will be communicated by sms the day before the beginning of the show.

From 23 March every Thursday until 15 June 2017 at 8.30 p.m.
From 3 May extra performances every Wednesday
Sunday 26 March at 17.00 also open to 11<14 years old.

23/03 ZONA PAGANO (made)
26/03 ZONA BRENTA (done)
30/03 ZONA PAGANO (done)
06/04 NAVIGLI AREA (done)
13/04 CENISIO AREA (done)
20/04 FOPPA-SOLARI AREA (done)
27/04 ZONA CORSO TICINESE (done)
03/05 ISOLA AREA (done)
04/05 NAVIGLI AREA (done)
10/05 LIMA ZONE (done)
11/05 SARPI ZONE (done)
17/05 MOSCOW AREA (done)
18/05 CITTA’ STUDI AREA (done)
24/05 ISOLA AREA (done)
25/05 NAVIGLI AREA (done)
31/05 P.TA ROMANA ZONE (done)
01/06 ZONE P.TA VENEZIA (done)
07/06 GARIBALDI ZONE (done)
08/06 CINQUE GIORNATE ZONE (done)
14/06 ZONA BESANA (done)
15/06 ZONA CITTA’ STUDI (done)

Conception, text, direction: Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, Daniel Wetzel Dramaturgy: Katja Hagedorn Interaction Design: Claes Schwennen, Mirko Dietrich, Hans Leser, Grit Schuster Assistant Interaction Design: Philipp Arnold Set Design: Lena Mody, Belle Santos Assistant Set Design: Ran Chai Bar-zvi Production: Juliane Männel, Anna Florin Technical Direction: Sven Nichterlein Web Design: Tawan Arun + Ralph Gowers (Programming) Artistic Collaboration Tour Milano: Anton Rose, Claes Schwennen Web Editing: Anton Rose Photo credits: © Rimini Protokoll / Illustration: María José Aquila, © Pigi Psimenou, © Expanderfilms, © Pigi Psimenou, © Expander films
For Milan: readaptation text Valentina Kastlunger, masters of ceremony Andrea Panigatti and Enrico Pittaluga (Generazione Disagio), technical support Alice Marinoni, Silvia Orlandi

Home Visit Europe is a production of Rimini Apparat. In coproduction with Archa Theatre Prague (CZ). BIT Teatergarasjen/Bergen International Festival (NO). Frascati Teater Amsterdam (NL). HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin (D). Kaaitheater Brussels (BE). LIFT London (GB). Malta Festival Poznan (PL). Mungo Park (DK). Sort/Hvid (DK). Teater Nordkraft (DK). Théâtre de la Commune Aubervilliers (FR). Théâtre Garonne (FR). Teatro Maria Matos (PT). A House on Fire commission / co-production with the support of the Cultural Program of the European Union. The project is supported by Capital Culture Fund Berlin.

Rimini Protokoll is today perhaps the most awarded artistic collective in Europe and a fundamental point of reference for all avant-garde theatre. Its members, Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel, came together in 2000 to form a collective of writer-directors. Since 2002, all their works – plays, radio plays, films and installations – have been signed Rimini-Protokoll. The focus of their research is the development of the expressive means of theatre to provoke new looks at reality. Each work draws on real life and uses elements and people from concrete situations and specific places. Thus Haug, Kaegi and Wetzel proclaim a general assembly of Daimler-Benz a play and, in doing so, transform it into one; they realise the 100% City project by bringing 100 real citizens onto the stage as a statistical sample to represent, among others, cities such as Berlin, Zurich, London, Melbourne, Copenhagen or San Diego. Or they go on tour with a group of Nigerian-European businessmen for the Lagos Business Angels project and with the paraplegic MC Hallwachs for the play Qualitätskontrolle (Haug / Wetzel) or create soundtracks for the most diverse cities in the world with the REMOTE X project (Kaegi). In April 2008 they won the European Theatre Prize in Thessaloniki in the category “New Realities”, and in 2011 the entire work of Rimini-Protokoll was awarded the Silver Lion at the 41. Venice Theatre Biennale.

Welcome Project (DE/IT)

Intime Fremde/Intimate strangers is dedicated to a reflection on the border, identity, the concept of nation, country of origin, the encounter/clash of physical and cultural, emotional anatomies.

Europe has accustomed us to travelling cheaply and feeling at home in all the countries of the Union. But the old continent defends its borders with barbed water and C.I.E. Borders exist hidden everywhere: while we go shopping, when we look at each other, skim, avoid, in the covered face of the neighbour, in the smells in the stairwell. And what is behind a door, behind a line has always scared us. If it is true that we are all biologically similar, it is also true that we are all culturally different, and endowed with different rights. Are we made up of what we eat, of our experiences, of the decisions we have made throughout our lives, of what we love, of what we fight for?

What is identity? What does nationality mean? What does citizenship mean?

Intime Fremde is a space in which to look at the fears and desires of a humanity divided between the need to belong and the need for freedom. On stage three actresses who live in Germany, but who have three different cultural origins, build barriers and look for spaces of intimacy.

The show had two residencies at Teatro del Lemming and premiered on 20 November 2015 at the Acker Stadt Palast in Berlin.

In English, Italian and Arabic.

With Aurora Kellermann, Lina Zaraket, Serfiraz Vural directed by Chiara Elisa Rossini lights Alessio Papa by Welcome Project – The foreigner’s Theatre production Teatro del Lemming in collaboration with TATWERK PERFORMATIVE FORSCHUNG_Berlin

Welcome Project is a female project born in Berlin in 2015 from an idea of Chiara Elisa Rossini. The group is made up of four female artists who live in Germany but have different cultural origins.
Its name comes from their personal experience as emigrants, but also from the concept of theatre as a world governed by other rules, a space where things out of the ordinary can happen.

EXTRA FOCUS

The Extra Focus category brings together those proposals that we have intended to welcome in the season but which due to theme or calendar (for both of these shows this is the case) cannot be included in the thematic focuses.

EXTRA FOCUS events

cancelled for health reasons of an actor
CAFFETTIERA BLU
Bluemotion (IT)
[show]

19 – 21 May 2017 h. 20.30
KÖSZEG
OPERA retablO (CH)
[performance].

25 May 2017 h. 20.30
INFLUENZA
Floor Robert/InQuanto teatro (IT)
[performance]

Bluemotion (IT)

Caffettiera Blu is a borderline disruptive exploration of theatrical language, ironically and painfully delving into family dynamics and the anguish of waiting and lying. The family relationship as deception and psychological torture is in our history as sons, daughters and parents, always and without escape.

The choice of placing a table in the centre as the only meeting place for the stories, and around it – on the four sides – the seated audience, including actresses and actors, is intended to nail us down in the obsessive voyeurism that the family bond continually imposes. The convergence of gazes on that table, the risk of crossing that of one of the actors or one of the spectators, stiffens the trajectory of looking, initially. Instead, we find ourselves abandoned and spying shortly afterwards.

So close up we see elements of realistic verisimilitude and others fantastically absurd alternating and confusing. The emotional laceration is confused with the process of deformation or explosion of the word, of vision, of the system of signs through which we mediate the world.

Caffettiera blu, based on the text of the same name by Caryl Churchill, questions the sovereignty of the text itself and reaffirms that of the actor and actress.

Director Giorgina Pi with Sylvia De Fanti, Gian Marco Di Lecce, Mauro Milone, Aglaia Mora, Laura Pizzirani, Simona Senzacqua voice-over Marco Cavalcoli costumes Gianluca Falaschi lights Giorgina Pi/Marco Guarrera sound dimension Valerio Vigliar sounds Michele Boreggi a BLUEMOTION/ANGELO MAI production with the support of SARDEGNA TEATRO within NON NORMALE, NON RASSICURANTE. CARYL CHURCHILL PROJECT curated by Paola Bono

Bluemotion is a group born in Rome within the artistic and political experience of Angelo Mai, winner of the Ubu Franco Quadri Prize 2016. Performers, directors, musicians and visual artists come together to create from their own suggestions, comparing their views on the present and on art. Bluemotion’s works are always collective creations, the result of the exchange and visions of the group’s members. Bluemotion creates, lives and shares in the independent art space Angelo Mai. The artists of Bluemotion are also activists in the field of human rights and the rights of workers in the performing arts.

Opera retablO (CH)

Köszeg, loosely based on Ágota Kristóf’s The Big Notebook, tells of identity, separation, of a humanity condemned to the limit, to the edge, and of its great capacity for resilience.

The protagonists of Köszeg are two brothers, indivisible and interchangeable as if they had only one soul. Two small adults with prodigious intelligence who, thanks to the logic of survival, develop a crystal-clear and brutal ethic of life. Around them move characters drawn with a few bare strokes in a context of hunger and death.

A hard performance where everything is made fierce and essential by a clear and direct acting. In the succession of images, always poised between adulthood and childhood, Köszeg proposes, through a strong resonance with current events and migratory flows, a raw, touching story that leaves no room for digressions and where love, war, violence, fragility, clandestinity, emigration, identity and loss of identity are the protagonists.

A creation: Opera retablO Director: Ledwina Costantini by and with: Ledwina Costantini and Daniele Bernardi costumes: Caterina Foletti scenography: Opera retablO and Michele Tognetti Production: Opera retablO in co-production with Teatro Sociale Bellinzona with the support of: Swisslos/ Pro Helvetia / Tognetti- auto/ Carthesio SA

Opera retablO was founded in 2008 in Sessa (Canton Ticino) and is a space that hosts and promotes artistic and cultural contaminations, born from the need to provide the creations of Ledwina Costantini, an actress-creator from Ticino, with a network of collaborations and an organisational and logistical structure. Opera retablO proposes creations poised between the innovative and the archaic; works that give substance to a modern and destabilising catharsis. The association’s activities take place nationally and internationally.

Floor Robert/InQuanto teatro (IT)

“We are not free. We are locked inside our bodies. We are bound to our history. We are inevitably part of the past. We carry within us things that are no longer there. We accept this. But there remains the possibility of coming and going between what is real and what is fantasy. How much can we be influenced by this?”

Influenza is a show to look at like a picture book, letting the images transport you into an alternative world.

Memories, desires, fears, presences from the past, a mysterious yet familiar universe.
Floor Robert moves among these suggestions, retracing with his body events and situations, real or imaginary, hinting at and unravelling stories.

Accompanied, at times, by figures that seem to have come out of those stories. It is a journey inside a room, but you can suddenly find yourself in a meadow, in a forest, or in space. To see everything that does not exist but that, for this very reason, ultimately influences us.

a performance by inQuanto teatro | conceived and choreographed by Floor Robert | with Floor Robert, Giacomo Bogani, Francesco Michele Laterza | music by Manuele Atzeni | technique by Monica Bosso | costumes by Eva Sgrò | organisation and communication by Julia Lomuto | winner of the competition Sillumina – Copia privata per i giovani, per la cultura | finalist of the show DNA Appunti Coreografici | with the support of Fondazione Fabbrica Europa, CSC Centro per la Scena Contemporanea – Operaestate Festival Veneto, Romaeuropa Festival, Le Murate. Progetti Arte Contemporanea, spazioK_kinkaleri, Sosta Palmizi, Samotracia/Associazione Punto A Capo, Teatri Sospesi, CS376.

Floor Robert was born in Haarlem, Holland, and now lives in Florence. She has worked as a performer with Kinkaleri, Compagnia Tardito-Rendina, Marco D’Agostin and Angela Antonini and with the Dutch companies NNT and Paradox. In 2010 she was awarded a special mention in the Premio Hystrio. She is co-author of the shows of inQuanto teatro and famigliafuchè, companies she helped to create. Since 2014 she has started her own independent creation process. inQuanto teatro is an artistic collective founded in Florence in 2010, which deals with performance, education and art in the public sphere. Its works are characterised by a multidisciplinary and dramaturgical approach that mixes media culture and literary tradition.

FOCUS URBAN

European cities are growing by the day. They are incorporating the suburbs and becoming metropolises. They are soaring into the sky with important new architectural experiments. They are the driving forces behind economic, social and cultural development, privileged meeting places, incubators of innovation and conflict. They are magnets for immigrants and anyone in search of change. Fast, dynamic, pulsating, but also inhuman, stressful, complex. Increasingly, they tend to lose their specific traits and become confused and similar. Milan is no different. Increasingly innovative, increasingly European, increasingly metropolitan. And, in our opinion, increasingly beautiful.

Focus Urban is therefore a tribute to our city and, at the same time, a form of research, a questioning of its limits and potential. Together with the artists involved, we will try to rediscover it and retell it, bringing its inhabitants onto the stage, penetrating its intimacy with performances in private homes, inhabiting places of transit such as hotels, and reinterpreting public space with Willi Dorner’s performers.

Events:

14 – 15 September 2017 h. 20.00
GUERRILLA
El Conde De Torrefiel (ES)
[performance c/o Triennale Teatro dell’Arte].
A project ZONA K, DANAE FESTIVAL and TRIENNALE TEATRO DELL’ARTE

23 – 24 and 29 – 30 September 2017 h. 17.45
BODIES IN URBAN SPACES
Cie Willi Dorner (AU)
[urban performance c/o locations in the Isola-Garibaldi districts].

30 September h. 20.00 + 1 October 2017 h. 17.00
and every Wednesday and Thursday from 4 to 26 October 2017 h. 20.00
HOME VISIT EUROPE
Rimini Protokoll (Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel) (DE/CH)
[theatrical table game for 15 spectators c/o private homes].
in collaboration with Stanze

6 – 7 October 2017 h. 20.30 + 8 October 2017 h. 17.00
GRIP
Fattoria Vittadini (IT)
[dance c/o private houses]

26 – 29 October 2017 h. 18.00, 19.00, 20.00
HEARTBREAK HOTEL, Room 304
Snaporaz (IT)
[performance c/o Hotel ZONA Garibaldi].

El Conde De Torrefiel (ES)

A project by ZONA K, Danae Festival and Triennale Teatro dell’Arte

A conference, a Thai-Chi class and an electronic music session: these are the three scenes that make up the play. There is no obvious conflict on stage, the battle has moved inside the mind. And in the depths of these inner spaces, where freedom is confined, there is a war of thoughts that wakes up every morning and falls asleep every night without ever being resolved.

Guerrilla observes the tensions experienced by Europe: incendiary thoughts of a space of comfort. If everything advances in an apparent state of peace in which there is a feeling of security, why do we involuntarily in our heads invoke war?

The play is written by combining fiction and documentary text, based on a series of interviews with a small group of people who share the same present and the same space, in this case the city of Milan.

conception El Conde De Torrefiel direction and dramaturgy Tanya Beyeler and Pablo Gisbert text Pablo Gisbert in collaboration with the volunteers of Milan assistant Nicolas Chevallier lighting design Ana Rovira scenography Blanca Añón sound Adolfo García assistance with choreography Amaranta Velarde music Pink Elephant on Parade, Salacot performers Amaranta Velarde and volunteers from Milan co-production Kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels, Steirischer Herbst Festival Gratz, Noorderzon Festival Groningen with the support of the European project NXSTP and the support of Graner, Centre de creació Barcelona, ICEC – Generalitat de Catalunya, INAEM, Ministerio de Cultura de España, Institut Ramón Llull

El Conde De Torrefiel is a company founded in Barcelona in 2010 by Tanya Beyeler and Pablo Gisbert.
Their work is articulated through a textual and visual aesthetic where theatre, choreography, literature and plastic arts coexist. The starting point of the project lies in an analysis of the present and an immediate questioning of the possibilities of our time. The company’s latest works have been presented at major European festivals including Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Festival d’Automne in Paris, Steirischer Herbst in Graz or Dublin Theater Festival.

With the support of

Willi Dorner (AT)

Bodies in urban spaces is an artistic intervention in city spaces for twenty performers, halfway between theatre and installation. Crowded under a bench, wedged between a group of trees, poised over a fountain, perched on top of walls or camouflaged between door jambs, the artists’ bodies take the public on an unusual itinerary through the spaces of their city. They involve passers-by, residents and the public in the discovery of new performance possibilities and offer new suggestions with which to observe already familiar places. Present for many years in the most important European festivals, the Viennese choreographer Willi Dorner creates with this unusual intervention in urban spaces a real site-specific action, working from city to city with groups of local performers.

The show is itinerant and will be covered on foot.

Departure point: Biblioteca Dergano – Bovisa, Via Filippo Baldinucci, 76
Public transport: bus 82, 92 / tram 2 / Ferrovie Nord Milano and Passante Ferroviario (Bovisa-Politecnico at 850 mt), M3 (Dergano at 950 mt)
Place of arrival: in the middle of Milan

conception Willi Dorner assistant choreographers Esther Steinkogler, Ian Per Dolan photos Lisa Rastl; performers for Milan Carolina Amoretti, Alice Bassetti, Davide Boi, Alessandra Bonincontro, Andrea Campani, Lorenzo Covello, Simona Drago, Antonella Fittipaldi, Alice Giuliani, Cinzia Galliani, Elisa Ghion, Lucrezia Palandri, Melania Pallini, Simone Paris, Mauro Plebani, Samuel Puggioni, Edoardo Sgambato, Francesca Sproccati, Clara Storti, Daniele Tenze assistant for Milan Luci Mazzi organisation Federica di Rosa logistic support Fattoria Vittadini

Viennese choreographer Willi Dorner creates stage performances, site-specific projects, films and installations presented at major international festivals. Bodies in urban spaces (2007) won major international recognition (award for interdisciplinary art at the KOÏNZI-DANCE Festival in Hamburg) and was shown in more than 90 cities worldwide. Finally, Dorner made the short films TREID (1999), mazy (2003), body trail and fleeting (2009), set in motion (2012) and every-one (2015) for cinema.

Rimini Protokoll (DE/CH)

A Rimini Protokoll [Haug/Kaegi/Wetzel] production.

The elements and images collected during the visits will be shared, anonymously, online at www.homevisiteurope.org, thus implementing a constantly developing European archive.

In collaboration with STANZE

c/o private houses in the city of Milan
The exact address will be communicated by sms the day before the beginning of the show.

30 September h. 20.00 + 1 October 2017 h. 17.00
then every Wednesday and Thursday from 4 to 26 October 2017 h. 20.00

30 settembre: ZONA ISOLA esaurita
1 ottobre: ZONA CENTRALE
4 ottobre: ZONA BOVISA esaurita
5 ottobre: ZONA NAVIGLI esaurita
11 ottobre: ZONA DERGANO esaurita
12 ottobre: ZONA P.TA ROMANA esaurita
18 ottobre: ZONA GARIBALDI esaurita
19 ottobre: ZONA CENTRALE esaurita
25 ottobre: ZONA GARIBALDI esaurita
26 ottobre: in via di definizione esaurita

Fattoria Vittadini (IT)

Grip is a performance in which different approaches to art come together. Dance, video, music, storytelling, shared writing, sculpture… Grip is the adherence of wheels to the road surface, a metaphor for adherence to one’s own life.

Starting from the comparison between two personalities, one voracious, intrusive but focused on his own needs (Riccardo) and the other fluctuating, respectful, but in search of himself (Alex), we asked ourselves, through the metaphor of the car and physics (the grip between two bodies), about the sense of adhering or not adhering to one’s own life, about running it to the extreme, to the limit and maybe even to the point of losing the grip. On the sense of necessity of doing this, on what drives us to desire it. The right to individual self-determination and (consequent) happiness are rights that it is so easy not to consider as fundamental before others of first necessity. But every human being has the right to have rights that allow him or her to adhere to his or her life, to recognize and acknowledge it. To guide it.

c/o private homes, the exact address will be communicated by sms the day before the performance

by and with Riccardo Olivier and Alex Mc Cabe collaboration with video artist Alberto Sansone and set/costume designer Maddalena Oriani

Fattoria Vittadini was born in Milan in 2009 from the desire of the eleven students of the course of the then Atelier of Teatro-Danza of the Scuola Paolo Grassi to remain united and continue to make their way together in the field of performing arts. An extremely heterogeneous and versatile group, they adapt to the plurality of languages with an ever-increasing professionalism. Over the years they have had the opportunity to collaborate with great artists, including Lucinda Childs, Yasmeen Godder, Ariella Vidach, Virgilio Sieni, Alessandro Certini, Emanuela Tagliavia, Jean Claude Penchenat, Maria Consagra, Matanicola and Maya Carrol, without losing sight of a personal research and poetics that they continue to investigate through the creation of choreographies within the company. Fattoria Vittadini has participated in important national and international events and festivals (among others, Biennale Danza, TorinoDanza, MilanOltre, Roma Europa, Ravenna Festival, Fabbrica Europa, A-Genre Festival, Un Automne a Tisser, Diversia Festival, Fringe Festival…). In 2011 it became an active partner in RIC.CI – Reconstruction Italian Choreography 1980-1990, a project to recover contemporary Italian choreography of the 1980s and 1990s conceived by Marinella Guatterini. Since 2012 the company has been supported by the Municipality of Milan. In 2013 Fattoria Vittadini won the regional competition Teatri del Tempo Presente with the show To This Purpose Only. In July 2014 it was invited by the Festival della Valle D’Itria to be the official company for the 40th edition of the festival, taking part in the works on the bill and signing some of the choreographies. Since 2014 Fattoria Vittadini has been supported by MiBACT – Direzione Spettacolo dal Vivo. Fattoria Vittadini are: Mattia Agatiello, Chiara Ameglio, Cesare Benedetti, Noemi Bresciani, Pieradolfo Ciulli, Maura Di Vietri, Gabriele Marra, Riccardo Olivier, Francesca Penzo, MariaGiulia Serantoni, Vilma Trevisan.

snaporaz (IT)

A new maid is hired at Heartbreak Hotel. She only has to look after one room. Room 304. A guest arrives at Heartbreak Hotel. A blind woman who can hardly walk. No, she can’t. A desperate housewife. Actually, no, an aspiring dancer… What are they looking for? Who are they running from? What do they want? And above all, why do they have the same face? Room 304 is not the answer to any of these questions. It is a woman’s search for the missing question, the only question that can help her find her way through the labyrinth of mirrors of her own identity.

A woman in conflict with her own soul is given the chance to re-embrace herself. Here, too, the choice of ending is the guestʼs responsibility. The Heartbreak Hotel provides opportunities, not solutions. Salvation is the responsibility of the individual.

Heartbreak Hotel is a multidisciplinary project. The Hotel is the container for a series of creations. Each creation is a different room of Heartbreak Hotel and can take the form of a show, a performance, an installation, a comic book… The Hotel is the narrative frame in which the episodes are inserted, different in terms of the language experimented, content and narrative elements. For each room, snaporaz chooses to broaden its vision by contaminating itself with new artistic presences. The artists who approach Heartbreak Hotel have maximum freedom of expression, but are subject to a single, simple constraint: to relate to the materials produced by the collective and the previous rooms. This multifaceted architecture is nevertheless supported by a solid common foundation. All the rooms, despite the variety of languages, deal with the same broad theme: the courage to face pain, one’s own fears, anger. Thus, snaporaz aspires to give rise to a non-serial series. An oblique format, crossed by stories that investigate man’s confrontation with crisis. Not as a negative concept but as a necessary stage in an evolutionary path.

Only 5 spectators per performance.
Performance: h. 18.00 – 19.00 – 20.00 – 21.00
c/o Hotel Garibaldi Area

from an idea by Gilda Deianira Ciao script by Noemi Bresciani with Noemi Bresciani and Gilda Deianira Ciao guides Fulvio Vanacore (aka the record producer) Matteo Salimbeni (aka the writer at the other end of the line)

snaporaz is a collective in progress, a multi-headed mutant, born from the encounter between Gilda Deianira Ciao, Matteo Salimbeni and Fulvio Vanacore. They work on the transformation of starting materials, contaminating visions, approaches, personalities. snaporaz inaugurated its path in 2015 with the project HeartbreakHotel: a format that feeds on each work phase, relaunching the outcomes of the previous episode and conveying different artists into a temporary collective intelligence.

FOCUS NOW

A fractured Europe, new uncontrolled migrations, business tycoons turned into new Caesars, ignorance without borders, violence inside and outside the home. And vice versa: a conscious economy, multicultural societies, courageous acts by courageous people, millennials projected towards sharing, borders that resist openness.

Today seems to be a time of disorientation and uncertainty. We are anchored to a present we do not like; polls speak of mistrust and discontent; the media show images of attacks, refugees, environmental disasters; politics mainly tells of itself lost in rampant individualism. Yet reality seems to be less worse than it is perceived to be, and statistical data provide other numbers.

But then what era are we living in? Are we allowed to be optimistic about the future, or is the present nothing more than the prelude to a new Middle Ages?

For us, NOW is all that. We want to be optimistic and believe in new possible revolutions, but we look reality in the face with the eyes of artists who live and interpret the present. Whether they are caustic, provocative, irreverent, condemning or astonishing.

Events:

14 October 2017 h. 20.00 and 15 October 2017 h. 16.00
FIVE EASY PIECES
Milo Rau (CH)
[performance c/o Triennale Teatro dell’Arte].

16 November 2017 h. 20.30
THE GREAT EUROPEAN DISASTER MOVIE
Piras and Emmot (IT/UK)
[documentary film]

18 November 2017 h. 20.30 and 19 November 2017 h. 17.00
OUR VIOLENCE AND YOUR VIOLENCE
Oliver Frljić (HR)
[performance c/o La Cucina Theatre]
In collaboration with OLINDA

22 – 23 November 2017 h. 20.00
REVOLUTION NOW!
Gob Squad (DE/UK)
[performance c/o Triennale Teatro dell’Arte].
In collaboration with Triennale Teatro dell’Arte

24 – 25 November 2017 h. 20.30
WE ARE GOB SQUAD AND SO ARE YOU
Gob Squad (DE/UK)
[performance]

24 – 25 November 2017 h. 22.00
LIVE LONG AND PROSPER
Gob Squad (DE/GB)
[double-screen film]

01 – 02 December 2017 h. 20.30
ISOLA E SOGNA
Ateliersi (IT)
[documentary concert]

Milo Rau e CAMPO (CH/BE)

A project by ZONA K and Triennale Teatro dell’Arte

Milo Rau, one of the most popular and controversial directors of contemporary theatre, arrives for the first time in Milan with an ambitious project that starts from a cruel news story – linked to the figure of the paedophile and murderer Marc Dutroux – and comes to reflect on the materialisation of feelings on stage.

Milo Rau and the International Institute of Political Murder (IIPM) have conquered the biggest theatres in Europe in recent years with their uncompromising political theatre. Their work is based on first-hand accounts and reconstructions of real events that mercilessly tackle the great taboos of our time.

In collaboration with the Belgian production centre CAMPO, they have created Five simple scenes to recount a tragic episode in Belgian history. Five simple scenes, interpreted by children between the ages of 9 and 13, to show a disturbing image of contemporary society and reveal the limits of what children know, feel and do.

How can they really understand the meaning of manipulation, empathy, loss, subjugation, disappointment or rebellion? What does it mean to involve children in adult theatre? What happens when we watch them act? What does it reveal about our fears and desires?

In Flemish with Italian subtitles.
Due to the theme, the show is intended for an adult audience.
c/o TRIENNALE TEATRO DELL’ARTE – viale Alemagna, 6

Concept, text and direction Milo Rau text and performance Aimone De Zordo, Fons Dumont, Arno John Keys, Blanche Ghyssaert, Lucia Redondo, Pepijn Siddiki, Hendrik Van Doorn, Eva Luna Van Hijfte performance film Sara De Bosschere, Pieter-Jan De Wyngaert, Johan Leysen, Peter Seynaeve, Jan Steen, Ans Van den Eede, Hendrik Van Doorn & Annabelle Van Nieuwenhuyse dramaturgy Stefan Bläske assistant director and performance coach Peter Seynaevec childcare and production assistant Ted Oonk research Mirjam Knapp & Dries Douibi scenes and costumes Anton Lukas video and sound design Sam Verhaert production CAMPO & IIPM co-production Kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels, Münchner Kammerspiele, La Bâtie – Festival de Genève, Kaserne Basel, Gessnerallee Zürich, Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA), SICK! Festival UK, Sophiensaele Berlin & Le phénix scène nationale Valenciennes pôle européen de création photo Phile Deprez

Annalisa Piras and Bill Emmott (IT/UK)

Documentary, winner of the prestigious 2016 Civis Media Award, awarded by the President of Germany for Best European Information.

A plane, in the midst of severe turbulence, tries to land in various European capitals but no airport gives permission. The old continent fell into total chaos. On board the plane, an elderly passenger tells an unsuspecting girl about a failed Europe.

Fiction, reality or premonition?

The documentary film directed by filmmaker, journalist and director of the Wake Up Foundation Annalisa Piras and produced by Bill Emmott (former editor of the Economist and President of The London Library and the Wake Up Foundation) shows a dystopian future in which the European Union no longer exists. Everything is portrayed in a lucid and straightforward way, from the rise of nationalism to seven years of economic crisis and growing dissatisfaction with democracy.

The stories told by five citizens from five EU countries make the whole thing true.

In English with Italian subtitles

Oliver Frljić (BA/HR)

NATIONAL PREMIERE In collaboration with OLINDA

Oliver Frljic, a provocateur and controversial filmmaker, enters reality and the collective consciousness at close quarters. Inspired by Peter Weiss’s “The Aesthetics of Resistance”, Frljic explores Europe’s confrontation with the refugee crisis. A Europe ready to forget its colonialist past and the violence it derived from it in order to erect walls and close borders.

La nostra violenza e la vostra violenza is one of the most controversial European shows of the moment, asking uncomfortable and non-rhetorical questions right up to the end. As spectators moved by imaginary scenes in the semi-obscurity of a theatre, do we still remain indifferent to real people in refugee camps across Europe?

Are we proud to call ourselves Europeans or should we be ashamed of Europe? Do we mourn the victims of terrorist attacks in Europe with the same empathy as those in the Middle East? Are we buying a clear conscience with simple declarations of solidarity? Are we aware that violence only begets more violence?

Due to the subject matter and the presence of full nudity, the show is intended for an adult audience.

In Croatian, Slovenian, English with Italian subtitles
c/o TeatroLaCucina, former Psychiatric Hospital Paolo Pini,
via Ippocrate 45, 20161 Milan, Italy

Direction and music selection: Oliver Frljić; Dramaturgy: Marin Blažević Scenography: Igor Pauška, Costumes: Sandra Dekanić; Lights: Dalibor Fugošić and David Cvelbar; Artistic advice: Aenne Quiñones; Assistant director: Barbara Babačić, Sound design: Silvo Zupančič; Production manager: Hannes Frey. Starring: Barbara Babačić, Daša Doberšek, Uroš Kaurin, Dean Krivačić, Jerko Marčić, Nika Mišković, Draga Potočnjak, Matej Recer, Blaž Šef; Production: HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Co-production: Slovensko mladinsko gledališče, Ljubljana, Wiener Festwochen, Zürcher Theaterspektakel, Kunstfest Weimar, Hrvatsko narodno kazalište Ivana pl. Zajca, Rijeka; Regional co-producer: MESS Sarajevo; Funding: German Federal Cultural Foundation. Translation into Italian: Živa Brecelj

OLIVER FRLJIC (Travnik, 1976) is a leading name on the European new film scene. His previous productions – Turbo Folk, Bacchae, Spring Awakening, Cursed be the traitor of his homeland – have all stood out for the impact they have had on audiences. In 2012, he staged the controversial Zoran Ðind about the assassination of the Serbian prime minister. Also in that year, another of his projects, 25.671, was about the number of people deleted from the residence registers of the Republic of Slovenia. Until last June he was superintendent of the Croatian National Theatre in Rijeka (HR).

Gob Squad (DE/UK)

A ZONA K project in collaboration with Triennale Teatro dell’Arte.

Overwhelming, involving, noisy, Revolution Now! dusts off from the past the revolutionary moments decisive for humanity with which the public, as in history, will have to get involved. Because for one evening it will be “all or nothing”.

“A magnificent, courageous and epic theatrical experience.”
The Guardian

Gob Squad, the most provocative British-German collective of the moment, exponents of a theatre that challenges representation and the public and transfers them directly into the “temples” of urban life, has decided to stage at least one of them and transform the theatre into the bubbling headquarters of a group of revolutionaries, connected live to the channel of a small TV station that broadcasts non-stop proclamations, manifestos and songs of revolt.

Is it time for a revolution? Aren’t our lives a little too comfortable? Are we ready to sacrifice them for the cause?
It is certain that the word ‘revolutionary’ has lost its meaning since it became glamour, a label for selling practically anything, from rock stars to sanitary towels.

Played in English, with scenic translation in Italian
c/o Triennale Teatro dell’Arte – viale Alemagna, 6

conception and interpretation Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Sharon Smith, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Laura Tonke, Bastian Trost, Simon Will live music and arrangements Christopher Uhe, Masha Qrella video Miles Chalcraft, Kathrin Krottenthaler sound Jeff McGrory technical direction Chris Umney costumes Pieter Bax dramaturgy and executive production Christina Runge dramaturgical consultants Aenne Quiñones, Götz Leineweber artistic assistants Milena Kipfmüller, Tina Pfurr interns Hannah Senft, Florian Wessels Gob Squad Management Eva Hartmann tour management Mat Hand production Gob Squad co-produced Donaufestival Niederösterreich, Schauspiel Köln and Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz with the support of Berliner Kulturverwaltung photos Thomas Aurin
* extraordinary participation of Marco Cavalcoli (Fanny & Alexander) for the Italian version

Gob Squad is a seven-headed monster, an artistic collective with seven leaders. It has a schizophrenic identity: two nations and two languages. For over 20 years Gob Squad has been searching for a new way to combine media and performance, producing performances, video installations, radio plays, films and urban interventions. Gob Squad was founded in 1994, while its members were still at Nottingham Trent University and Giessen. Berlin has been the creative home of the group since 1999. Its members are: Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Sharon Smith, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost and Simon Will. Other artists are invited to collaborate on particular projects. Their productions have been performed all over the world: Super Night Shot (2003), Gob Squad’s Kitchen (2007, winner of New York’s Drama Desk Award 2012), Saving The World (2008, winner of the Goethe Preis at the Impulse Festival), Before Your Very Eyes (2011), Western Society (2013) and the most recent War And Peace (2016).

Gob Squad (DE/UK)

Featuring Fanny Alexander.

“Be yourself, be honest with yourself, follow your dreams and reach for the stars”. This is the mantra of a generation that prizes individualism as the ultimate expression of freedom. But who is this “self” you think you are? How did you become who you think you are? What makes you, really you? And what happens when we venture outside the concept of ‘uniqueness’?

Gob Squad takes the audience through twenty years of work, made up of collective processes, big ideas, videos and soundtracks, and in doing so leaves the stage, blends in with the audience creating shifts of identities and bodies. As the audience gets involved the collective identity develops through a playful and experimental perspective.

Using a technique Gob Squad calls ‘remote acting’, the show begins with a conventional lecture and ends as a moving meditation on the nature of the self. It is an experience that balances curiosity, courage, risk-taking, and the relationship between childhood freedom and shared responsibility for everything that happens.

The Milan version is performed by Marco Cavalcoli and Andrea Argentieri for Fanny & Alexander

Concept Gob Squad Concept Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Sharon Smith, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost, Simon Will Sound Jeff McGrory, Martin Cooper Video Sarah Harrison, Sean Patten Production Management Eva Hartmann UK Producer Ayla Suveren Interns Valeria Germain Production Gob Squad With the support of Senatsverwaltung for Science, Research and Culture Berlin and The Arts Council of England Photos Jean-Philippe Offord/ Cartel Photos

Gob Squad (DE/UK)

Seven film sequences are reinterpreted and remade by seven performers in seven different locations in Berlin. The original and its copy are shown simultaneously on two screens, one a distorted mirror of the other, as in the game “find the differences”. The escalators of the central station are the mountains of the Far West, the fairground is the field of a historic battle, Pfennigland – a ‘Everything for a Euro’ type shop – is the interior of the spaceship Enterprise.

These are death scenes of great characters from cult films. Contemporary society no longer dwells on death. It announces it, shows it, but passes over it, there is no time to reflect, no time to assimilate, no time to pause. This installation works on that pause, on that missing time, and puts the spectator at the centre of this relationship-reaction.

In English and German, with Italian subtitles.

A project by Gob Squad Arts Collective developed and performed by Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Sharon Smith, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost, Simon Will editing Sharon Smith with advice from Ute Schall sound Jeff McGrory colour correction Carsten Görtz production assistant Hilde Tuinstra interiors Annelies Puddy, Alfredo Martins Gob Squad producer Eva Hartmann with financial support from Berliner Kulturverwaltung thanks to all the shop assistants and security agents who turned a blind eye while we shot this film first screening 3. 12.2009 at HAU in Berlin/Germany

ISOLA E SOGNA

A report in the form of a concert on Giusi Nicolini, Mayor of Lampedusa until June 2017, and the exercise of power on the island of landings and turtles, a place that has become an emblem of the border, a showcase for the representation of European policies. Of the hand that heals and the hand that strikes. His defeat at the last elections inspired dozens of articles in the newspapers and thousands of comments on the web. In Isola e Sogna, Ateliersi poetically confronts the prospects of this change, starting with the semantic shifts produced by Nicolini in her five years as mayor.

On the island, local opposing factions coexist, not without difficulty, on a human level, geopolitical contrasts linked to colonialism, events, contemporary imagery and the desire to pursue a life of fishing, tourism and peaceful hospitality.

“Everything suggests that Lampedusa is a lit brazier. / That talking about Giusi Nicolini in Lampedusa is now unseemly.”

Isola e sogna brings to the stage the heated words of the inhabitants of Lampedusa, of Giusi Nicolini*, of those who described her and those who described her island; and makes it a matter of rhythm, timbre and opposing senses.

* Valuable among the sources, the book/interview with Marta Bellingreri Lampedusa. Conversazioni su isole, politica, migranti (Edizioni Gruppo Abele, Turin, 2013).

by and with Fiorenza Menni and Andrea Mochi Sismondi and with Giorgia Sangineto and Marco Mochi Sismondi music by Vittoria Burattini (percussion), Mauro Sommavilla (electronics, guitar) and Vincenzo Scorza (electronics) sound by Vincenzo Scorza technical direction Giovanni Brunetto administration and organisation Elisa Marchese planning and communication Tihana Maravic

Ateliersi is an artistic production collective working in the field of performing arts and theatre. It deals with artistic creation and the cultural programming of Atelier Sì in Bologna. Ateliersi’s creations are made up of theatrical works and artistic interventions in which the performative gesture enters into an organic dialogue with anthropology, literature, musical production and the visual arts in order to encourage a communication of thought capable of intercepting anxieties and perspectives that coagulate meaning around the subversions manifested in the world.

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