POLIS Teatro Festival is born, an event that on an annual basis will enliven the city of Ravenna by focusing on the art of the actor-performer as the burning fulcrum of the relationship with the spectator, of the theater with society.
Since the first edition, POLIS disseminates performances, meetings and participatory experiences to offer the citizenry the chance to get in touch with what in the ancient polis were called the technicians of Dionysus, that is, those who through the art of theater, transmitted by contagion from a god, led citizens to share a space and time of reflection on the present.
Not great stagings, but great performances, which in order to make themselves a mirror of society, did not need gilded frames. A theater understood in its broadest and most welcoming sense, without distinctions between genres and generations, under the guide of the contamination not only of languages, but also of audiences, in order to overcome useless distinctions together and bring this living art closer to the community.
We start from the heart of the city center: the Teatro Alighieri and the Chiostro Grande of the Classense Library. The cloister’s recollected dimension, the close relationship that this fosters between the work and the spectator, makes it a magical and powerful space, one that strongly affects the form of the performances hosted and that, with its particular architectural layout, manages to immediately bring history and innovation into dialogue.
Since the image that Gianluca Costantini created for this year’s festival, the theater is at the center of a city hidden behind the gaze of a little girl, who invites the other to follow her in order to rediscover the importance of art and memory, to rebuild a community starting from its own rubble and projecting towards the future.
The 2018 edition of POLIS focuses around three key words: ACTOR, MUSIC, POETRY. Three fires that unite all the programmed performances and put the emphasis on the poetic word that becomes music, that becomes enunciation, nervous and muscular vibration that spreads through space and is transmitted by contagion to the spectators. Music, which dictates the tempo and altitude of the word, placing between itself and the latter the body-voice of the actor and the musician.
Examples are Oscar Wilde’s song of the last, brought to the stage by two great masters such as Umberto Orsini and Giovanna Marini; the revolutionary scream of the poets who sang the Red October, in our 1917 cloister version; the impalpable materiality of Nevio Spadoni’s Romagnolo dialect, which emerges from the depths of the bodies of Roberto Magnani and Simone Marzocchi in the Teatro delle Albe performance.
The issue of participation will be at the center of the day dedicated to Theatre and Polis with Prof. Marco De Marinis, who will focus on the world’s longest-running company, Odin Teatret, a rare example of vertical research and horizontal community involvement.
The polis will also have a chance to actively participate. Every evening spectators will be encouraged to anonymously leave their comments after viewing the performances, and both evenings at the cloisters will be accompanied by Marzia Bondoli Nielsen’s participatory photographic act. Both testimonies will flow into PARTECI-POLIS, a moment of collective sharing and discussion planned at the close of the festival on the last day.
Agata Tomsic and Davide Sacco – ErosAntEros
