POLIS Teatro Festival, the festival of theater and participation, now in its third year, is not backing down at this time of social distancing and global crisis. But rather, it takes advantage of this period of suspension of public activities to deeply rethink its role within society and call together the international theater community of artists, professionals, scholars and spectators that the ErosAntEros company has managed to create around itself during its first decade of activity.
From May 14-24, 2020, POLIS returns to inflame not only the city of Ravenna, but the entire theater community, transcending regional and national boundaries, organizing a major international conference on the theater of tomorrow, and dedicating its programming to a potentially infinite number of spectators through the use of networked platforms.
“What theater for tomorrow?” is the title we decided to give to this new edition and at the same time the question that during the days of the festival we will decline into five more questions on the web channels of ErosAntEros and EmiliaRomagnaCreativa. Just as in our works as a company and in the performances we are used to hosting at the festival, theater becomes a tool for reflection on the present, so, in the impossibility of physically experiencing the theatrical venues, the festival turns into a great collective reflection on theater, capable of offering important cues for building the theater of tomorrow.
Before the pandemic, the 2020 festival program was supposed to be dedicated to the theme of human rights and exile, with a dense program of performances, meetings and participatory projects. That is why we had chosen as its guiding image a beautiful portrait of Yoko Ono and John Lennon by the artist-activist Gianluca Costantini. In this delicate situation, where personal contacts are limited, we believe that this work is even more able to speak to our present, reminding us of the essentiality of such a deeply human gesture as a hug and the political force it can unleash.
When it will be possible, we will return to inhabit theaters, these places of great promiscuity, where bodies touch each other, both on stage and in the audience, reflecting each other. This means, that when health security conditions permit, POLIS does not rule out returning to inhabit the stages of its city even in more fluid and unprecedented forms, perhaps the only ones possible in the times we are living. And in any case, to return in 2021 more aware, when it will be possible to hug again.
Agata Tomsic and Davide Sacco / ErosAntEros
