To celebrate its first five-year anniversary, POLIS Teatro Festival crosses national borders and broadens its reach. It crosses city boundaries, multiplying the events scheduled and spreading them among Teatro Alighieri, Teatro Rasi, Teatro Socjale, Arteficerie Almagià. It crosses national borders, hosting the Italian premieres of some masters of the international scene such as Pascal Rambert and Ivica Buljan, within a special focus dedicated to contemporary French dramaturgy that projects the festival into a new European dimension. This focus programs and co-produces various artists who from different perspectives explore the theatrical languages of a given geographic area: not performances from a single language or nation, but paths in which authors and artists meet, translated into Italian or performed in other languages.

POLIS 2022 perhaps exceeds its own possibilities by programming more than twenty events at a difficult and uncertain time, promoting dialogue between different cultures and generations of artists, scholars and spectators, pursuing the idea of a theater that fights marginality and becomes a place of fiction where the ills of the present can be confronted.

Central themes of the festival will be violence among human beings and toward our one common home the Earth, conflicts, migration, and the violation of fundamental rights. Announcing them will be the figure of Simone Weil who is the protagonist of Gianluca Costantini’s work.

While transformed into an international event, POLIS also continues to exercise democracy through those participatory projects that have distinguished it on the territory since the first edition. As such, Visionari, Parteci-Polis, Suspended Tickets and Tickets under30, together with a new workshop for international students from I-Contact and a new project on the Manifesto dei diritti e doveri dello spettatore curated by Ateatro, will return.

Davide Sacco and Agata Tomšič / ErosAntEros