ErosAntEros’ interview by Natasha Tripney, “Seestage”, May 5 2023
POLIS Teatro Festival: “We have an attraction to the theatre of South East Europe”
Natasha Tripney, “Seestage”, May 5th 2023
https://seestage.org/interview/erosanteros-polis-teatro-festival-ravenna/
Why did you decide to found the Polis theatre festival 2018? You talk about wanting to bring theatre closer to society – what do you mean by this?
For 13 years as ErosAntEros we have been carrying on an aesthetic-political theatre that employs a variety of sources and expressive languages, with the aim of connecting theatre to life and making imagination a tool to transform reality.
When we founded the festival in 2018, it was natural for us to search for these peculiarities also in the artists we host, trying to bring to Ravenna works by artists who use contemporary performative languages to reflect on themes we feel are important to share with people. Not only performances by the protagonists of the European scene, but also emerging artists, formative and participatory projects, which also want to guarantee access to the theatre for all segments of the population, from young people to those who do not usually set foot in cultural venues for economic or social reasons.
This is an issue we care a lot about and for which every year POLIS carries out a twofold action: at an international level with its own productions and international performances, and at a local level by involving a large number of collaborations in the area, with Universities, schools, social cooperatives, cultural associations, within projects that cover the entire year and culminate in the festival. Hence the name POLIS, which pursues the utopia of returning theatre to the centre of society’s life, stimulating citizens to be active and aware spectators.
Why did you choose to focus on the Balkans this year? What about the work being made in the region excites you?
Agata Tomšič and Davide Sacco: We think that the Balkans offer a privileged mirror through which we can reflect on today’s Europe, the conflicts that run through it, the barriers that surround it. It is the place where the last European fratricidal war took place until last year and the passage of one of the most important and violent routes that migrants take to try to enter Europe to enjoy a small part of the privileges that we European citizens enjoy every day without paying attention, often to the detriment of the territories from which these people are fleeing.
The works of Oliver Frljić, Žiga Divjak, Jeton Neziraj, and Branko Šimić that we are hosting at the festival this year are emblematic for this ability they have to allow us to mirror ourselves and also enter into a relationship with other fundamental themes of our present, such as the Mediterranean migratory route that we address in our latest work LIBIA, the concept of the “enemy” explored by the dance-theatre company Zone -poème- after a long stay in the area of the former Yugoslavia in order to understand today’s conflicts through it.
In order to reflect on these issues from other perspectives as well, we have organised a round table in collaboration with the University of Bologna, in which university professors of political science and geography are invited to dialogue with some of the guest artists at the festival. Another project launched this year of which we are very proud is a collaboration with some of the city’s libraries and bookshops, which for several weeks have been displaying in-depth bibliographical studies on the Balkans, on site and online, in order to make people aware of these issues and allow those who wish to do so to delve into them.
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