POLIS Teatro Festival 2026, “Dramma.it”, May 19 maggio 2026

https://www.dramma.it/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=41199:polis-teatro-festival-2026&catid=40&Itemid=12

“NORDIC FOCUS is the ‘epigraph’ title of this ninth edition of the Festival conceived and generated by ErosAntEros—the Ravenna-based company of Agata Tomšič and Davide Sacco, which has always made, and once again makes, contradiction its ordinary nature. It is a fertile contradiction between aesthetic forms and languages that, in theatrical and dramaturgical practice, exalt rather than sever the thousand threads binding the stage to Community and History, seeking to intercept the thousand diverse forms of human creativity without rigidifying them.


A continuous and stubborn crossing of borders—be they external, geographical, and cultural, or the often far more rigid internal and psychological ones—in search of what composes, and thereby values and connects in a shared feeling, the diversity of ‘diversities’. This begins with gender, to recreate the stable/fluidity of sexuality as a search for a pleasure that is not erotic solipsism; it moves from the concept of ethnicity and nation, confronting itself through what oppresses it (and what oppresses it is not always ‘outside’); and it arrives at an idea of a ‘rainbow’ humanity that is both guest to and host of Nature.


Significant, in this regard, is the image of Greta Thunberg ’embraced’ by the Polar Bear, which also visually depicts the spirit of this edition of a festival that took place in various venues across beautiful Ravenna from May 5th to 10th.


Finally, a ‘trespassing’ that tends to compose an aesthetic and, at the same time, a geography of heresy—not only theatrical, as evidenced by the panel discussion that concluded the final day of the festival with the presentation of Marco De Marinis’s book, Regia Eretica (Heretical Directing).


This year in particular, as I was saying, in which POLIS delves into the climatically cold North-East of Europe, among Scandinavians, Baltics, and Finns (an apparent homogeneity made also of profound diversities) to ignite a ‘focus’ that illuminates and warms what is born and lives around that theatre.”