Nicola Arrigoni on POLIS Teatro Festival, “Sipario”, May 18 2026
POLIS Teatro Festival, a showcase between the Baltic and Scandinavia, “Sipario”, May 18 2026
“Between cities and cities / beyond the wall, the abyss / wind at my back, a hand / a stranger’s hand upon my solitary flesh / I still feel the angel / but he has no other face now / than yours, which I do not know. So writes Heiner Müller in *The Angel Without Fortune 2*, from the collection *The Invention of Silence: Poems and Texts from After 1989* (Ubulibri, 1995).
Why start with Müller? Not only because ErosAntEros, as part of the Polis Teatro Festival, staged the German author’s *Materials for Medea*, transformed into a melologue for voice and body by a captivating Agata Tomšič, but above all because the thought of Walter Benjamin and his *Angelus Novus* — that angel of history who, driven by the wind of progress, turns his back on the future to observe the rubble left in his wake — weave together the geopolitical and aesthetic reflection of the festival’s ninth edition. Theme: Nordic Focus, a monograph on the dramaturgy of the Baltic and Scandinavian countries.
Greta Thunberg and a bear appear in the illustration that serves as the festival poster, created by Gianluca Costantini. And that bear evokes Je suisse (or not) by Collettivo Treppenwitz, a performance for two spectators at a time, in which Camilla Parini, wearing a polar bear costume and with the help of a photo album, flips through memories and concepts of family, identity, and memory together with the audience. What emerges is the feeling of always being a stranger, of not belonging, a sense of disorientation and loss of certain horizons that not even family photographs can soothe.
And while the actress in the bear costume seeks herself and narrates a condition of existential and identity-based neutrality, Müller’s Medea is the stranger—she is the one who sacrificed everything for her man and finds herself abandoned, an outsider in the world she chose and no longer part of the world that gave her birth and nurtured her. It is the condition of the migrant, of peoples without a homeland. The actress, supported by the music of Matevž Kolenc, constructs a physical-vocal score that offers no respite, screaming out the condemnation of marginalization, exclusion, and betrayal. Agata Tomšič transforms all of this into a fierce song, a glimpse into a distant and magical East, golden and mysterious, that hovers over the abyss […]”.