38° festival Pergine Spettacolo Aperto

5th -13th July 2013

Storytelling can help us give a direction, a time, and maybe even a meaning of the things that happen around us, perhaps it’s the only means we have to protect ourselves from total chaos. Even though this is probably an illusion, let’s be honest, as chaos is what digs deep into our very own being and it’s definitely not containable, though it’s also true that we don’t have much of a choice: mankind needs to recount about its very existence and the surrounding world, trying to make sense of it in some way or the other. We are constantly struggling against falling back into oblivion and indifference, and therefore telling stories of ourselves and the world around us becomes a necessary primeval instinct that we could even say is a question of survival.

But nowadays what kind of form does storytelling really take, when every attempt of categorising reality seems to end up as some kind of short-circuit of our senses? A world where words are plentiful but they don’t really say anything at all? Where any link between meaning and significance has been lost? And it’s precisely from these kinds of thoughts that the theme of the 2013 Pergine Spettacolo Aperto, “Homo narrans” has been based on and will also be the link between all the shows and events of the programme, in the attempt to explore the way art can recount mankind and the world.

So here you’ll be able to see a variety of shows that include the brilliant performance of Antonio Rezza who, in a sacrilegious way, ratifies the failure of all communication, or the enchanting story of “Bella Rosaspina Addormentata” (Sleeping Beauty), a new production by Emma Dante that looks at that critical moment between childhood and adulthood, or the works of Bonaria Manca, Shepherdess from Sardinia, born in 1925, who has plotted the story of her life on a tapestry, transforming the art of embroidery into an artistic language while at the same time creating an incredible autobiographical sequence of handiwork, then there’s the physical and instinctual theatre of the Res de Res, a Spanish company of actors (here for the first time in Italy) that act out their latest play (Remor) inside a claustrophobic shipping container, where the public are given lamps that they can use in the dark to help them define the actual play by shedding light on what happens.

Then there’s the dreamlike dancing of Radhouane El Meddeb who acts out the preparation of Cous Cous or the autobiography of John Lennon interpreted by Alessandro Haber. Not to mention the interactive installations, workshops, debates, meetings, new contemporary inventions, neuroscientific picnics at the lake and even meditation in the park, as well as autobiographical games and the tea-making ritual. This small town in the heart of region of Trentino, symbolically and architecturally marked by the presence of an enormous ex-psychiatric hospital, will be alive and bustling for the entire duration of the festival, creating a unique atmosphere, being both contained and lively at the same time. A place on the edge of the world yet at the same time being the centre of art, or better still, of storytelling.