Italy Grand Tour: the Biennale of Theater in Venice

This article is published in the 22-23 issue of Vanity Fair on newsstands until June 8, 2021

What a feast the Biennale Teatro! Let this be told by someone who has been there for forty years, and thanks to her he has discovered a part of himself. A part that remains closed, sealed, it is true: a perverse tabernacle to be carried around as a secret. Certainly not a topic of conversation like the TV series, when at dinner among friends the chatter is fruitful. Here, we are already at the sore point: the theater is for the few. Some things you can only see at festivals and, back home, you won’t find anyone to talk to. So don’t let them slip away, who can.

The Biennali Teatro & Co. are cubic meters of time in which everything thickens, everything can happen. Too bad that everything happens only there. Or is this their strong point? That
not to found a shared memory? If I tell you that in the eighties at the Biennale Cinema I saw a preview Zelig by Woody Allen, o Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown by Pedro Almodóvar, you know what I’m talking about. Cinema unites. But if I started to list the shows of the Theater Biennials directed by Franco Quadri, how many would understand me? It was 1983, I was twenty, and seeing those shows I became someone else. So, if you are twenty years old – personal or perceived – and you are looking for something that does not leave you as before, and you do not feel like joining the rest of the world, come to Biennale Teatro. Let’s take a look at this year’s program, decided by the new directors Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte. One thing stands out: foreigners throw themselves into the present, Italians into the past. Why, damn it, why? Yet they are great artists. Roberto Latini remakes Testori; Danio Manfredini deported to concentration camps; Lenz Foundation back to Life is a dream; and the young Paolo Costantini falls back into the totalitarianism experienced by Herta Müller. Cheppalle!

Everyone assures us that, by analogy, by allegory, by allusion, these things concern us now. But foreigners do not go through these mediations, they face the present directly! They take risks, with new stage shows and scripts. The Italian theater has this vice: being still essentially a directing theater, it must only bring out the contribution of the director, the genius of his interpretation, therefore it relies on the already known, on consolidated values, relies on the classics, or on references from the past which are now canonical. Play it safe. Do we not want to question the importance of Giovanni Testori, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Calderón, the oppression suffered under dictatorships? There is an exception, that of Filippo Andreatta of Office for a Human Theatre (Danger), with A theater is a theater is a theater is a theater. If I understand correctly, it will show an empty scene in which the headlights move, the lights change, the curtains and pylons lower and the props are moved. A very swanky contemplative experience, from Hesychast monks of contemporary art (its antecedent is Le Vidand Yves
Klein).

In these decades the so-called post-dramatic theater (in which making a show no longer consists in staging a text, starting from the words, but in devising a scenic writing in which all the elements are equal: lights, movements, words, videos, bodies , scenography) has given the theatrical aesthetics a gladiatorial and dervish twist: more than acting characters, on stage they have seen warriors of the performance; bodies that really suffered, not pretending, fighting against their own physical resistance, or against language. In this edition I know that Kornél Mundruczó will propose something similar with Hard to Be a God, in which there are actresses object of harassment, Adrienn Hód with the choreographic Sunday and Kae Tempest with his poetic-political ejaculations (The Book of Traps & Lessons).

But I expect the best from those who promise total scenic binges and dramaturgies of the present: We Are Leaving di Krzysztof Warlikowski, Who killed my father by Thomas Ostermeier and Éduard Louis, and perhaps also The Mountain by Agrupación Señor Serrano. Am I wrong? I hope. People go to the Biennale Teatro to be surprised and proved wrong.

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