Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

Dance, music and theatre are languages that manifest themselves in time and in presence, defining themselves in the relationship of the here and now between artist and audience. For Sir Wayne McGregor, dance invites us to reconsider the nature of time; for Caterina Barbieri, music takes us back to the primeval listening from which everything arises; for Willem Dafoe, theatre leads us back to the truth of human encounter. The titles they have chosen – Time Does Not Exist, A Child of Sound and Alter Native – are more than poetic statements, they affirm the here and now and stand as genuine orientations for our being in the world. And the three departments, once again, confirm the dialogue they have established between them, each with its own specific code.

The Programmes presented by the directors, in fact, explore the central dimension of the live artistic experience understood as a necessary medium to renew, time and time again, the perception of reality of those who participate in a performative event.

The 70^th International Festival of Contemporary Music, directed by Caterina Barbieri, moves toward a return to the origin with A Child of Sound. The title leads us to the essence of a question: what is the first sound in our memory – can we retrieve the dimension of pure listening, that of childhood?
Music is seen as a childhood of the spirit, which precedes even language and takes us back to a primeval state of listening and wonder. The child’s listening in fact preserves a form of trust and openness to the world that art can reactivate. Music in the same way is a process of transformation and catharsis, which can turn the pain of the world into a sensitive and shared experience.

Sir Wayne McGregor, Caterina Barbieri and Willem Dafoe invite the public to undertake a journey that traverses ritual and research, memory and imagination, childhood and future. Every artistic experience, when it truly happens, always brings us to the same point, to that instant in which we rediscover, in an eternal and fresh first time, a movement, a sound, a gesture.