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 54^th International Theatre Festival, directed by Willem Dafoe, is built around the title Alter Native. Theatre is explored here in its deepest essence as a practice that is born out of ritual and human encounter. Dafoe himself, having moved through decades of theatre, experimentation and encounters, becomes a conduit opening to the artistic realities that have shaped his lengthy career of encounters. As if to say, at a time in which truth appears increasingly fragile and the narratives multiply to the point of losing substance, theatre reclaims the power of direct perception. The presence of the actor, the body on stage and the live relationship with the audience become instruments that lead back to a shared life experience. Artistic exploration takes us right back to where we were at the beginning: to recognize what we thought we knew.

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.