The Inner State

This year, we still want to provoke the imagination regarding the constitution of innovative communities, and invite a reflection on the inner state of things. An ecology of the self, the self as an Inner State, within the political sense of “State”, in relation to our individual “territorial” condition with its values, confines and liberties.

Are the instruments that we use to understand ourselves and the world that surrounds us still useful or have they become obsolete? It is this obsolescence that speaks of a changing world and tempers our ability to examine and intervene. New social forms, new forms for “narrating reality”, a whirlwind of fictions and representations that make worldwide conflicts and personal stories knots in a cognitive process that is always contradictory. Often, we have had the idea that we’re living in a transitional phase, that we had to seek ways of changing, meanwhile, we have always arrived in a new state, in which everything had already transitioned, already changed. But where are we?

We desire the new, but the new makes us uncertain. Change is embraced to be assimilated, to allow it to empower and renew our instruments for perceiving the world, the instruments with which we design the architecture of our inner state and which make up a system of evaluation in looking towards the future.

Now, we must examine how to go beyond, accepting that we have naturally fallen into a new system of relations, and it is within ourselves that we must seek out new instruments to navigate this changing system, taking the personal responsibility to mediate these changes. New maps with which to chart perimeters, delineate and articulate new extensions, deviations and masses. We must assume the responsibility to go beyond the old disintegrated map, starting over from the relationship between places and community; understanding how to reinvent or recreate spaces for reflection in order to respond adequately to these changes in a necessary attempt to be a community; re-charting an interior map capable of being infused with new territories, while recognising that others have already sunk beneath the waves of conventions that no longer belong to us, conventions of a society that no longer coincides with the reality that we live in. We must start again from our inner state, that already becomes us.

Fabrizio Arcuri

 

There are things we don’t know, the research of which is best shared. The true sense of such research is to be found in the sharing, where our personal grappling with such a challenge becomes a public event. Art is, among other things, exactly this. It is a matter of making one’s very presence a political happening, a recognition of the natural and virtuous confusion between my being and the being of others, a temporal and spatial melting-pot: to create ties without being tied, to forge links but not chains, to be relating, stratifying, eliminating confines, perceiving confines as a beacon for movement. Being in one’s self, while already beyond that, already somewhere else. Lo Stato Interiore makes such an act possible, offers a personal practice, artistic and cultural, but always in relational terms, always contaminated.
We can’t possibly be if not on a map, whether it has already been determined or still remains to be plotted. Everyone has their map, charts their course, decides how to assign their personal experiences in relative positions, suggesting possible itineraries. Even escapes – the map for leaving our map. Stellar constellations and maritime trajectories, that which is set out and that which is not, the volatile fabric of our relations, of our being. The Inner State is a map of where we are now, but also a coordinate of the map that is yet to exist, the possibility of drawing a path that we’d like to follow.
Like every year, Short Theatre identifies a field of discourse, it makes its map, catalogues a theme. The unfinished nature of this design makes the theme, not indicative of content itself, but an initial impulse to a subsequent dialogue: Lo Stato Interiore is a question, a suggestion that contaminates thoughts and visions, the axis around which the life of the festival revolves, the climate of the landscape that we inhabit.
This year our Stato Interiore is Short Theatre; this year Short Theatre examines its own stato interiore, and it does so with the temporary community of artists, workers and spectators, which, for twelve years, has come together and discovered each other, has adventured and been surprised, in the times and places of this Roman festival.
Short Theatre 12 – Lo Stato Interiore takes place in the spaces of the La Pelanda and Teatro India from 7 to 17 September 2017.
For this edition, Short Theatre follows through on its research mission dedicated to emerging talent and its support of an already well-grounded reality, Italian and international, while underscoring the significance of its preceding work: projects that vigorously examine the relationship between art and spectator; music as a fundamental basis of its programming, including concerts, radio-shows, clubbing; the support of resident projects that, in collaboration with varying artistic realities, invade the festival for its entirety; the crossing of Europe’s confines and of a certain idea that identifies us with those confines.
Creating the map of the Inner State of Short Theatre 2017 are individuals carrying out their artistic research, with their thoughts and discussions, their gazes and paths. There are plays, performances, meetings, conversations. There are emerging artistic itineraries, recognisable excellence, there are familiar forms and languages, as well as hybrid performances that call into question form and language itself. There is a common process of demarcation born out of an aesthetic view towards an ethical vision of performing, which goes beyond personal tastes and those of the community. Above all, there are the people that conceived of these languages, that play with these forms.
For twelve years, Short Theatre has been this: a time and place that brings together a temporary community of artists, public, citizens and professionals. Short Theatre is a lens with which to observe the landscape of live performance both Italian and international, but also a chance to speak about the current conditions of performance itself, its forms and logic, along with its prospects.
This year, it is also the Inner State of each of us and every possible map.