Short Theatre is a multidisciplinary festival active in Rome since 2006. Short Theatre engages the changing landscape of national and international contemporary performing arts, with a layered program made of performances, installations, talks, lectures, workshops, concerts and DJ sets. The festival facilitates an open environment for research and experimentation, one in which to develop new forms of production and circulation of arts-related knowledge, offering established and emerging artists a space and a time in which to meet, get to know each other, exchange.
Since 2025 Short Theatre is co-directed by Silvia Bottiroli, Silvia Calderoni, Ilenia Caleo and Michele Di Stefano in the attempt of practicing collective curation as an artistic and political gesture and of nourishing the possibilities of experience that the festival may offer to artists, visitors and communities.
Short Theatre adopts tools and good practice in accordance with the objectives of the UN 2030 Agenda, for the reduction of its environmental impact and the promotion of inclusiveness, training, growth and innovation.
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Area 06
AREA06 is a platform working both in Italy and Europe that produces, organizes and promotes various cultural projects: educational programmes, festivals, artistic careers.
AREA06 is both a resource for projects development and an idea of cultural policy. Several subjects from different generations and professions take part in AREA06: managers, artists, administrators, young trainees, moodboarders searching for new ways of producing and communicating, for a different approach to theatre and other areas.
AREA06 is a member of the Associazione Scenario. AREA06 has been producing Short Theatre since 2006.
Contacts
artistic curatorship | Silvia Bottiroli, Ilenia Caleo, Silvia Calderoni, Michele Di Stefano
silvia.bottiroli@shorttheatre.org
ilenia.caleo@shorttheatre.org
silvia.calderoni@shorttheatre.org
michele.distefano@shorttheatre.org
general coordination |
organizzazione@shorttheattre.org
comunicazione@shorttheatre.org
Our Story
YESTERDAY___ Short Theatre was born in 2006 as a review of short theatrical formats within the program of Teatro di Roma at the behest of Fabrizio Arcuri, who is today co-artistic director of the innovative CSS Theatre of Friuli Venezia Giulia and former director of Massenzio International Festival of Literature, and in close collaboration with the companies and most active figures of the independent art scene in Rome, including Francesca Corona, artistic consultant until 2021 of Teatro India and today artistic director of the Festival d’Automne à Paris. The spark from which Short Theatre originated is the desire to emphasize contemporary dramaturgy in order to overcome the traditional idea of repertoire and bring the audience closer, to create a relationship capable of relating to the creative process. Having become independent from Teatro di Roma, which still remains one of the main partners of the festival, in 2010 Short Theatre began to migrate from the places included in the live show map and chose the Mattatoio as its new headquarters, coming into contact with other practices, languages, and aesthetics, establishing a lasting relationship with the space and then with the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, which today manages it. The festival continues to move in parallel in other places too: Villa Medici, Real Academia de España en Roma, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, some of the Biblioteche di Roma, and even WEGIL, the historic former headquarters of the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio building by architect Luigi Moretti, today a multipurpose centre reopened by the Lazio Region. Here Short Theatre, in collaboration with scholars, artists and activists, has helped to initiate reflection in a decolonial and transfeminist key.
As it approaches its twenty years of activity, Short Theatre enters a new phase of life, projecting itself into a three-year period from 2022 to 2024 in continuity with what was built in the past but trying to reinvent its methods of action. The first fundamental move is represented by the choice of a new artistic direction, which changes for the first time after sixteen editions. This choice falls on Piersandra Di Matteo, a scholar, dramaturg and curator, who has been working for the festival since 2021. With this the design priorities that inspire Short Theatre’s new three-year plan are starting to emerge: regenerating the relationship with the urban dimension and with the local artistic and cultural community; expanding international relations and alliances with realities active in different fields, helping to further amplify the resonance of the festival in the cultural panorama; accompanying the creative processes and the growth phases of emerging creativity; paying particular attention to the relationship between philosophical and theoretical thought as well as artistic and political practices
TODAY___ Short Theatre is an independent reality that maintains solid relations with the main institutional and cultural realities of the city, both national and international. It maintains strong roots with its territory and with those communities referenced therein, performing a fundamental task of mediational, cultural and social interrelation, in a complex and fragmented capital like Rome. Its physiognomy is that of a “medium-scale” structure, from which derives a particular form of responsibility that the festival takes on with seriousness and enthusiasm: acting as a place of mediation between different scenes and generations, configuring itself as a subject capable of engaging with artists a relationship of proximity, closely supporting their growth. Dedicated to experimentation and engagement with contemporaneity, over the years the festival has built a collective and horizontal cultural model, where shared vision has refined tools and competences, generating a virtuous dynamic that has enabled results otherwise unimaginable for an independent reality.
Through extensive European networking and project work, Short Theatre has gained increasing relevance internationally, supporting the mobility of Italian companies abroad while presenting in Italy for the first time some of the most compelling artistic voices from Europe and beyond. Looking ahead to the new 2025–2027 ministerial triennium, Associazione AREA06 – ETS has launched a call to define the new curatorial configuration of the festival, aiming to encourage a choral proposal. With this, the artistic direction passes from Piersandra Di Matteo to a plural configuration composed of four artists and curators among the most recognised figures in the national and international performing arts landscape: Silvia Bottiroli, Silvia Calderoni, Ilenia Caleo, and Michele Di Stefano, who now join the core team steering the festival.
TOMORROW___ The new course of Short Theatre will be defined not simply by a succession of names but by the transformation of its very curatorial configuration. The festival chooses to embrace a plural form in defining its artistic project — a handover informed both by transformation and by continuity of intentions and visions with previous directions — aiming to pursue with renewed energy the elaboration of unprecedented cultural, artistic, and political forms that have marked Short Theatre since its first edition. Transformation and dialogue with the present remain central to the festival’s future, while taking a further leap forward and amplifying what has always been at its core: trust in artistic practices that engage with reality, in sharing and redistribution, in entrusting reciprocal care, proximity, and community-building as the keystones of its trajectory.
This new curatorial configuration represents an assumption of risk, a militant gesture of expansion, and an act of trust in open curatorial processes and in the practices of creating and transforming public space.
Short Theatre 2025’s staff
artistic direction | Silvia Bottiroli, Ilenia Caleo, Silvia Calderoni, Michele Di Stefano
silvia.bottiroli@shorttheatre.org
ilenia.caleo@shorttheatre.org
silvia.calderoni@shorttheatre.org
michele.distefano@shorttheatre.org
general direction | Roberta Zanardo, Matteo Angius
production | organizzazione@shorttheatre.org
Roberta Zanardo
Matteo Angius
Giulia Messia
Giusy Guadagno
in collaboration with Francesco Corrias, Chiara Pegoraro and Joe Gardoni
logistics | organizzazione@shorttheatre.org
Beatrice D’Agnese
Giusy Guadagno
administration | amministrazione@shorttheatre.org
Elena Campanile
technical direction and coordination | technicashorttheatre@gmail.com
Angelo Longo
Daniele Torracca
in collaboration with Lucia Koreia Ciusa
communication and promotion | comunicazione@shorttheatre.org
Lorenza Accardo
Francesco Di Stefano
Sara Mattei
in collaboration with Claudia Morgagni
box office | info@shorttheatre.org
Silvia Parlani
Sara Mattei
social media
Gaja Aurora Ebere Ikeagwuana
press office | agambi75@gmail.com
Alessandro Gambino
graphic
Simone Tso
the image of ST25 is by Noura Tafeche
pictures
Claudia Pajewski
video
CIRCA Studio | Laura Accardo, Eleonora Mattozzi, Maria Giovanna Sodero
technical staff
Alessandro Catalano, Alessio Lodovichetti, Camila Chiozza, Chiara Zaffiro, Dario Salvagnini, David Ghollasi, Davide Clementi, Emanuele Floris, Francesca Zerilli, Francesco D’Alessio, Giacomo Cursi, Gianluca Di Meo, Luca Bucari, Marcello Sodano, Marco Compagnucci, Marco D’Amelio, Marco Guarrera, Martin Emanuel Palma, Matteo Ziglio, Paolo Savignani, Renato Piacentini, Stefano Toson, Vincenzo Monaco
translations communications texts
Ilaria Patano
web master
Manlio Ma
food & beverage
Alaska, Cucina e Cultura Catering, Laboratorio di ristorazione Quarticciolo
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special thanks to all the interns who offer their voluntary work
thanks to
Sergio e tutto 5m, Giulia Flenghi, i soliti Fenni&Massimo, Paolo Caravello, Isabella Di Cola, Maya Vetri, Michela Torquati, Davide Lilli, Angela Ventura, Luca Spartera, le Tube, S4NT4NTON1O