Festival

Short Theatre 2022 — ¡Vibrant Matter!

17th edition
6–18 September

Affects, subtle chords, micro-stories that wiggle in the matter. Short Theatre returns with its 17th edition to give life to an evolving space between artistic practices, theoretical thought, music and conviviality. We plot alongside the art forms that, in their dialogue with theories, practices and places, suggest to us a radical objection to those dualisms that separate subject and object, nature and culture, to contemplate our power to influence the world that surrounds us, and our ability to be affected by it.
2022 is the year of some firsts for Short Theatre: a diffuse and stratified spatiality; the construction and multiplication of forms of accessibility; the centrality of participatory artistic projects; a gaze on an international artist and the diffraction of her languages in different formats; the writing of a non-catalogue / online magazine and the books of an unprecedented editorial series, which inaugurate new forms of dialogue, cutting across disciplinary boundaries, de-legitimizing the hierarchies between methodologies, knowledge and objects. All are ways, not only geographic, of enlarging space and pervading time. We think of the festival as the environment to explore the capacity of our reserves of possible, activating tests of the future in the here and now.
¡Vibrant Matter! is the title chosen for this new edition. Short Theatre 2022 assembles energies, fluids, fabrics, fibres, organic and inorganic elements, intensities, impressions, making room for the continuum of nature, to shift attention from the human experience of things to things themselves. The body – human or non-human, a bundle of relationships with the world, an open system in continuous evolution – is ground zero for works of interference and fermentation, of the proliferation of inexhaustible subjectivities. The shows, the musical performances, the exchange of practices and the meetings all go in search of a vital materiality that binds bodies and thoughts, to generate areas of transformation, in the accumulation and dispersion of exchanges.
Short Theatre decides to live in several venues in the city of Rome, even simultaneously, and goes beyond mere metropolitan territory, to locate and spread in complicity with theatres, cultural institutions, associations. A spatial dissemination that arises from agreements intertwined over time. It is a propagation movement that invests aesthetic horizons and knots common and other unforeseen tensions, to transform and relaunch them.
It is a question of cultivating interdependence to increase the ability to act, rejecting the exclusive barrier of doing things by oneself and for oneself. Losing one’s centre without losing the sense of community that Short Theatre has built over the years, hinging on broad hospitality.

WHAT CAN YOU TRY, FIND, DO, UNDO AT SHORT THEATRE THIS YEAR?
You can dissolve solids with aquatic intrusions – inhabit the crack at the root of a rotten world – invent new myths and new rites – divert words from communication to atmospheric feeling – place bodies side by side – welcome the vegetal becoming of things – remove your shoes to shuffle softly – speculate over afrofuturist fabulations – reflect oneself in resin dolls that front the mirrors of domination – all the while re-reading ancient feminine rites of mourning – you can risk ubiquity – affirm a science fiction of pleasure – evoke medieval epidemics of dance, bacchanal and tarantellas, and precipitate them in this contemporary world – weave collective dramaturgies of voice and thread – animate incorporated pedagogies – leave behind the shadow of the (city) centre – making the poet’s voice echo among the ancient stones of aqueducts – tying together polyrhythms and political action – shunning the anecdotal about mental health and bringing out the systemic precarization of subjects – you can make wildness a critical tool beyond norms – pausing in idleness – as you eat together under a canopy – dislocating that fascist propaganda fixed in the architectural heritage of the city – you can disperse black quartz and dust – refuse the radiographic transparency of language and measurement – pass into meaninglessness sensitive and with / sensual – and make room as you don’t give up occupying it …

PRISMA
INVENTORY OF SHIMMERS.
GISÈLE VIENNE IN THE CITY OF ROME

PRISMA is among the new paths Short Theatre explores in its 2022 edition, a refraction project involving different locations and partners in the attempt to travel through the transdisciplinary work of an international artist who has radically modified the spectrum of performing arts. Inventory of Shimmers. Gisèle Vienne in the city of Rome refracts the work of Gisèle Vienne. As a choreographer, director, puppeteer and visual artist, she has radically reinvented the paradigms of the artistic scene. Her stage work combines laughter and abjection together through the body seen as something to be manipulated, in a concept halfway between eroticism and violence. As she wears away the established limits of staging, she questions the binaries organic/synthetic and natural/artificial through the creation of worlds inhabited by puppets, dolls, folkloristic zoomorphic beings and humanoid robots.
A performance at the core of the festival, a large-format show, the presentation of a movie that has rewritten one of the artist’s most renowned works, a theoretical meeting, an installation open throughout the entire festival and an editorial publication. Inventory of Shimmers intercepts emotional sparks, and sudden burns – both conscious and non conscious – disseminated by Gisèle Vienne across Rome as an invitation to confront diverted narratives, ambiguous figures and phantasmal voices.
PRISMA.

RECIPROCITY

RECIPROCITY is an experiment with new models of mutuality and intersectionality that spans relationships, origins and expertises through dimensional playfulness, physical exchange, narrative crossroads. It’s the launch of formats open to all and in particular to those subjects usually excluded from artistic processes and convivial urban spaces.
Participatory projects, laboratories, sharing practices, workshop-based performances: in RECIPROCITY different pedagogies and the sharing of practices contribute to shift Short Theatre’s geographical and social centre of gravity (and its participants’) in a mix of aesthetics, artistic practices and social contexts.
Explore projects of RECIPROCITY.

ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT

Anticipation of the Night is the discursive space that lights up every day in the late afternoon, moving between the different locations of the festival. Conversations, meetings, book presentations, lectures, and informal talks expand the forms of reflection starting from artistic practices, promoting the connection between worlds and languages, feeding tangencies and aesthetic interference.
Explore the calendar.

SHORT BOOKS

Palcoscenici Fantasma (Plateaux fantasmatiques) is the first publication in Italian that traces the work of the French artist from the beginning until today. The essay of Bernard Vouilloux is translated in Italian for Short Books, editorial serie born from the collaboration between Short Theatre and NERO Editions. Bernard Vouilloux is a professor of French Literature at “La Sorbonne” University in Paris, he proposes a complete fresco on the artist dividing Vienne’s production according to four concepts – stage, stories, images and figures – so as to highlight the phantasmatic and visceral quality of Vienne’s dramaturgical constructions. Through psychoanalysis, linguistics and theatre ethnography from the early 20th century, the essay analyses the dramatic and impossible storylines staged with refined impalpability.

Palcoscenici Fantasma will be presented at Short Theatre the 10 of September.