Festival

18th edition 3–17 September

Paris 1881. Sarah Bernhardt plays the role of Marguerite Gautier in La dame aux camellias. She starts coughing dramatically as her character dies of consumption. Instantly the theatre is filled with bouts of coughing that last several minutes to the point that no one can hear the words uttered by the great actress. The audience, caught in a sympathetic circuit, in a contagious flow that passes through the bodies, finds itself immersed in an atmosphere that attune beings, moods, things.

For this year’s edition, Short Theatre 2023 has chosen as a title Radical Sympathy. A familiar word as sympathy – that lively includes stories, philosophical wrinkles and instrumental uses – is summoned to deconstruct its sentimental emphasis. The aim being, instead, to focus on the erotic and magnetic attraction between the bodies, on interdependences that create dis(harmonies) between different matters, causing action and reaction, and again action and mobilisation. It’s a way of feeling each other through porosity, fluid exchange, temperaments and temperatures, from the very small to the atmospheric; following gravitational inclinations that leave traces of complicity between dystonic or fatally other worlds. As the festival spreads across the city, a new urban morphology emerges. A morphology that exceeds the margins, favours a change of position and the reciprocity between cultural institutions and nontheatrical locations, setting a different pace. From the city Theatre to the underground car park in the mall of a residential suburb; from the monumental classical style of a former aquarium next to the railway station, to the artificial grassy hill made of broken vessels in ancient Rome’s port area; from the neighbourhoods near the Tiber mouth, to the reopening of an historical institutional theatre on one of the city centre’s main streets. In this way, the idea of a festival emerges as a comprehensive, panoramic, stratified cooperation, taking place in the asymmetric temporality of September days where to meet in a dreamy euphoria. The programme alternates solo performances with choral pièces. In both cases, the stage – a black box, a lawn, a street, a listening room – is the space of imagination where to train oneself to overcome and accomplish subjectivity, without presuming to feel how others do. Far from the mechanisms of dominion that filters every fabric, according to more and more complex and unconquerable geometries of action, the scene keeps open the possibility of creating affinities right there, where nothing existed. Our practice is to intuitively be firm, minutely pursuing a radical feeling – unexpected and unpredictable – that may corrode the suffocating architectures of the real. In this edition, the space is filled with fugitive thoughts and postures that claim the right to be enraged, as black political and aesthetic researches teach. The poetics of opacity works to deconstruct paradigms imposed (by whiteness), in order to safeguard the irreducibility of sense. So that everything won’t be transparent, immediately understandable, conquerable, equivalent. Linguistic strategies that primarily demonstrate themselves through the crooked, the repressed, the grotesque, the painful, in terms of an existence that rejects all forms of assimilation, and instead pursues sensitiveness, enjoyment, flexibility, proximity as elements that re-trace the meaning of being together away from assertive but more and more unsteady systems. As sympathetic ink makes what is hidden – but always present – visible, the festival reveals absent agreements and confusional states rooted in the here and now. Sympathy is meant as a magnetic and impersonal perception, something similar to gravity as it invites what is external to go inside, to muddy the waters, and to exit to participate in new waves of meetings. Different states pour one into the other, in an incessant in-and-out movement. Sympathy is radical because it goes beyond us, because it lures us in an elsewhere where judgement is suspended, in the embrace of the unusual.

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PRISMA COMPLAINT, A LYRIC. LIGIA LEWIS in the city of Rome