VISCOUS POROSITY
Short Theatre 2024
September 5–15
Roma and elsewhere
Currents, resistances, stickiness, transparencies and fabulations.
The 19th edition of Short Theatre continues the excavation into the embodied relationships, sensitive experiences, and situated practices of knowledge that the performing arts are able to provoke.
Short Theatre 2024 composes words and technological fibres, turf and urban tunnels, fossilised fish and waterways, capillary invisibility and atmospheric perceptions. Through shows, musical performances, listening spaces, the exchange of practices, and theoretical encounters, it sets up affective intensities and spatial densities along urban trajectories that cross the city.
VISCOUS POROSITY is the title chosen for the new edition.
The “porous viscosity” suggested by Short Theatre is an invitation to look at the continuous intermingling of human, natural and social facts, in a knot of interconnected matters. It is a call to grasp the tactile sense of relationships: neither fluid nor solid. That point where, in the encounter with different elements, something resists deformation, resists the containment of flow. And it is there, that contagion, admixture and transformation manifest themselves.
Thinking of relations as viscous – even sticky – means paying attention to points of criticality, to inconsistencies, to forms of dissent, to what is cancelled with precise strategies of control over bodies and knowledge. Porosity is revealed as a membranous space in the intra-actions of phenomena, a moist landscape, and a soft substance-soaked ground in which to exercise malleability.
Reality leaves no doubt: the space of the possible is contracted by explicit and implicit violence that anaesthetises, imposes aphasia, announces disappearance, and works for erasure. Something, however, resists with a movement that is mixed with critical horizons and affective matters.
Short Theatre 2024 – VISCOUS POROSITY invokes a collective training in complexity and responsibility, in order not to wait motionless for the things to return fluid, to make uncertain pacts, to welcome the strength of the residual, and that instead permeates, to make our own a posture that already reorients the desirable world.
Mark the dates. Are you ready to enter the entanglement?
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.
ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT
The transmission of knowledge as well as the relationship between aesthetics and performativity as political action are both at the centre of Anticipation of the Night, a discursive space that comes to life each day during late afternoon, accompanying the festival as it flows through different locations. Conversations, meetings, book presentations, masterclasses and informal talks.
SHORT BOOKS
Short Books is the publishing series created by NERO Editions and Short Theatre, addressing the interweaving of aesthetics, critical thinking and performance practices. Translations of foreign texts, straddling theory and art criticism, miscellanies of critical writings published in old magazines or discontinued catalogues, original short essays.
