Skholḗ means ‘free time‘ in ancient Greek, it was a time dedicated to mental relaxation, to studying. Only afterwards a “school” became the ‘place where one studies’.

As always Short Theatre makes room within its schedule for a time of openness and sharing, both parallel to and at the same time interwoven with the Festival’s programming: Tempo Libero, the section that since 2018 gathers together workshops, laboratories and many moments of free training. Short Theatre’s Tempo Libero or Free Time is imagined as a rest – from producing, from accounting, from obtaining – but one that is both fruitful and grounded in reality: small spaces of freedom that are opportunities to pay attention to the various ways and conditions in which knowledge is transmitted, with which experience and ideas are shaped and reality is reinvented.

Gérald Kurdian – Hot Bodies Choir

1-2 September | 5:00-8:00 pm
3 September | 1:00-4:00 pm
Teatro India

workshop outcome
4 September | 9:00 pm
5 September | 10:00 pm
WeGil – Scalinata

max  20 participants

Singing is a way for human beings to connect to their deeper selves and to give a listen to their inner voices. Sexual minorities seem to carry throughout time many underlying emotions, unanswered oppressions and traumas the normative world doesn’t offer any space to heal in. The Hot Bodies – Choir workshop is thought as a place for the expression of these unspoken affects, a place to tell, to voice out and to become the supporting voicing body of others. The Hot Bodies – Choir workshop gather queer, LGBTIE+ and feminist individuals around writing and choir singing practices. In their frame, one exchanges of experiences and ideas from the reading of queer-feminist manifestos towards the collective writing of revolutionary texts. These unique, polyphonic and unruly texts, hence constitute the basis of a choral score, arranged musically by Gérald Kurdian and performed live by all the participants.

The workshop is divided in four parts: a writing momentum inspired by the collective reading of queer, feminist and decolonial manifestos (Radical Tenderness by La Pocha Nostra, the Ecosexual Manifesto by Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, Scum Manifesto by Valérie Solanas, The Straight Mind by Monique Wittig, Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway, etc.etc.) where each one of the participants writes for himself a transformative mantra. The texts would be written in the mother tongue of the participants. A vocal technique momentum where I will share with the participants a specific training to connect the emotional and the physical body. A collective singing practice to learn and share all the texts by everyone and, at the end, there will be two live final outcomes with all the participants.

 

Details:

• No singing technique is needed, it’s really for everyone interested
• It’s a queer feminist project, it is hence thought as a safe space for queer, feminist and fem / non-binary identifying individuals
• In English with Italian – English translator
• Attendance is required for all five days

 

The workshop has limited capacity and reservations are mandatory.
To make a reservation, please send a mail to shorttheatrefestival@gmail.com within 28th August.

Jacopo Jenna – Désir Mimétique
11 September | h 3 pm – 5 pm
12 – 13 September | h 10.30 am – 12.30 pm
Teatro India – Sala C
max 15 participants

 

Désir Mimétique is a dance workshop aimed at kids aged 10 to 14 ideated by the choreographer and performer Jacopo Jenna, in which we experiment with contemporary dance starting from the concept of imitation which is a basic mechanism for the incorporation and transmission of culture. We will watch videos of various examples of choreography from the last century – from Nižinskij’s ballets, through Merce Cunningham and Yvonne Rainer to streetdance steps – copying, recomposing and transforming their movements live, to create something completely new and unexpected. At times complicated and/or abstract, these choreographies will morph into a new dance in which error becomes an element of novelty that transforms the process of imitation into a new form of physical freedom, beyond any codes.

The title of the workshop freely refers to the concept of “mimetic desire” theorized by French anthropologist René Girard, who argued that human imitation is the basis for many of the phenomena that characterise our behaviour. Moreover, in cultural transmission both information and the essence of movement are replicated or transferred from one person to another through a “memetic” process: just as in biological and genetic evolution the gene unit is transmitted, thus transforming itself, so the units of intellectual or cultural information, once fixed and consolidated, become “memes” that can thus pass from one mind to another, and from one body to another.

Details:

• Young people between 10 and 14 years
• The workshop is open and free and does not require specific skills
• Attendance is required over all three days.
• On the last day of the workshop, Jacopo Jenna will shoot video for archival purposes.

 

The workshop has limited capacity and reservations are mandatory.
To make a reservation, please send a mail to shorttheatrefestival@gmail.com within the 28th August.

Little Fun Palace_Scuola Nomadica
4 – 8 September
WeGil and La Pelanda
max 10 people

The Little Fun Palace caravan returns to Short Theatre in 2020 and this time takes two forms, multiplying its possibilities of reinventing space and being together.

During Covid-19’s enforced quarantine time, there came a need to transform Little Fun Palace into a Nomadic School; an experiment in which the accentuated individuality of isolation is funnelled into collective moments to rethink our relationship with the spaces surrounding us. Analysing the hidden political implications of a caravan, we can challenge the rules in which we work [in theatre] and we live [in reality].

The Nomadic School is aimed at a young audience of architects, designers, theatre-makers as well as artists and offers four workshops/meetings with as many figures as possible covering the areas between research and artistic practice, investigating space and landscape as aesthetic territories that have political implications whilst not using the language of politics.

The Nomadic School does not exclude anyone and is open even to professionals from all types of backgrounds: basically to anyone who wants to question who decides what is real, leaving the distancing typical of academic and some cultural environments way behind in the rear view mirror.

Little Fun Palace wants to be a performative caravan that holds a mirror up to itself and – at the same time – to the different artistic practices that grow from their infinite exchanges with the environment, guests and public. By embracing the uncertainty of different points of view, and of a heterogeneous community, it is in a sense what will make the production of knowledge tangible to all participants.

 

Calendar:

friday 4 | h 9:30 pm | WeGil

Matthew C. Wilson The Age of Autonomous Exploration
film
55’

 

Saturday 5 | h 11:00 am – 2:00 | WeGil
Donato Epiro, biologist, composer, musician
Nessuna Musica

 

Sunday 6 | h 7:00 – 8:30 pm | WeGil
Giovanni Attili, researcher and professor of urbanism at the Sapienza University of Rome
Lo spazio dell’abitare tra abbandono e spettacolarizzazione

 

Monday 7 | h 5:00 – 7:00 pm | La Pelanda
Donatella Saroli, curator and researcher of feminist urbanism, visual arts and media
Il mio posto è al centro delle cose. Scrivo partendo dal nucleo di un atomo

 

Tuesday 8 | h 5:00 – 7:00 pm | La Pelanda
Giulia Crispiani, artist, writer, editor per NERO
Distanza

 

Notes:

• Participation in all events is strongly recommended

 

The workshop has limited capacity and reservations are mandatory.
To make a reservation, please send a mail to shorttheatrefestival@gmail.com  with your name, telephone number and a short presentation within the 28th August.

Françoise Vergès – Nous tissons le linceul du vieux monde
Words and practices for Anti-racism, Anti-capitalism, Anti-imperialism and Anti-patriarchy

8 – 9 – 10 September
Teatro Argentina

 

After illuminating the WeGil staircase last year with her words centred around ‘Un Féminisme Décolonial’, 2020 sees the return of Françoise Vergès at Short Theatre to rally and revive the community that gathered around her speech in the last edition. Nous tissons le linceul du vieux monde: We weave together a shroud for the old world. An intensive workshop aimed at getting artists, activists, researchers, curators and representatives of cultural institutions to know and recognize one other, to share the questions, needs, and (im)possibilities linked to the undetected racial and patriarchal system that capitalism has erected. A system that we live in and contribute to strengthen on a daily basis. The 8th to the 10^th of September will be three days of communal reflection, a time to come together, learn new words, imagine practices and strategies to apply them.

The systemic and structural violence of racist capitalism and patriarchy has, once again, been revised by the containment policies that governments have implemented in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. There has been no decrease in femicide, the murder of militants and natives, violence against the elderly and children, assaults by the police and racist violence. Inequality as well as social and racial injustice have become even more serious, contributing to a resurgence of the immense unstableness created by globalised capitalism and its racial structure. These politics shed a vivid light on the differentiation perpetrated by governments between people who have historically benefited – and still do – from being protected over to those who have throughout history been classified as disposable or as surplus and who are viewed as naturally reluctant and resistant to what those powers have conceived of as “normal life”. Therefore not only are exposed to the virus and death, but their behaviour is criminalised.

Sometimes words fail to fully explain the explosions of violence that can occur, which in turn create a climate of helplessness, anger, anguish and despair. Yet every day, somewhere, women and men resist, tearing apart the veil that normalises crime. One of our tasks will be to bring people up to date on the intertwining of temporality and spatiality that creates vulnerability, and leads to the premature deaths of the racially oppressed, of trans, queers, sex workers, migrants, refugees and the defenceless. In this three-day workshop, which will bring together activists, artists and researchers, we will try to trace these strands starting from the issues that galvanise Italy at this moment. Afterwards we will strive to put into words our aspirations and desires for emancipation and liberation.

Details:

• Attendance is required for all three days
• In English

 

 

The workshop has limited capacity and reservations are mandatory.
To make a reservation, please send a mail to shorttheatrefestival@gmail.com within 28th August sending a short presentation to explain your motivation in attending the workshop.

Les Cliniques Dramaturgiques
9-10-11 September | by appointment, only in the afternoon
La Pelanda
max 10 participants

 

Do you have a creative project in the pipeline, in the process of completion or development? Questions, creative blocks, unformulated wishes? Take advantage of a private exchange with one of our invited dramaturg(s).
A conversation free of production imperatives, to take a step back, to gain momentum.

Riccardo Fazi, in collaboration with Jessie Mill and Elise Simonet, develops for the first time in Italy the research and sharing format of Les Cliniques Dramaturgiques, conceived by the TransAmériques Festival of Montreal.

Five international dramaturg are invited to share practices, theories, issues, tools related to their dramaturgical practice. A week-long space-time of shared work during which dramaturgs from different countries, contexts and artistic practices discuss together their current projects, their individual practices and the artistic, theoretical and political scenes within which they are developing. At the center of the whole investigation the role and the functioning of the dramaturg in contemporary artistic creation, in relation to institutions, company practices, teaching in the context of performing arts.

The research will open outwards, through a series of “private consultations”.The invited dramaturgs will in fact offer daily their attention, their listening and their presence to a group of local theatre, dance and performing arts artists, in a series of “one by one” meetings dedicated to the care of the creation processes linked to dramaturgy and the writing of unpublished projects.

Invited dramaturgs: Piersandra Di Matteo, Nedjma Hadj Benchelabi, Riccardo Fazi, Sandra Noeth, Elise Simonet

 

Details:

• What? 1 h 30 private meeting, in person, in English or Italian, with one of the invited dramaturg(s)
• When? September 9-10-11, in the afternoon, by appointment
• For who? Professional theatre, dance and performing arts artists(s)
• What? The consultations are free of charge and can be booked online, while places last, by filling in the attached form (you can download it from here) do and sending it to shorttheatrefestival@gmail.com within 28th of August.

 

an idea by FestivalTransAmériques
developed at Festival Short Theatre by Riccardo Fazi / Muta Imago, Jessie Mill, Elise Simonet
cooperation on the territory Carrozzerie n.o.t
project carried out within Fabulamundi Playwriting Europe, and co-financed by the European Union