Poetic words, mountain songs that are both prayer and struggle, motionless dances defying repression, bodies caressing Martian landscapes, visions of worlds, earth, flowers, butters, listenings that break the grammar of seeing. And then gigantic architectures that turn into soft limbs, ready to embrace atmospheric actions, exhausted dances, mysterious explorations and explosions.
An edition that placed us at the very heart of things, of processes, of struggles and of the imaginations of another way of making and being in the world, gifting us with the awareness of the strength of collective processes.
The 20th edition of Short Theatre concludes itself with a long list of gifts received and of thanks to give. A crowded list, just as ST25 has been crowded: with faces, smiles, emotions, enthusiasms, commotion, embraces, astonished and complicit gazes.
The first thank you, always, goes to the group of interns: impeccable and vivid branches who, through their contribution, brought care, attention, and energy into every corner of the festival.
Thank you to all the staff, across every department – production, communication, technical, logistics, administration, box office – for never giving up on imagining, and for always striving for what is best for this constellation that is Short Theatre.
Thank you to the artists who trusted our often daring intuitions, sharing risk with us and turning it into collective experience, into unexpected landscapes.
Thank you to the partners and sponsors who injected support and vital lifeblood so that all this could be possible, and to all the large and small organisations that helped shape the events that animated this edition.
Thank you to MISS — aka Michele, Ilenia, Silvia & Silvia – for believing in the possibility of transformation, and for carrying us all into the experience of wonder.
And, last but not least, thank you to all of you who joined us: audience members, cultural workers, journalists, scholars, activists, friends, companions, lovers. A pulsating, desiring crowd that intertwined with others, and accompanied us in the exploration of disordered, overlapping, rewilded habitats, with all the proximity and trust without which we could never exist.
From the storm, for now, it’s all.
See you soon!