At the end of a bright and warm edition, the mandate of Piersandra Di Matteo, artistic director of #ShortTheatre since 2021, comes to an end. Four years that have allowed the festival to grow, transform, and become more solid but even more ready for change and experimentation. We are full of gratitude and esteem for all that we have explored: the widening of perspectives in the city and beyond, the discovery of new travelling companions in unexpected places, taking together the responsibility and risk of welcoming complex and urgent postures, looking at desire, making and knowledge in a renewed and always accurate way, thinking of the festival as a necessary adventure. It is wonderful to have become together something we did not yet know. The future of Short Theatre today takes the form of a transformation that is already present, which gathers and expands the profound sense of the vision that has substantiated the festival since its inception: being permeable to contemporaneity, accelerating the possibilities of what is real and granting the dialogue between artistic languages, collective practices and theoretical thought the power to transform subjectivities and environments.
© Claudia Borgia / Short Theatre 2024
The new course of Short Theatre is characterised not by a mere succession of names but by the transformation of the curatorial configuration itself. Following a public call launched by AREA06, for the next three years Short Theatre chooses to look to a plural form for the definition of its artistic project, identifying in the choral proposal presented by Silvia Bottiroli, Silvia Calderoni, Ilenia Caleo and Michele Di Stefano the best opportunity to continue its journey, in the company of the work group that guides the festival. Four of the most recognised figures on the performing arts scene, each with their own professional and personal journey, with whom we look forward to sharing imaginations and possibilities, taking this new leap together.
Here is the press release:
The 19th edition of Short Theatre 2024 – Viscous Porosity, directed by Piersandra Di Matteo who, for the next three years, leaves the baton to a new curatorial configuration, ended on Sunday 15 September.
The city was the protagonist for ten days of an interweaving of shows, performances, installations, live music and DJ sets, free workshops, lectures, and editorial presentations that saw almost all the artistic proposals sell out. Short Theatre 2024 was able to offer the public, artists, and cultural operators, both national and international, a vivid and vibrant landscape in which different artistic generations, with their different practices and visions, took their place, reverberating with one another, setting up a porous discourse that went from body to body, transformed the being and the experiencing, and gave shape and vitality back to the community.
This brings to an end the artistic direction of Piersandra Di Matteo, at the helm of the festival since 2021, whose mandate has been characterised by intense and radical work on several intersecting lines: to regenerate the relationship with the urban dimension, outlining an unprecedented map of action within a complex urban fabric such as that of Rome, and expanding the interlocutions and interweavings with the local artistic and cultural community, in a decolonial and transfeminist key; to expand international relations and alliances with realities active in different fields, helping to further amplify the festival’s resonance in the cultural landscape; to initiate a profound reflection in the field of accessibility of live performance, looking at disabilities as a fertile field of aesthetic experimentation and artistic languages as territories of political transformation.
The new course of Short Theatre will be characterised not by a mere succession of names but by the transformation of the curatorial configuration itself. Following a public call launched by AREA06, the association that has been realising the festival since 2006, Short Theatre chooses to look at a plural form for defining its artistic project over the next three years. A transition informed by transformation but also by the continuity of intentions and visions with the previous directions, aiming to continue with new impetus the elaboration of forms – cultural, artistic, political – that have characterised Short Theatre since its first edition. The curatorship of the artistic project passes from Piersandra Di Matteo to a plural configuration composed of 4 artists and curators, among the most recognised figures on the national and international performing arts scene: Silvia Bottiroli, Silvia Calderoni, Ilenia Caleo and Michele Di Stefano, who join the working group that leads the festival’s direction.
“On the threshold of its 20th edition, Short Theatre is today an established reality on the national and international artistic scene, able to offer the city of Rome a unique opportunity to meet the most progressive contemporary art scene, in a space and time that makes the relationship between the community, the city and the languages of the scene possible and sensitive. A festival dedicated to experimentation and interaction with contemporaneity, which over the years has built up a model of collective and horizontal cultural work, in which the sharing of a project vision has made it possible to refine tools and skills, setting up a virtuous dynamic, thanks to which results otherwise unthinkable for an independent reality have been achieved. Piersandra Di Matteo’s term of office – to whom all our gratitude, appreciation and enthusiasm go for the path we have travelled together – has allowed the festival to grow and clearly consolidate its vocation as a catalyst for radical and quality experiences, weaving deep links between the foreign and national art scenes, stratifying knowledge and convergences on the city’s cultural and social levels, and conceiving curating as an intrinsically collective activity, a widespread and punctual work of understanding, dialogue, sharing of intuitions, urgencies, desires and opportunities. If the complexity of the present seems to be accelerating to the limit of aphasia, the future of a reality that makes transformation and dialogue with the present its fulcrum, cannot but go in the direction of a further leap, choosing not to delegate the continuation of its project to a simple succession of names, but rather in recognising and deploying the value of what Short Theatre already expresses: trust in artistic practices in contact with reality, in sharing, in redistribution, the desire to entrust the keystone of its path to reciprocal care, proximity and the creation of community. The collective proposal of Bottiroli, Calderoni, Caleo and Di Stefano is the one that has best foreshadowed a future, with the awareness and preparation necessary to face the challenges that an event like Short Theatre entails, as well as the impetus and vital force towards tomorrow that this festival, and this city, deserves. Bottiroli, Calderoni, Caleo, Di Stefano are the four figures who, each with their own professional and personal history, can best guarantee Short Theatre quality and credibility on an artistic, political and project level, in a mechanism of complementarity and reciprocity that aims to multiply the potential achieved in recent years.” affirm AREA06 and the festival’s working group.
“The 2024 edition of Short Theatre was under the sign of joy, of laughter, of listening, of layered kindnesses, of artists and performers capable of reading context, of memories connected to the stories of the places of this incredible, eternal and fragile city. Traversing it has been perhaps the sharpest desire of the three-year period now drawing to a close. I feel a deep sense of gratitude for the collective with which it was possible to imagine it, for the management and the technical team, for all the institutions large and small with which we put together pieces, for the cultural and social associations with which we acted in concert, for the boys and girls who collaborated with us in the final phase. I would like this farewell to sound like a declaration of love for this space of proliferation, which makes its independence a field open to change and listening to the present. I am happy to pass the baton to a collective that, together with the Short Theatre team, will create a radical new configuration of its own! Yay!” declares Piersandra Di Matteo.
“There is a lot of emotion in taking over the artistic project of Short Theatre, a collective body to which we wanted to present our small multitude above all as a choice of method: an assumption of risk, a militant gesture of expansion, an act of trust in open curatorial processes and practices of creation and transformation of public space. Short Theatre is one of the most relevant festivals of the performing arts scene in Italy, an accelerator of social and political relations, discursive practices and profoundly transformative artistic forms; and it is this responsibility that we want to continue to take on at a time when we feel the urgency of this and in a global scenario of wars, crises and genocides. Short Theatre has always been the festival where everything starts again and is unleashed to give energy to what is to come: autumns, inventions and utopias of bodies.” explain Bottiroli, Calderoni, Caleo and Di Stefano.
Bio
Silvia Bottiroli is a curator and researcher with a particular interest in the intersections between performativity, institutional practices and pedagogies. She was artistic director of DAS Theatre, an international master’s programme for artistic and curatorial practices in Amsterdam (2018-2021) and of the Santarcangelo Festival (2012-2016). She curated The May Events programme for KunstenFestivalDesArts in Brussels and Vooruit (now Viernulvier) in Ghent (2018) and the FUORI! project for Emilia Romagna Teatro / Teatro Nazionale in Bologna (2022-2023). She has co-curated several artistic, discursive and educational projects, collaborating among others with West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, Homo Novus Festival in Riga and with several Degree and Master’s courses, including SNDO in Amsterdam, the Degree Course in Theatre and Performing Arts at IUAV in Venice, the Masters PACS and MAP_PA in Rome and the CLEACC at Bocconi University in Milan, where she has been teaching Method, Criticism and Research in Artistic Disciplines/Theatre since 2011. Her latest book, What Can Theatre Do, co-curated with Miguel A. Melgares and published by BRUNO, came out in 2024, and she joined the artistic cohort of Rose Choreographic School in London, with the research project Ripetere, interrompere sospendere. Il ritmo come principio curatoriale (working title), also winner of Italian Council 2024.
Michele Di Stefano is choreographer and founder of the mk group. He has received numerous awards for his work (Premio Ubu 2019 and Premio Danza&Danza 2018 and 2020, Premio Speciale Ubu 2021) and choreographic commissions from Aterballetto, Korean National Contemporary Dance Company, Nuovo Balletto di Toscana and the Ballet de Lorraine. He was a consultant for the dance programming (GRANDI PIANURE 2018-22) of the Teatro di Roma, co-curator with Francesca Corona of the Giacimenta project for Matera Capitale della Cultura 2019 and creator of the performance cycles TROPICI (Angelo Mai Roma) and BUFFALO (Palazzo delle Esposizioni, MACRO Roma and Museo Nazionale Romano). In 2018 he curated the outdoor section (Outdoor) of the BolzanoDanza Festival. Alongside the touring of the shows, she is also involved in an intense activity of meetings, workshops and experimental proposals, including the Platform of Balinese Dance at the Santarcangelo Festival (2014 and 2015), projects for the 2013-14-15 BiennaleDanza, research workshops for the Scuola Paolo Grassi in Milan, the Anghiari Dance Hub, the ISIA in Urbino and for the IUAV University. He is an associate artist at the Triennale di Milano for the three-year period 2022-24. In 2014 he received the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance at the Venice Biennale.
Silvia Calderoni is an actress and performer. She trained artistically from a very young age with the Teatro della Valdoca company, for which she has performed in several productions Since 2006 she has been an active part of the Motus company, taking part as a performer and author in many of its shows, both national and international. She stars in The Plot is the Revolution alongside Judith Malina, the historical founder of the Living Theatre. Awarded the 2009 Ubu prize for best actress under 30, she appears in several films and series including: Davide Manuli’s La leggenda di Kaspar Hauser (2012), Matteo Rovere’s Romolus and Andrea De Sica’s Non mi uccidere (2021), Gus Van Sant and Alessandro Michele’s Overture of Something that NeverEnded (2020), etc. She was associate artist d Queering Platform of the Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong and artistic consultant of Sherocco Festival (Ostuni).
Ilenia Caleo is a performer, activist, researcher. Since 2000, she has been working as an actress, performer and dramaturg in the contemporary scene, collaborating with various companies and directors, and signing several dramaturgies (Tutto brucia (2021), Frankenstein (a love story) (2023) by Motus and Exinction / les Phalènes (2022) by choreographer Alexandre Roccoli. A philosopher by training, she deals with corporeity, feminist epistemologies, experimentation in the performing arts, new institutions and forms of cultural work, publishing essays and editing several collections. She is a researcher at the IUAV University of Venice, where she teaches ‘Performance, gender and sexuality studies’, and co-founder of the Master in Gender Studies and Policies at Roma Tre University. She collaborates with the research group of the five-year project ‘INCOMMON. In praise of community. Shared creativity in arts and politics in Italy (1959-1979)’, ERC Starting Grant.
After their meeting in 2012 at Teatro Valle Occupato, Calderoni/Caleo started a joint project between artistic residencies, research ateliers and performances. Together they created several projects, installations and performance works – KISS (2019), SO IT IS (2020), thefutureisNOW? (2021), Pick Pocket Paradise (2022), The present is not enough (2023) – produced by festivals, production centres and art platforms in Italy, Germany, China, Brazil and South Korea. In 2023 they are associate artists of the Italian Pavilion of the Biennale Architettura.
Cover picture by Claudia Pajewski.
