Ida arrives in Messina, where her mother has called her back to renovate the family flat. Surrounded by the usual objects of her former life, Ida must come to terms with the ancient trauma of her father’s disappearance, when he left one morning and never returned. His absence determined the silence with her mother, her own identity, based on an anomaly, and her relationship with her husband. But now that she is besieged in her childhood home, she must break the spell and finally get her father off the stage. The play builds on the obsession with the physical space of the dilapidated house, overlapped with the psychic space, and liberates the ghosts that haunt both mother and daughter. The aim is to exorcise their power, and circulate the crucial images that govern the most ancestral relationships.

The Programme

Inside a house. A family home in Romagna. Characters move within a familiar plot where the father-son dialogue suffers from the disconnection typical of the generation gap: no regrets; broken dreams, perhaps; no illusions; rather, too many disillusions concerning the future. Then Sideri, a director who has always been sensitive to socio-historical issues, zooms out and pans to the port, the factories, the fields, the industries. Nights that end with one too many drinks just when someone else gets up to go to work: the lights of the Riviera outshine the stars, dark omens of the bewilderment of the new generations, who do not always find a calēra, a path that they can follow. Indeed, paths are sometimes hidden, lost in a world where «evolution does not always mean progress».

The Programme

Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari have come up with an act of hope for 2021, the year of the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death: their verso Paradiso is a one-night happening, from dusk to dawn, featuring the integral reading of the thirty-three Cantos of Paradiso by all the actors of their own company, Le Albe, and the actresses and the actors who work in Ravenna. verso Paradisopoints to their Cantiere Dante, to return in 2022 with a full staging of the Comedy,from the ‘dark wood’ to the dazzling light of Paradise, once again with all the citizens of the Public Call. Marco Martinelli will guide us through this project in a sort of diary, published online at doppiozero.com from April 25 to the end of June, with contributions by various scholars and artists.
The Programme

In the dark backstage, in the wings, behind the backdrops, cracks, openings and gaps are disclosed and hidden… A light flashes, disappears, is transformed: apparitions are evoked by the voices of two white figures mirroring each other. Guardians, ghosts, souls. Two actresses who have already and repeatedly crossed paths. Now, again, they meet in the grandiose theatre of Dante’s Comedy, a map of lights designed to guide us through the darkness caused by discord and ignorance, arrogance and greed. Big lights, small lights: useful tools to push our way through the “forest dark”.
Lights that inspired Dante, and were inspired by him: they invite us to listen to the spirit of hope that dwells in each of us, a spirit that creates but does not destroy, welcomes but never rejects.

To this day, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s death probably remains the most exciting cold case in Russian literature. On April 14, 1930, the leading poet of the Russian Revolution shot himself through the heart, for reasons that were never clarified. Political pressure? Intellectual isolation? A broken heart? Serena Vitale, one of the most important Italian Slavists, has written a successful book on this mystery, The Deceased Hated Gossip, whose title quotes a famous line from the poet’s suicide note. Vitale’s complex investigation has inspired Menoventi, who now adapt for the stage the poet’s mysterious end. They will propose a very peculiar work, based on the interplay of noir and crime story, where hypotheses, perspectives and testimonies reflect one another in a fantastic game of mirrors.

The Programme

The profoundly “political” nature of the research carried out by ErosAntEros does not run short in this new project, centred on the eminently political and pressing theme of borders and their complex meaning.
Confiniis the result of a project started in 2018 by a team of international artists (like the young Luxembourg-based playwright Ian De Toffoli and actor Marco Lorenzini). Starting from the migration of Italian miners to the coal basins of northern Europe in the 1950s, the work focuses on the thorny issues of our ramshackle European Union, with intriguing forays into “future history”.
All centres on a few fundamental questions: what is a border? What is it that really separates men? And why, 70 years after the first European economic agreements, do we still not have a common political vision?

The Programme