La Biennale di Venezia: programmes of Teatro Danza Musica 2025

Between the end of May and October, a tightly-packed calendar of events will involve the entire city of Venice and its territory. The 53^rd International Theatre Festival that runs from May 31 until June 15, with the programme created by the Festival’s artistic director, Willem Dafoe. The 19^th International Festival of Contemporary Dance, from July 17 until August 2, under the direction of the British choreographer Sir Wayne McGregor. And the 69^th International Festival of Contemporary Music, which will be inaugurated on October 11 and will run through October 25, organized by the director Caterina Barbieri, musician and composer.

“Wayne Mc Gregor, Caterina Barbieri, and Willem Dafoe are three great artists from different generations, origins, and experiences – writes Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, President of La Biennale di Venezia. But they are also three refined thinkers, able to convey their vision and put it at the service of cultural institutions, interpreting with intuition and originality the artistic scene to which they themselves belong. And they do this with the same eyes, heart, and brain they use to create choreographies, musical scores, and dramaturgies”.

He continues: “Right from its origin, La Biennale di Venezia has been distinguished by the strong vocation for contemporaneity and the international open-mindedness that have molded its identity over time. Starting from these founding elements, the Artistic Directors of the upcoming editions of the Dance, Music, and Theatre Biennales have delineated programmes that are able to go further and broaden the horizons: from the international to the universal, from the contemporary to a projection into the future. Their projects, rich in conceptual stratifications and innovative ideas, clearly express the desire to expand categories and redefine paradigms, transforming the artistic gesture into an experience of intellectual exploration. Hence, they are an invitation to measure oneself against the complexity of the present time through the exercise – and the arduous challenge – of critical thought”.

The physical presence of actors, their centrality to the scenic creation, is the leitmotif of the 53^rd International Theatre Festival entitled Theatre is Body. Body is Poetry, which will run from May 31 to June 15 in Venice, under the direction of Willem Dafoe. “The body, its presence, its intelligence beyond our control, is the beating heart of the theatre. It drives the meeting of the people on stage and the public, to create an instantaneous community with a commitment to attention and a possibility to wonder even in this age of virtual experiences.” A specificity of the body that is at the center of the many revolutions that have changed the language of theatre over the past century, original matrices of a new kind of theatre, still today a harbinger of impulses and possibilities. It is a return to the origin for Dafoe, whose roots are firmly anchored in the Wooster Group’s experimental theatre.

Four major areas of research interweave in the 53^rd International Theatre Festival.

1 - Venice 75/25. Fifty years of new theatre
The interface between yesterday and today was the 1975 Biennale Teatro, directed by Luca Ronconi; it was the cornerstone of the experiences of new theatre, involving seminal figures on both sides of the Atlantic. The Festival pays tribute to some of those protagonists: Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley of the legendary Odin Teatret, who will be in Venice with their most recent work, Le nuvole di Amleto; Thomas Richards, who was with the Workcenter Grotowski for over thirty years and will present the European premiere of Inanna in the sign of the multiculturalism of the new company, Theatre no Theatre. That fervid period of creativity will also be the focus of exhibits, video projections, and an encounter featuring the participation, among others, of Richard Schechner, the great theoretical and practical reference point of new American theatre, who will also give a lectio magistralis; Satyamo Hernandez, Chris Torch, Toby Marshall of the legendary Living Theatre, who were in Venice fifty years ago with Julian Beck and Judith Malina, the historical founders of that anarchic and pacifist group; Giorgio Sangati and Sandra Toffolatti, who was Luca Ronconi’s assistant and one of his actresses; as well as Eugenio Barba and Thomas Richards, the director Willem Dafoe, and Andrea Porcheddu, theatre historian and essayist.
Dafoe himself, along with Simonetta Solder, will pay tribute to Richard Foreman, the recently deceased playwright, poet, and director who was a pioneer of America’s artistic and intellectual avant-garde, with a “performative experiment,” No title. Also, the Wooster Group - the artists’ collective headed by Elizabeth LeCompte (who will receive the Festival’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement) and Spalding Gray, the tireless New York team that inherited those experiences and became a reference point of the avant-garde theatre of the 1980s - will present the European premiere of Symphony of Rats, one of Foreman’s greatest successes, almost forty years after it was first performed.

2 – Today’s maestros
From the original matrices that invest the creative dynamics of the actor’s body in order to illuminate the present. The Festival retraces the legacy of last century’s new theatre in some of its acknowledged exponents of post-modern and post-dramatic creativity.
Romeo Castellucci will be in Venice with the world premiere of a site-specific creation, I mangiatori di patate, on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio; Thomas Ostermeier, the director of the Schaubühne, will present the Italian premiere of Changes by Maja Zade; Milo Rau, today the artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen, will be in Venice with his new work Die Seherin, starring the extraordinary actress Ursina Lardi (who will receive a Silver Lion during the Festival). These artists are a lesson in creativity and theatrical pedagogy that still has much to say about the idea and the possibilities of the poetic body.
Davide Iodice will present his offbeat Pinocchio, whose subtitle “what is a person” reveals all the potential of the body as a unique instrument for telling stories. The “different” bodies of the young people who compose the variegated work group and are affected with Down syndrome, autistic spectrum disorder, Williams syndrome, or Asperger syndrome bring onstage many possible Pinocchios, each one precious and unreplaceable.
Plus: Gardi Hutter, an extraordinary clown who is appreciated and applauded the world over, her character Giovanna D’ArpPo opens up a reflection on the comic body; and the important Istanbul Historical Turkish Music Ensemble, the dervishes who, through music and the whirling of the holy-body create the conditions for achieving the divine.
Lastly, the American poet Bob Holman, the heir of the grand season of the Beat Generation, a master of New York’s spoken word scene for the past forty years and of poetic incursions in unconventional contexts. In Venice, he will be the star of a street performance, We are the Dinosaur, about “the power of sound and the magic of sense nested in sound” of words, and of Talking Poetry/More Than Heart II, in collaboration with the collective Industria Indipendente, an exploration of the idea of the vocal body and the rhythmic body.

3 – A look to the future
The Festival will also explore the emerging generations, bearers of unexpected poetics. An exploration that will continue next year and be expanded to different and geographically distant contexts.
The Festival’s programme will be enriched by the creations of the Greek choreographer and director Evangelia Rantou, who is involved in film and theatre with Dimitris Papaioannou, Robert Wilson, Lucinda Childs, and Yorgos Lanthimos, among others, but also with her company Garage21, with whom she will present the world premiere of Mountains; the multidisciplinary African/Belgian artist Princess Bangura, who has worked with Milo Rau and is the author and performer of amazing solos, two of which will be performed at Biennale Teatro: Oedipus monologue and Great Apes of the West Coast; Germany’s Yana Eva Thönnes, the author and director of Call me Paris, a world premiere; the claustrophobic and intellectual constructs of Anthony Nikolchev, from the United States, active in film and theatre, a founding member of The Studio Matejka Physical Theatre Laboratory in residence at the Grotowski Institute of Wrocław, with The (Un)Double he presents, for the first time ever, his personal take on Dostoyevsky’s The Double, interlacing it with texts by Radovan Karadzic (alias Dragan David Dabic) and judicial acts from the Christchurch massacre in 2019; and lastly, the musical vertigo of the collective Industria Indipendente. The Festival will conclude with the only Italian concert this year by Daniela Pes, an extraordinary musician, singer-songwriter, and composer.

4 – Biennale College
A pillar of the Festival, Biennale College, the longstanding project that La Biennale di Venezia has launched in every sector to support new talents, presents the winner of the 2024-25 open call for Directors, Mariasole Brusa, the author and director of Golem e fango è il mondo, a world premiere; and the winners of the 2024-25 open call for Playwrights: Jacopo Giacomoni for Tacet, with a reading curated by Silvia Costa, and Athos Mion for Orge per George, curated by Arturo Cirillo and involving his students at the Teatro Nazionale acting school in Naples.
This is also the framework for the project by the director Antonio Latella and the Accademia d’Arte Drammatica Silvio d’Amico, the drama school in Rome; he will be Venice with a new and prestigious collaboration among training colleges. Latella curates the project www.wordworldwar.bomb, a series of recitals-performances by the Academy’s second-year acting students, directed by Thom Luz, Sebastian Nübling, Jackie Poloni, Natalie Beasse, and Alessio Maria Romano.

As always at Biennale College, the pedagogical-didactic perspective is enhanced by the participation of various generations of teachers. Many of the artists who will be in Venice will hold laboratories pertinent to the major theme: the art of acting, the actor’s body, work on “physical actions,” structures of the stage practice.
The laboratories will be held by Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley, Richard Schechner; Thomas Richards, Giorgio Sangati and Sandra Toffolatti, Yana Eva Thönnes, Princess Bangura, and Gardi Hutter.
A truly special laboratory will be conducted by Davide Iodice, a comparison of the landscapes of human and urban distress, a path that begins in 2025 and will result in a new creation in 2026.
There will also be the traditional workshop on theatre criticism held by the scholar and critic Roberta Ferraresi; the project Writing in Residence of ASAC, the Historical Archive of the Biennale, run by the critic and scholar Katia Ippaso; and conversations and encounters with the artists, conducted by the journalists and critics Maddalena Giovannelli and Lorenzo Pavolini.

Arena Cinema, a space open to documentary and cinematographic video works by the artists who are guests of the Festival, will have a few surprises and curiosities in store. Such as Dionysus in ’69, a film version shot by Brian De Palma, Robert Fiore, and Bruce Rubin of Richard Schechner’s original performance of Bacchae by Euripides; Action, Thomas Richards’s last show under the supervision of Jerzy Grotowski, filmed in the church Hagia Irene in Istanbul; In principio era l’idea by Torgeir Wethal, from Eugenio Barba’s Il Vangelo di Oxyrhincus, which was presented at the 1985 Biennale Teatro directed by Franco Quadri.

It takes the long view to imagine the future through the generative power of art: Myth Makers/Creatori di miti is the theme of the 19^th International Festival of Contemporary Dance that will run from July 17 to August 2 in Venice.
“Myths have played a crucial role throughout history,” writes McGregor, introducing the theme, “by providing a framework for understanding existence, morality, and the cosmos. They help us express our fears, aspirations, and the mysteries of life. As societies evolve, so do their myths. In times of turmoil or transition, when traditional beliefs and structures begin to break down, humanity often seeks new narratives to cope with uncertainty and inspire hope. These fresh myths can emerge from various sources: science, philosophy, collective experiences shared across communities, and most vitally, from the vivid realm of art.”
“Through their inexplicable creativity quest,” continues McGregor, “artists have always been the mythmakers of their day, and it is in their legacy that we delve into the depths of their/our inner selves while articulating universal truths that resonate across times and cultures.”

The sections of the 19^th International Festival of Contemporary Dance – live performances, art and technology, installations, Biennale College, workshops, and conversations – will present many new works: 8 world premieres, 7 European premieres, 5 Italian premieres. Over the course of 17 days, more than 160 artists will be involved in the 75 events open to the public.
In recent years, in particular, under the direction of Wayne McGregor, Biennale Danza has developed and consolidated a network that invests in the creativity of the future with its most innovative exponents through calls, residences, co-commissions, and coproductions. 361 proposals for new choreographies were presented through the two national and international calls launched last year; 393 applications arrived from over 40 countries throughout the world to participate in the 2025 Biennale College Dancers and Choreographers residence.
This year, the two winners of the international and the national call for new choreographies that will debut onstage at the Festival as world premieres are Bullyache, the duo composed of Courtney Garratt and Jacob Samuel, with A Good Man is Hard to Find; and the Nuovo Balletto di Toscana with Sisifo felice by the company’s new artistic director Philippe Kratz, who created the piece with the choreographer Pablo Girolami.
During the months of May, June, and July, the 16 dancers and 2 choreographers who will soon be selected for Biennale College’s intensive theoretical-practical programme – attending courses and workshops, and, above all, creating new works – will be concentrating on two focuses and the resulting projects will be presented during the course of the Festival.
The first focus is a unique, site-specific project, The Herds, which will be presented as a festival preview (June 17). The College dancers and choreographers will collaborate on The Herds, a large-scale public art and climate change initiative to raise the attention of the whole world. From April to August 2025, herds of life-size puppet animals will invade cities from Kinshasa to the outermost edge of Norway, a 20,000 km-long route symbolizing their flight from the climate catastrophe that has destroyed their habitat. Biennale College Danza will encounter The Herds in Venice, and, for the occasion, the hip-hop star Anthony Matsena will create a bespoke choreographic intervention.
The second focus centers on Sasha Waltz, the creator of a highly personal choreographic imaginary; through her dance, she illuminates the structure of the music, presenting it under a new light. The young artists of the College will work with Sasha Waltz and her team at the studio and on an adaptation of In C by Terry Riley.
Plus, this experience of the selected young artists will interweave with and be fostered by the staging of the two original Biennale College choreography projects that won and will be performed by the dancers themselves.

This year, too, Biennale Danza co-commissions, coproduces, and presents new works by the choreographers who received a Silver Lion during the previous editions of the Festival. For 2025, Tao Ye and Duan Ni will present the European premieres of 16 and 17, two new works of pure dance that continue the Numerical Series, their expressive cipher, as well as a seal.

Several of the top-tier names in international choreography will be in Venice with new creations in co-commission or coproduction with La Biennale and other important institutions and festivals.
Marcos Morau and the multidisciplinary collective he founded twenty years ago, La Veronal, will present the world premiere of La Mort i la Primavera, inspired by the universal myth of death and rebirth, and by the posthumous work by Mercè Rodoreda.
Tânia Carvalho, one of the new, internationally affirmed exponents of Portuguese dance, will present a world premiere solo, Ventre do Vulcão at Biennale Danza. A work that fuses classical precision with expressive, chaotic movement, mirroring life’s unpredictability.
Following its debut in Madrid, Biennale Danza presents the Italian premiere of Simulacro by the collective Kor’sia, founded in Madrid by the dancers and choreographers Antonio de Rosa and Mattia Russo – both of whom graduated from the Teatro La Scala in Milan. Through a combination of artistic languages and advanced technology, the performance, which studies the human identity in the digital era, offers an immersive and interdisciplinary experience that amplifies the interaction between reality and the virtual.
Another Italian premiere will be Friends of Forsythe, featuring William Forsythe in collaboration with Rauf “RubberLegz” Yasit, Lex Ishimoto, Riley Watts, Brigel Gjoka, and the JA Collective (Aidan Carberry & Jordan Johnson). Friends of Forsythe celebrates the diversity of the cultures of dance and the transformative power of this discipline that can unite people on a profound level.

The Festival will also present intercultural proposals, some of historical ancestry, with unusual characteristics, all Italian premieres.
A journey into Sufi spirituality, in the rhythmic and dense flow of Islamic verses, conveyed by the highly sophisticated form of kathak tradition of the Aakash Odedra Company and its Songs of the bulbul. Aakash Odedra was trained in the kathak and Bharatanatyam styles of classical Indian dance. He is directed by the choreographer Rani Khanam, who has impressed kathak with her own highly personal style permeated with the wisdom of the Sufi texts, and accompanied by the music of Rushil Ranjan, who reformulates the impetuosity of Sufi music through rich orchestral scores.
Yoann Bourgeois, a choreographer and artist who has turned the art of falling into a choreographic element by blending dance and acrobatics, presents his new work, created in tandem with the Canadian singer-songwriter Patrick Watson. The aerial beauty of the movements and the play of light is accompanied by the delicacy and nuances of Canadian popular music.
Virginie Brunelle, violinist and choreographer, presents Fables, three tableaux embodied by ten dancers from her company and accompanied by the pianist Laurier Rajotte. Inspired by Monte Verità, which, in the early 1900s, became the cradle of a famous community of artists, utopians, revolutionaries, and theosophists, Fables puts the spotlight on the prodromes of that extraordinary experience of women’s freedom.

The Festival will once again be the stage of highly experimental experiences involving dance, art, and technology.
On the Other Earth, which debuts as a world premiere and will be on view for the entire duration of the Festival, is a coproduction between La Biennale di Venezia, Studio Wayne McGregor, Hong Kong Ballet, and Future Cinema Systems, and will see Wayne McGregor himself alongside the artist Jeffrey Shaw, the filmmaker Ravi Deepres, and the light artist Theresa Baumgartner. Dance, choreography, digital images, a multimodal survey, artificial intelligence, and spatial audio converge in this immersive and interactive installation that envelops the audience in a new nVis installation, the first movie screen in the world that uses 360-degree sensory technology. An unexpected and unique way to experience dance.
Chunky Move, the Australian company directed by Antony Hamilton, has also propagated the magic of algorithms through performances that are a perfect alchemy of performance, visual art, electronic sound, and installation. In Venice, they will present the European premiere of U>N>I>T>E>D, set in a post-industrial digital era, with six extraordinary dancers-cyborgs, armed with robotic exoskeletons – an “artificial musculature” that increases strength, agility, and speed, thanks to the highly evolved animatronics of the global leaders Creature Technology Co. A universe that is both sci-fi and barbaric.

The legendary American choreographer and dancer Twyla Tharp will receive the Festival’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and will inaugurate the Festival (July 17) with the magnetic energy of her choreographies: Slacktide, a new creation, will be presented together with her famous choreography from 1998, Diabelli. A diptych that celebrates sixty years of activity with her company, Twyla Tharp Dance, on its Diamond Jubilee Tour. The tour started on January 26 in Minneapolis and is crossing the United States from coast to coast, before coming to the Biennale for its European premiere.
A key exponent of the South American experimental scene, Carolina Bianchi, the recipient of the Silver Lion, reflects the most extreme experiences of female performance art with strong political and social implications. A current that runs from Gina Pane to Marina Abramovic, Regina José Galindo, Tania Bruguera, and Ana Mendieta, and for which Bianchi opens new frontiers. At the Festival, Carolina Bianchi will present the Italian premiere of the second chapter in the trilogy, Cadela Força: The Brotherhood, a work that centers on masculinity and the male gaze.

Like every year, the Festival will hold laboratories for specialists that are also open to the public, featuring many of the guest companies and choreographers. Encounters and conversations that will bring the public closer to the programmed performances.
Lastly, an exhibit and a book will document the activities and protagonists of Biennale Dance, captured by Indigo Lewis during his four years of residency at the Festival; intimate and unexpected pictures that form an extraordinary photographic archive.

The Star Within is the title of the 69^th International Festival of Contemporary Music, which will be held in Venice from October 11-25. A poetical-symbolic image that, in the words of the director Caterina Barbieri, is “the desire for great things and for vastness. Spark of new worlds, it opens us to infinity. A vibration that permeates the cosmos and pierces through us with awe, from molecule to planetary motion, sound escapes the boundaries of the ego and opens us up to the encounter with the Other — the unknown.”
The Festival will explore cosmic music.  “Through using this poetic expression,” writes Caterina Barbieri, “I am not referring to a specific musical style or tradition but rather to the generative power of music to create new worlds, beyond rigid definitions of genre or historical affiliations. [...] In the ecstasy of listening, rigid notions of time and space dissolve: music teaches us much about the relativity and limits of human perception. In this it is similar to Venice and its vocation to mutability: the play of reflections, the vanishing perspectives, the perpetual motion of water and light that dissolve boundaries and open to the space of the multiple and the infinite.”
“The Festival’s programme is rooted in electronic music and minimalism, but then branches off into various directions that explore connections between past and present, bringing together musical traditions that are apparently distant from one another in style, era, and geographical area, and are the expression of a community: there are forays into ancient music, contemporary music, folk music, drone music, techno, and Afrofuturism. Programming through resonance that offers the most vivid and fluid gaze possible onto the present time, representing the music of today in its richness, diversity, and inclusivity.”

The following are a few of the projects and artists present at the Festival, in anticipation of announcing the complete, detailed programme.
A musical procession on the water by the multidisciplinary artist and musician of Bolivian origin Chuquimamani-Condori will be the Festival’s opening event, to celebrate and restore the value of sound as a collective ritual. A musical procession of small boats will glide down the canals of Venice and culminate in a live concert by Los Thuthanaka, the duo composed of Chuquimamani-Condori and his brother Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, in front of the basin of the Gaggiandre at the Arsenale.
Another commission by Biennale Musica that engages with the presence of water is the new monumental work by the avant-garde American composer William Basinski, who reimagines the tape loops of Garden of Brokeness for a number of grand pianos, percussions, and vaporetto motors, a world premiere in Venice.
Plus: Resonant Vessel, by the Japanese sound artist Yosuke Fujita, alias FujiIIIIIIIIIIIta, is a site-specific work that explores the generative power of sound and water; he has created his own 11-pipe organ that interacts with a system of water tanks, in which liquid and air interact to generate a landscape of tones in constant evolution. The Teatro alle Tese is transformed into a sound chamber, becoming a vessel that navigates the fluid interaction between the terrestrial and the cosmic.

The Festival will host the European premiere of The Expanding Universe, a seminal work created between 1974 and 1977 by Laurie Spiegel, a forerunner of electronic experimentation at the dawn of its analogic applications. The work explores the relation between sound and cosmogony, reinterpreted by the Dither Quartet, an electric guitar quartet from New York, known for its versatile interpretation of experimental repertories.
Another pioneer of electronics in the analogic era is the Italian-American Suzanne Ciani, who will participate at the Festival in a new and stimulating collaboration with Actress. A transgenerational musical meeting that merges the fluid and organic style of Ciani’s expressivity on Buchla synthesizers with the rhythmic eclecticism of Actress’ so-called “R&B Concrète.”
There will be a rare appearance by the Kamigaku Ensemble, originally founded by Catherine Christer Hennix; on the occasion of the Festival, the ensemble will reunite for a special, site-specific performance in tribute to the Swedish composer who passed away in late 2023. A unique figure for the abundance of her artistic research, which ranges from composition to performance, installations, poetry, visual art, and mathematics, Hennix is another pioneering female figure, whose work has only recently been rediscovered and properly recognized.
The German multi-instrumentalist and composer Moritz Von Oswald will present the Italian premiere of Silencio, a collaboration with a 16-voice choir challenges and expands the boundaries of electronic music and the traditions of choral music, intertwining the organic with the electronic in masterful ways.

From historical minimalism to some of the most unusual voices in contemporary music, which have opened new and surprising pathways in this musical expression. The Swedish composer and organist Ellen Arkbro, a former member of the Kamigaku ensemble founded by Catherine Christer Hennix, will present a new composition, commissioned by the Festival, for three viola da gambas, a work that continues her exploration of harmonic sound and its transcendental qualities.
Another artist who explores the fusion between acoustic instrumentation and electronic synthesis is the Italian Agnese Menguzzato, trained in violin and Renaissance lute; she will be in Venice to present a new work for electric and eight-string guitars entitled Undici.
Maxime Denuc is a musician who merges the expressive abundance and emotional power of the church organ with a contemporary electronic music sensibility; she will present the Italian premiere of Elevations, an installation that incorporates the inspiration of the dub techno aesthetic into the fragile ephemeral sound of an organ controlled by computer via midi specifically created by the artist with the Belgian organ-maker Tony Decap. The Festival will open with Into the Blue, a world premiere by the Norwegian saxophonist Bendik Giske, the star of performances that transform the saxophone into an extension of his body, making the act of playing music an experience that is as visual and physical as it is acoustic. A unique voice in contemporary percussion, Enrico Malatesta explores the physical nature of sound through an approach that is both minimal and radical at the same time. He will perform the world premiere of the composition Solo VI by the German composer and organist Jakob Ullmann for percussion and audio reproduction devices; and Occam XXVI (2018), which the French pioneer of electronic and drone music Éliane Radigue wrote specifically for Enrico Malatesta.

The Festival will present many connections between different musical traditions that push the envelope of contemporary music. Peacock Dreams is the title of the concert performed by the Egyptian poet, rapper, composer, and vocalist Abdullah Miniawy, whose verses resound throughout the Middle East, with the trombonists Jules Boittin and Robinson Khoury. A new trio that freely intermingles baroque and operatic influences, Sufi and Coptic themes, and music from the Arabian Peninsula, blended together with the chaotic symphony of Cairo traffic.

A reference point of experimental electronic music, known for his work using the microtonal Colundi Sequence, Perälä has constructed his own sound universe in continuous expansion, made of digital sounds inspired by instruments and natural elements. In Venice, Perälä will present a site-specific musical concert in quadraphonic sound for the Teatro alle Tese, in collaboration with Melissa Briand-Speirs.
A pioneering figure in glitch music, Christian Fennesz will present an expanded version created especially for Biennale Musica of his seminal work Venice, an absolute manifesto with the unmistakable signature sound of the Viennese guitarist and electronic musician.
The cult drone metal duo Sunn O))), formed by Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, whose monolithic sound evokes the transcendent and transformative power of distortion, resonance, and volume, will be in Venice with a set created for Biennale Musica.

The vocal ensemble Grandelavoix led by Björn Schmelzer, who founded it in 1999 in Antwerp, brings its transformative approach to ancient music to the Festival with Epitaphs of Afterwardness. At Biennale Musica, they will present a programme in which the Messe de Notre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut, an absolute masterpiece of Medieval religious polyphonic music, dialogues with the great revolutionaries of the twentieth century – György Kurtág, György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis.
Aligned with the theme of the Festival that explores music as a generative principle and form of cosmogony, the FontanaMIX Ensemble proposes a repertory that fosters a dialogue between two figures who come from different historical and geographical contexts but share a focused research into the metaphysical nature of the cosmic dimension of sound: Giacinto Scelsi, the visionary Italian composer who celebrates the 125^th anniversary of his birth this year, and Vahid Hosseini, a composer born in Tehran in 1984, who will present the premiere of a new version for ensemble of his composition Le sensibilità delle tenebre.

Afrofuturist experimentalism and forms of Black-rooted electronic music innovation traverse the Festival. With the above-mentioned Actress, who has channeled her explorations of the Afrofuturist language into clubbing. And with the theorist, musician, and cultural critic DeForrest Brown Jr., who presents the Italian premiere of his electronic project Speaker Music, a pulsating and high-velocity exploration of rhythm, improvisation, and sonic futurism that channels the African-American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music.
The Belgian-Congolese musician and artist Nkisi (alias Melika Ngombe Kolongo), who has presented her works at Tate Modern, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and the Centre Pompidou, will present in Venice the world premiere of the most recent evolution of her research into the archeology of ethnographic sound. Nkisi’s work combines percussive influences from the musical traditions of Central and Western Africa, forming rave, noise, and industrial sounds that explore the historical memory and collective rituals tied to sound and states of trance.
A key figure of the second techno wave in Detroit, where he was born and raised, and still lives today, Carl Craig brings his visionary sound to the Festival with a DJ set that embodies the city’s rich legacy of Afrofuturism and sonic innovation.

The cellist and singer from Guatemala Mabe Fratti, recognized for her ability to interweave classical training and experimental research in sound, will present a site-specific performance in collaboration with the Venezuelan artist I. la Católica and the Mexican drummer Gibrán Andrade.
On the Festival’s opening night, there will be the world premiere of Traveling Light by Rafael Toral, a new work that continues his exploration of jazz harmonies through the expressive possibilities of guitar dialoguing with acoustic soloists – the clarinetist José Bruno Parrinha, the saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, the saxhorn player Yaw Tembe, and the flautist Clara Saleiro. On the Festival’s closing evening, Ecco2k will present in Venice an extended and immersive set on the borderline between performance and DJ set.

Biennale College: 235 applications from 35 countries throughout the world were sent to Biennale College Musica which, aligned with the Festival’s theme that explores music as a form of cosmogony, will select 5 musical projects – live performances or acousmatic compositions diffused through multiple channels. These works will debut at the 69^th International Festival of Contemporary Music at the end of the programme of residence, research, creation, and production that the selected musicians will follow in Venice over the course of three sessions between May and October.
The mentors of the selected musicians, who come from different fields of artistic and theoretical research in contemporary music (from the field of academic research to performance practice, from audiovisual multimedia research to club culture, from electroacoustic music to sound design), will be: Ellen Arkbro, DeForrest Brown Jr., Chuquimamani-Condori, Thierry Coduys, Lorenzo Senni, and Marcel Weber (MFO).

Dance, Music, Theatre with their respective festivals will involve designated areas in Venice and other more unusual ones that are full of history, to then spread beyond Venice, involving the territory in its most dynamic areas of Mestre and Marghera.

Performances, concerts, and many of the programmed events will take place in the unique venues of La Biennale di Venezia at the Arsenale (Teatro alle Tese, Tese dei Soppalchi, Sale d’Armi, Teatro Piccolo Arsenale). This year, a new venue has been added, the Sala Squadratori of the Italian Navy, a 16^th-century area where the lumber used for ship construction was originally stored and which will host the rite of the whirling dervishes during Biennale Teatro. A few of the events will be hosted in the city’s historical theatres, the Teatro Malibran and the Teatro Goldoni. The island of Lazzaretto Vecchio will become the venue of a site-specific performance by Romeo Castellucci during Biennale Teatro. And then the calli, the rii, and the basin of the Gaggiandre will be the setting for performances during all three Biennales. Other events will be hosted in the city’s historical area of Forte Marghera, from the bay of the Fort to Pavilion 30, and lastly, the industrial zone of Marghera will transform one of its amazingly tall warehouses into the perfect venue for the aerial performance by Yoann Bourgeois during Biennale Danza.

Since 2021, La Biennale di Venezia has launched a plan to reconsider all of its activities in light of recognized and consolidated principles of environmental sustainability. In 2022 La Biennale obtained the carbon neutrality certification for all the events it held that year. This was made possible by carefully collecting the data on the causes of CO2 emissions generated by the events themselves, and on the adoption of consequent measures. The entire process for achieving this, was conducted in compliance with the international standard PAS2060. For the year 2025, the goal is to obtain the “carbon neutrality” certification in accordance with the new ISO 14068 standard, for all of La Biennale’s scheduled activities: the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, the 53rd International Theatre Festival, the 19th International Festival of Contemporary Dance, the 69th International Festival of Contemporary Music, and, in particular, the 19th International Architecture Exhibition. For all the events, the most important component of the overall carbon footprint involves the mobility of the visitors. In this sense, La Biennale will engage again in 2025 in a communication campaign to raise the awareness of the participating public.

Over time, La Biennale di Venezia has developed a strong commitment in the field of education with their “Educational” activities, addressed to the audiences of the Dance, Music and Theatre Festivals. They have worked with universities, schools, families, a public of enthusiasts and the merely curious, involving over 65,000 people in more than twenty years. All the initiatives are aimed at actively involving the participants and are led by professional staff members selected and trained by La Biennale. They are divided into workshops, open classes, interdisciplinary activities, interactive learning initiatives.

The official catalogues of the 53rd International Theatre Festival, the 19th International Festival of Contemporary Dance and the 69th International Festival of Contemporary Music are published by La Biennale di Venezia and edited by the Directors of the three Departments. The three catalogues will explore the themes, protagonists and productions of each Festival and feature critical essays, images and original illustrations.
The graphic identity of the Dance Music and Theatre Department is designed by studio Headline in Rovereto, as is the layout of the catalogues for Biennale Danza 2024, and for Biennale Musica 2024, with photographs by Marco Borggreve; the layout of the catalogue for Biennale Teatro 2024 is designed by Studio Tomo Tomo in Milan.

Starting today, the programmes of the Dance Music and Theatre Festivals, with instructions for accreditation, may be found on the Biennale website, www.labiennale.org.

Starting April 23rd, tickets and passes may be purchased for all the performances and concerts in the programmes of Biennale Danza, and Biennale Teatro.

Our thanks to the Italian Ministry of Culture for its important contribution and to the Veneto Region for its support of the programmes in the Dance Music and Theatre Sectors of La Biennale di Venezia.

Special thanks to Rolex, which already supports the International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia and is now becoming Main Sponsor of Biennale Danza. Through its Perpetual Arts Initiative, an expanding portfolio of arts that extends across architecture, cinema, dance, literature, music, theatre and visual arts, the brand champions artistic excellence and achievement and confirms its long-term commitment to global culture.

Media partner of the Dance Music and Theatre Sectors is once again Rai. Through its information channels and Rai cultura - in particular the TV channel Rai 5 and Radio3 – the various activities taking place in Venice will be described and offered to the public.

We thank the following for their collaboration: Fondazione Teatro La Fenice; Teatro Stabile del Veneto “Carlo Goldoni;” Polo Museale Veneziano - Ministero della Cultura, Marina Militare e Difesa Servizi; Fondazione Forte Marghera; APS Live arts cultures ETS.

Our consolidated collaboration continues with Vela – Venezia Unica, a commercial company of the City of Venice specialized in mobility and marketing, with an agreement of reciprocal promotion and visibility.