Pietrangelo Buttafuoco

The voice of poets

Wayne McGregor, Caterina Barbieri, and Willem Dafoe are three great artists from different generations, origins, and experiences. 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.

As a shaman capable of intercepting lights and performing crossings, with the hallmark illumination of her artistic being, Caterina Barbieri is endowed with a talent for theorizing that allows her to move easily and with disconcerting nonchalance within the spaces and tempos of music.

The programme The Star Within first pays tribute to Clarice Lispector but right after evokes other interior stars: from Nietzsche’s dancing star to Heidegger’s star, the one that leads to the ground, the same one that the philosopher of Pathmarks requested for the immobility of his own gravestone.

Music is the only one of the arts that can travel through time with the weightless and immaterial paraphernalia of sound; and, in fact, the guests of the Biennale Musica directed by Barbieri are Laurie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue, and Vahid Hosseini, as well as Guillaume de Machaut, who is musically more alive than the living.

The theme of cosmic music also has echoes of astral space and contemporary ascents, of its ties with science and nature, with philosophy and the limitless flights of the spirit.

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.

Thus, the Dance, Music, and Theatre programmes are illuminations that have descended directly from Parnassus, an appointment with Terpsichore, Euterpe, and Melpomene in Venice over the next two years.