Biennale College Teatro 2024

Dates:  21 > 25 June 2024
Language: English
Target group: theatre-makers; people who are involved in making theatre whatever their discipline
Age: +18 > 40
Participants: up to a maximum of 10

WORKSHOP
An offer to theatre-artists to think less about ourselves and more about our dear friends the audience.
To think about how we abuse them, ignore them, infantilise them. How we charge them the price of a weekly food bill and then feed them cult versions of themselves in shiny sealed boxes.
This offer is a provocation towards finding a de-materialised theatre – one that thinks about its audience as co-author and collaborator. We’ll return to the roots and work upwards, thinking about form, words, pictures and performance. We’ll write and work in time and space. We’ll think about how we can dismantle our fixation on ownership and virtuosity – and find theatre again by giving it all away.

In art, nothing is black and white. The binary does not exist. Everything is fluid. The site of theatre is in the audience’s mind and every site is different. No absolutes, no objective truth, no hard lines. Only shadows and suggestions. This is the freeing power of the imagination.

TIM CROUCH
Tim Crouch is an internationally acclaimed British playwright, director and theatre-maker. He was an actor before starting to write and he still performs in much of his work.
Plays include Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel (Lyceum Theatre), Superglue (National Theatre), Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (National Theatre of Scotland, Royal Court), I, Cinna (the poet) (RSC), Beginners (Unicorn Theatre), Adler & Gibb (Royal Court, Center Theatre Group, LA), The Author (Royal Court), An Oak Tree (Traverse Theatre), I, Malvolio (Brighton Festival), ENGLAND (Traverse Theatre/The Fruitmarket Gallery) Shopping for Shoes (National Theatre) and My Arm (Traverse Theatre).
As a director: House Mother Normal (Brighton Festival), Peat (Ark, Dublin), Beginners and Jeramee, Hartleby and Oooglemore (Unicorn Theatre), The Complete Deaths (Spymonkey), The Taming of the Shrew, I, Cinna (the poet) and King Lear (RSC).
Tim created and co-wrote Don’t Forget the Driver, a six-part series for BBC2, which won Best TV Comedy at the Venice TV awards, 2019.
Other awards include: Obie Special Citation, Prix Italia, OffWestEnd Offie, Writers Guild of Great Britain (Best Play for Young Audiences), John Whiting Award, two Scotsman Fringe Firsts, two Total Theatre Awards and two Herald Angels.
He is published by Methuen Books.

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In addition to the requested personal data, candidates must also provide the following:
· curriculum vitae (in English)
· text (100 characters min > 1000 characters max including spaces, in English) on the provocation: WHY THEATRE NOW? (You will not be penalised for writing a short text)
· link to a video (max 5 minutes) that inspires the way you think. This should not be a video of yourself.

Dates: 17 > 21 June 2024
Language: English
Target group: diverse group of participants from different backgrounds (see workshop description below)
Age: +18 > 40
Participants: up to a maximum of 10

WORKSHOP
Although we reject the concept of ‘mastery’, we will share different strategies we have developed for performance co-creation . We will guide participants through tasks such exploring the urban space, image making, inventing games, drawing on personal biography to serve collective writing. We will play, dance, talk and perform together. The emphasis will be on working in small groups.
Gob Squad members step across the domains of theatre, performance art, visual art, video art, dance and music. So we welcome artists with a range of experiences whose practice similarly straddles various disciplines who are interested in making performance collaboratively. Acting is not an essential skill,  introverts are as much welcome as extraverts and flexi-verts! Artists who are curious to see what happens when their own practice meets the practice of others are key to the workshop's chemistry.

We enter the labyrinth in order to get lost. Being the hero of our own story will not help us in here. The only solution is to delete our egos, be humble, make ourselves vulnerable and ask others for help. This is the path we must walk, as artists, as people.

GOB SQUAD
Gob Squad is a group of UK and German artists. We make performances and videos which search for beauty in the everyday, and look for words of wisdom from a passing stranger. We are a artists collective, the seven core members working collaboratively on the concept, direction and performance of our work. Other artists, performers and technicians are invited to collaborate on particular projects.
We try and explore the point where theatre meets art, media and real life. As well as theatres and galleries, we place our work at the heart of urban life – in houses, shops, underground stations, car parks, hotels or directly on the street. Everyday life and magic, banality and utopia, reality and entertainment are all set on a collision course and the audience are often asked to step beyond their traditional role as passive spectators and bear witness to the results.
We started the company in Nottingham in 1994 but are now more or less based in Berlin.  Our work is regularly shown throughout Europe, and we’ve toured to all the continents apart from Antarctica.

The masterclass will be led by two members of the Gob Squad team.

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In addition to the requested personal data, candidates must also provide the following:
· curriculum vitae (in English)
· write to us (in English) about a piece of art / music / dance / film / literature / video game / tiktok which you love and has changed your life (max 200 words)
· link to a 60 second video of yourself as a work of art. No cuts, no edits, no zooms, fixed camera position. You must appear in the video yourself. You may choose to speak (in English)/not speak. You can sing, dance, be a still life, or just ‘be’.

Dates: 19 > 23 June 2024
Language: English
Target group: creative practitioners from different fields and mixed backgrounds
Age:  +18 > 40
Participants: up to a maximum of 10

WORKSHOP
A five-day session will be shared between the three artists, covering different aspects of working together where the skills of every collaborator fulfil the overall conceptual idea. Besides the group session, artists will lead individual workshops based on their solo practices and working methods. R.Bazdžiukaitė will focus on spatial aspects and gazing, V.Grainytė will invite for a textual practice, L. Lapelytė will guide through a series of explorations on listening.

Vaiva Grainytė: Niger et Albus is a beast, carrying a monochrome coat of arms. At first glance, its flag is signaling straightforwardness and robust character. It looks soothing. It seduces us into the territory of firmness and clear direction we wish to obtain. However, the compass we believed is working greatly, opens up an abundance of baby labyrinths. Niger et Albus is a trickster!

Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė: There is no line between them when they stand nearby, but they become a line to each other. One is the absence of the spectrum, while the other is the totality of the spectrum. One is absorbing, and the other is reflecting. But being so extreme, they cannot reflect or absorb one another. This masterclass will explore conditions for in-between states, allowing dialogue and nuances.

Lina Lapelytė:  In some cases, there is a clear distinction where evil sits; in some others, the black and white cannot be defined. These ambivalent circumstances, contexts, and conditions turn the definition of black and white into evil itself. Through listening and accepting, one may find a path to the queer state of mind and being.

VAIVA GRAINYTÉ, LINA LAPELYTÉ AND RUGILÉ BAZDŽIUKAITĖ
In their collaborative practice, the artists pay special attention to the relationship between documentary and fiction, reality and poetry, and the overlap of theater, music and the visual arts. Their opera-performance Sun & Sea is the second collaboration between the three artists. The work represented Lithuania at the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, where it was awarded the Golden Lion for best National Participation. Their previous work, the contemporary opera Have a Good Day! for ten cashiers, supermarket sounds, and piano is shown in Biennale Teatro 2024.

Vaiva Grainytė’s text-based practice shifts between genres, interdisciplinary theater works and publications. As a writer, playwright, and poet she takes action as an observant anthropologist: challenged by Grainytė’s poetic interpretation, mundane social issues take on a paradoxical and defamiliarized nature.

Lina Lapelytė is an artist and musician. Her performances and installations engage trained and untrained performers often in an act of singing through a wide range of genres such as mainstream music and opera. Her works take the form of a collective and affective event that questions vulnerability and silencing.

Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė works as a theatre director, filmmaker and visual artist. In her creative practice, Rugile explores how the gap between objective and imagined realities opens in documentary narratives, how social constructs invade nature, moving from humor to horror, from real to surreal.

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In addition to the requested personal data, candidates must also provide the following:
· curriculum vitae (in English)
· motivational letter (in English)
· link to previous work/portfolio

Dates: 24 > 28 June 2024
Languages: Italian or English
Target group: actors, performers
Age: +18 > 40
Participants: up to a maximum of 10

WORKSHOP
What does the present hold?
What remains, in the air we breathe, of what has happened?
How much future is there in this instant?
Time and performance: the body and voice of the actor/actress as a medium for moving through time starting from the scenic present. Through the practical analysis of some moments of dramas by authors who deal with the question of time, the masterclass intends to create a shared space to try to get out of time: to shake it, move it, try to understand its characteristics through a theoretical and practical study together.
Sorace and Fazi will share with participants materials, issues and practices that investigate the nature of time through the language of performance.

Olga, Masa, Irina, the three sisters protagonists of Chekhov's eponymous text, tell us that there is another way of being in the world. A way that goes against the continuous quest for power, the exercise of possession, the anxiety and desire for continuous progress, and that instead goes towards what exists, in an attempt at a sensitive and shared embrace of the present, of all its fragile and uncertain manifestations. Our Niger et Albus is the revelation we have when we step out of time, out of the 'practical' life that crushes our days, and to which we can and must oppose the continuous search for the wonder that lurks around every corner.

MUTA IMAGO
Muta Imago is a theatre company founded in Rome in 2006. It is led by Claudia Sorace, director, and Riccardo Fazi, dramaturg and sound artist. The continuous search for forms and stories that relate the sphere of imagination with the sphere of present reality, human, political and social, has led the company over the years to investigate different forms of live arts: theatre, performance, musical theatre, radio, always aiming to find the best form to investigate the relationship between the human being, their time, and their feeling. Time, memory and identity are at the heart of the investigation carried out in their latest works: Sonora Desert, Ashes and Tre sorelle.
Over the years, the company has won numerous awards: the Ubu Special Award, the ANCT Critics' Award and the DE.MO./Movin'UP award (2009); best direction at the XXIX Fadjr Festival in Tehran (2011); Ubu Special Award and the Critical Network Award for the Radio India project, co-created by the company (2021); Ubu Award for best sound project and best lead actor (Marco Cavalcoli) for Ashes (2022).
Since 2018, the company has been funded by the Ministry of Culture as a theatre production company of research and innovation theatre.
In the three-year period 2019-2022, Muta Imago was the resident artist of the Teatro di Roma, as part of the Oceano Indiano project. In December 2023, it inaugurated at the Centre Pompidou in Paris the installation Bar Luna conceived together with the director Alice Rohrwacher.

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In addition to the requested personal data, applicants must provide the following:
· curriculum vitae in Italian, English or French
· motivational letter: "Why are you interested in working on the issue of time on stage?" in Italian, English or French
· link to short video: "Have you ever had the feeling of travelling through time? Tell us the story" in Italian, English or French

Dates: it is possible to attend:
the entire masterclass: 15 > 30 June
half masterclass: from 15 to 22 June (1st group) or from 23 to 30 June (2nd group)
Assignment to one of the two groups will be defined ex officio by the college administration office
Language: Italian
Target group: Scholars, journalists, critical spectators. Preferably graduates (not only in performing arts)
Age:  +18 > 35
Participants: up to a maximum of 6 for each group

WORKSHOP
In collaboration with lecturer and critic Roberta Ferraresi, the project intends to set up a web editorial office that can follow, analyse, comment and evaluate the events and performances of the Festival in the form of articles, interviews, reviews, reports, videos and photos for a daily narration of what happens during the Biennale Teatro.

Either black or white. That's the saying, isn't it? When it comes to choosing, deciding, taking sides. Critics do this: they divide, decisively, between yes and no. And white is Apollonian, pure, positive. Black is mystery, fear, darkness: in a word, Dionysian. It is time to choose sides, to take sides. No more nuances, no more unspoken words. We are with Dionysus, we are entering the mystery. They will not stop us.

ANDREA PORCHEDDU
A graduate in Philosophy of Law, he has been involved in theatre since 1988 as a critic and scholar.
He has collaborated with several national newspapers, online, in print, radio and TV, including L'Espresso, glistatigenerali.com, antinomie.it, Che-fare.com, Lettre International and speaks as an author and presenter on Radio3 Rai. In his career he has founded and contributed to several newspapers, including Teatro/Pubblico, Primafila, Pagina99. He has written books on Emma Dante, Ascanio Celestini, Virgilio Sieni, Ricci/Forte, Arturo Cirillo, Pierpaolo Sepe and many other artists. He holds courses in Methodology of Criticism at the 'Silvio d'Amico' Academy of Dramatic Art. He has taught at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" (2016/2022) and at the IUAV in Venice (2001-2011).
He has curated criticism workshops at various Italian festivals and in particular at the Venice Theatre Biennale, from 2010 to 2016 and again in 2021, 2022 and 2023. He devoted himself to critical theories applied to the stage with the book "Questo fantasma, il critico a teatro" (Titivillus editore). He edits the series “Guide Teatrali” by Cue Press, with which he published the book 'Che c'è da guardare? La critica di fronte al teatro sociale d'arte" (2017) and the more recent "Altri corpi/nuove danze" (2019) dedicated to the interaction between choreography and discomfort and "Un viaggio a Prato: laboratorio Gruppo di Lavoro Artistico" (2021) and "Progetto Incroci" (2022). With Luca Sossella Editore he published "Il respiro di Dioniso, il teatro di Theodoros Terzopoulos" (2020). He has directed festivals and served on international (Sarajevo, Tehran) and national juries, and in 2012 he served as artistic director of the Bahrain National Theatre. Since 2021 he has been Dramaturg of the National Theatre of Genoa.

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In addition to the requested personal data, candidates must provide the following:
· a curriculum vitae (in Italian)
· a motivational letter (in Italian)
· link to your own article-review of a performance (in Italian) - max 3000 characters, spaces included
· indicate in the online form (dedicated section) whether you intend to follow the whole or half of the course

Dates:  26 > 30 June 2024
Language: Italian
Target group: light designers, technicians, directors, choreographers, performers, actors, dancers and all those who wish to explore certain concepts, questions, reflections, poetic, philosophical and technical issues of light (and darkness) and space in contemporary theatre.
Age:  +18 > 40
Participants: up to a maximum of 10

WORKSHOP
Thinking, doing, writing about light. The workshop as a common space for studying and practising light, a time for in-depth poetic, dramaturgical and thought exploration; refining sensitivity and awareness of the matter light, of its intrinsic expressive potential and infinite applications in the space of contemporary theatre. We will try to focus on concepts, questions and substantial themes related to the thought and dramaturgy of light (and darkness) in contemporary creation: practices and theoretical reflections that trigger, nourish the research process and direct the composition of light in the scenic space. We will explore the relationship between space and body, the relationship between illuminating light and the illuminated body, a relationship of metamorphosis, meaning, expressiveness in continuous transformation. 

The image of a white, luminous sheet of paper: an empty space in which the mind and the gaze instinctively project infinite signs(dreams) and the action becomes real (triggers) the opposites. The contrast marks the end of balance, of expectation, perhaps of absence. We explore the labyrinth of Niger et Albus through the intensities of darkness and light, of the relationship between body, space, and light.

GIANNI STAROPOLI
He began his professional activity in 1997 working with the poet, director and actor Marcello Sambati, founder of the Dark Camera company, a leading group in the Roman avant-garde of the 1970s. He currently collaborates with various directors and choreographers for Italian and international productions and holds workshops for universities and performing arts professionals on the use of light in the space of contemporary theatre and on the dramaturgy of light.
In January 2020 he participated in the international study conference Lumière Matière at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice. In 2021 and 2022 he publishes two articles: for La Falena, Magazine of theatrical criticism and culture, Editorial project Teatro Metastasio in Prato and for Lumière Matière University of Lille and University of Padua. In 2022 he starred in the documentary film "La parte maledetta. Viaggio ai confini del Teatro'. A Teatro Akropolis project - directed by Clemente Tafuri and David Beronio. He is a tutor at the Anghiari Dance Hub training project directed by Gerarda Ventura. He teaches at Limelight, a Roman school of lighting engineering and lighting design. He is tutor at Téchne - Project of residency, training and technical research of Light at Lavanderia a Vapore PDV - Collegno Turin. He is a project lecturer at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica Silvio d'Amico in Rome.
In 2017 he received the Ubu prize for best lighting design for the show Il cielo non è un fondale by Deflorian/Tagliarini. In 2019 he receives the Ubu prize for best lighting design for the show Quasi niente by Deflorian/Tagliarini. In 2022 he is a finalist in the Ivo Chiesa Prize - Mestieri del teatro (dedicated to Sandro Sussi). Prize established in 2020 by the National Theatre of Genoa.

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In addition to the requested personal data, candidates must provide the following:
· a curriculum vitae (in Italian)
· motivational letter (in Italian)