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.

The body is poetry, from the Greek ποιεῖν, i.e., to make and produce, as Willem Dafoe tells us in the presentation of his programme Theater is Body - Body is Poetry. The theatrical text traverses and inhabits the body, in the sense of the “beating heart of theatre.” Thus, the body is the actor’s instrument, the interlocutor between dramaturgy and audience, the zero degree of making theatre.

One of the founders of the legendary Wooster Group in 1977, Dafoe’s perfect control over the scenic body has always possessed discipline, knowledge, passion, and deep awareness, all elements he brings to his Biennale Teatro.

To strip away the sumptuousness of the stage machine in order to reach its primary, essential element means to return to its origins, to a body that is a casing but also a mystical device. Poignant, highly fragile, and at the same time an instrument of absolute expression, it is the “beauty of the theatre rite,” in which Theatre itself becomes flesh. The free will of the gesture, the trained voice, the physical feelings: this is the domain of the exercise in freedom that represents the very meaning of the path La Biennale di Venezia has followed ever since its first edition, in 1895. 

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.