Intro

NATURE OF THEATRES #24

Performing Arts Festival

The conceptual theme of the three-year period 2018-2020 is Touch. Inspirations from Jean-Luc Nancy and Gilles Deleuze, divided into Tenero (Tender) in 2018, Liscio / Striato (Smooth / Striated) in 2019 and Sforzo (Effort) in 2020.

Tenero presupposes touching, but also a moral predisposition. Touch is essential to experience, to knowledge and to the emotional relationship, yet today we touch less and less both things and people. For Jean-Luc Nancy, existence is body, there is no other evidence than that of the body: “Our existence is the touch: we touch ourselves as we exist. Our touch is what makes us “(J.L. Nancy, Plural Singularity, 1996). The problem is: how does the incorporeality of the word and the image touch the corporeal body and things? The touch that we are gradually removing in everyday life returns to other aspects of our life, especially when we think, when we know, when we love. Knowing is touching. No longer with the hand but with the brain. A resonance of emotions, visions, memories. It comes from the relationship of the bodies, the experience of one approaches the experience of the other when we share the ability to recognize ourselves as two bodies (“Already I do not wait for you to ask me how I understood you” , Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, IX-81).

In composing this twenty-fourth edition of Natura Dèi Teatri, like a child who has just learned to walk and runs in a room, which does not go from point to point as an adult would do, but moves freely, with no set goals, so that every point of space can be space-time of discovery and knowledge – we have referred to this double movement of creating striated space and smooth space: repetition and difference, associative links and transformation, coagulation and dissolution. The poetic characteristics of each artist are different, but it is precisely this rhizomatic quality that exposes everyone to growth, in a space of freedom of movement. “Painting puts eyes everywhere: in the ears, in the belly, in the lungs”, so too the performative theater, the complex and mestizo language makes the work become a breath and a chain of meaning, thought and physicality.

Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto
Natura Dèi Teatri Artistic Directors