Santarcangelo Festival, directed for the fourth year by Polish curator, dramaturg and critic Tomasz Kirenczuk, started last weekend its 55th edition, which will continue for three more days spreading across various locations in the medieval village of Santarcangelo di Romagna, with its epicenter in Piazza Ganganelli. A novelty is the reopening of the spaces of the former rope factories, a suggestive industrial complex for the production of ropes and nets now abandoned, unused since 2013. Enthusiasm is high in this great and long-standing theater festival that proposes itself as an extended community, for the thirty-eight Italian and international companies expected, twenty of which are national premieres, for over 140 proposals, nine DJ sets at Imbosco until late at night and eight public meetings.
Santarcangelo Festival 2025, opening in piazza Ganganelli, ph Pietro Bertora, courtesy Santarcangelo Festival
But tensions are also high due to the recent drastic cuts to the National Fund for Live Entertainment that have penalized some of the most culturally accredited realities in the sector: even the score of Santarcangelo Festival itself was lowered by the ministerial multidisciplinary commission from 28 to 14. In a press conference, Kirenczuk forcefully stated that the State should not be concerned with programming and curation of cultural institutions, but rather with guaranteeing the economic, social and structural conditions for their effective functioning and for the development of artistic processes. The curator, identifying in this disinvestment an alarming analogy with the most coercive aspects of the cultural policy of his home country, denounces an intimidating act towards independent culture and a targeted homogenizing censorship. Not yet, the theme of this edition, has thus revealed itself as a sort of omen: “not yet” is the time of waiting, but also of tension towards a perspective, albeit uncertain, of radical planning and experimentation. Not yet is an invitation to reflect on the uncertainty of our times, uncertainty that for Tomasz Kirenczuk is not an expression of resignation, but an act of hope and political imagination. A founding characteristic of Santarcangelo Festival, the attention to sensitive topics and the attraction to the non-binary, have risen as guiding lines of research aimed at exploring emerging trends and attempting unprecedented media hybridizations. Not yet, in retrospect, also because most of the shows we saw seemed more like seminal language studies than crystallized theatrical works, composing together a stimulating international panorama of the most recent research protocols on the expressive body, open to debate and circulation among industry professionals.
Hana Umeda, “RAPEFLOWER”, performance, 55 min., ph courtesy Santarcangelo Festival
At the level of performers and direction, the gender gap of the theater industry is overturned by a female predominance, which was clear during the first weekend. From the beginning, the festival entered the heart of the matter with impactful topics, such as rape at the center of RAPEFLOWER by Hana Umeda (Warsaw / Berlin). The Japanese-Polish performer tackles this theme without seeking to untangle the complex intersection of psychological, ethical, sociological and political instances implied in it, demonstrating an aesthetic courage that transcends denunciation to become an act of reappropriation. RAPEFLOWER is not testimony but transmutation: reworking it through the movements of jiutamai dance contaminated with aseptic demonstrations of safety procedures, Umeda transforms trauma into creative energy. The choice to use a performative art that in the 19th century was performed for a male audience in secluded environments only by women, many of whom were probably abused, creates a temporal bridge that universalizes the subjective experience of gender violence. Umeda makes her violated body a territory of aesthetic resistance, in which other iconic victims celebrated by art history from the past are embodied (Artemisia Gentileschi’s women first and foremost), whose faces deformed by rage or fear overlap at times on the artist’s belly. The Not yet here is the time necessary to process trauma, but also the wait for a society that knows how to look at the female body without projecting victimizing stereotypes onto it. The performance investigates the gray zone of the post-traumatic condition to heal pain with a sort of exorcism that overturns the victim’s surrender, now ready to show herself proud and no longer an object of pity, to tell her story without being reduced to her pain, to fiercely expel what keeps wounds alive and to scream, finally, a violent song, naked, against a flowering field that turns red.
Kenza Berrada, “BOUJLOUD (man of skins)”, performance, 60 min., ph Helene Harder, courtesy Santarcangelo Festival
The Moroccan-French performer Kenza Berrada (Rabat / Paris) in BOUJLOUD (man of skins) also addresses the theme of sexual abuse, condemning the connivance of patriarchal family structures in protecting it with secretive silence. To subvert the perspective of identity boundaries, the artist invokes the ancestral figure of Boujloud, a cathartic being dressed in sheepskins, protagonist in some areas of Morocco of traditional carnival celebrations connected to female fertility, following the Feast of Sacrifice. Berrada here tries to literally wear “the skin of others” (victims, aggressors, witnesses) in a metamorphosis process akin to possession rituals, but also to the most radical theatrical practices. The drum, traditional ritual guide, marks like a metronome the transformations of a body possessed by multiple voices, alternating with the persuasive narrative voice of the actress on stage. BOUJLOUD (man of skins) questions identity fixity in a normative world: what does it mean to be a woman, Moroccan, emigrant, artist? The traditional mask thus becomes an instrument of social criticism, revealing how every identity, ultimately, is based on a performative construction. The Not yet here is the time of metamorphosis: in an era of opposing ideologies and global migrations, Berrada proposes an almost animalistic body as an instrument of liberation from impositions.
Silvia Calderoni e Ilenia Caleo, “temporale {a lesbian tragedy}”, 70 min., ph Pietro Bertora, courtesy Santarcangelo Festival
The Italian duo composed of Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo in temporale {a lesbian tragedy} focuses instead on the construction of a hallucinated imagery that draws from the virtuality of “backrooms”, infinite and disturbing spaces generated by collective digital creativity. The “storm” evoked by the title is both a meteorological and emotional condition: atmospheric disturbances become a metaphor for exasperated and unstable affective states, while bodies disarticulate on stage following the provisional hysteria of the mind. Calderoni and Caleo, who met in 2012 at the occupied Teatro Valle in Animale politico project by Motus, bring to their performative research the radicality of political activism and an unmistakable aesthetic. On stage, the rapid succession of alienating apparitions, compositions of bodies draped in eccentric ways and everyday objects interpreted improperly makes flash and exalts the unsuspected seduction of marginal affective spaces (not only queer, we would like to add). In a national context of generalized conservative restoration, the storm claims the destructuring possibilities of a radical imagination and tries to become a tempest, necessary to sweep away hetero-normative certainties.
Xenia Koghilaki, “Slamming”, performance, 35 min., ph Pietro Bertora, courtesy Santarcangelo Festival
Brutality, this time that of the overexcited crowd, is instead the starting point of Xenia Koghilaki (Athens / Berlin), who in Slamming, transforms the wildness of the mosh pit, an extreme dance style in which participants push and collide with each other, into research on collective trust. Through a choreography performed by three tireless dancers synchronized to pressing rhythms (a triple body in unison oscillations as in sculptural poses, even individual ones), Koghilaki explores the relationship between subcultural dance practices and collective release dynamics in the crowd. Slamming challenges the preconceived idea that associates punk energy with destruction: here the impact becomes caress, collision transforms into embrace. The three performers do not simulate what happens at the foot of the stage in a concert, but dig into the anthropological essence of a liminal territory where bodies meet without social mediation. The choreographer, with her research on “mechanisms that regulate shared movement”, demonstrates how dance can perceive and recover the tribal component underlying contemporary practices. The Not yet here prefigures a community made solid by shared physicality, proposing the body as the last territory of relational authenticity in a time of digital distancing.
Maud Blandel – I L K A, “l’oeil nu”, performance, 60 min., ©Margaux Vendassi, Camille Tonnerre, ph courtesy Santarcangelo Festival
The atmosphere becomes more meditative in l’oeil nu by Maud Blandel (Lausanne), in which six performers move in a group like a mutable constellation of celestial bodies in decomposition, but also like the synapses of a memory in the reorganization phase. That of the Swiss choreographer is a study on the dynamics of relationship and balance between bodies in space, foundational components of every scenic action. A bit hazy is the relationship between this type of “technical” reflection and the conceptual and emotional superstructures suggested by the words projected on screen: the association of stellar death with the tragic explosion of the paternal heart, desired sublimation of suffering in the cosmic dimension or the verses of The Hollow Man (1925) by T.S Eliot. In this personal astrophysics, death is not an end but energy transformation, and dance (this in the opinion of the writer is the most interesting intuition) becomes an instrument to measure and connect incommensurable distances.
Ewa Dziarnowska, “This resting, patience”, performance, 180 min., ph courtesy Santarcangelo Festival
The Polish choreographer Ewa Dziarnowska (Poznań / Berlin) in This resting, patience instead presented a three hours long durational performance in which the audience was invited to participate in a seduction experience. At the center of the stage, the athletic and androgynous body of Leah Marojević offered as a metamorphic idol capable of embodying, alternatively, maximum male and female seductiveness through the codified attitudes of dance and mimicry. First declared “victim” of her charisma is Dziarnowska herself, on stage with her as an imperfect mirror, loving counterpart and loving handmaid, as well as director of the movements of the audience involved in the active magnification of her splendor as a late-ancient sculpture. The experimental format dissolves the boundaries between installation and performance, between art and daily life, between noise and music. The patience required of the spectator, reinvigorated in attention by changes of soundtrack, costumes or attitudes that arrive just a moment before the temptation to give up, proposes slowness as a strategy of resistance to cultural consumption and as a necessary prerequisite to access a more authentic dimension of aesthetic experience, where contemplation is a revolutionary act.
Muna Mussie, “Cinema Impero”, video still frame, 20 min., ph courtesy Santarcangelo Festival
The Eritrean-Italian artist Muna Mussie (Keren / Bologna): in Cinema Impero orchestrates a device, available by reservation for one spectator at a time, which is at the same time cinema, theater and algorithmic installation. The title recalls the homonymous cinema hall designed by Mario Messina in 1937 in Asmara, capital of Eritrea, in which the local public could only access the balconies, while the stalls were reserved for Italian colonizers. The artist sits beside the spectator in the dark in the small hall of C’entro – Supercinema Santarcangelo, whispering a personalized commentary on the images that scroll on the screen, alternating between fascist propaganda documentaries from the Luce archive (with original audio), footage of Eritrean cinema in decay and her private films, described by artificial intelligence. The individual format, opposing the media spectacularization that is rampant today, recovers the intimacy of oral narration as a revolutionary tool for escape from control and deconstruction of the persistence of colonial narrative. By inserting artificial intelligence as a fallaciously neutral co-narrator, the artist expands the reflection by questioning our ability to distinguish between memory, simulation and ideological construction. What is called into question here is our difficulty in deciphering the power dynamics that traverse languages and technologies, but also the hope of a postcolonial narration that knows how to look at history without removals or celebrations.
Santarcangelo Festival 2025, Imbosco, ph Pietro Bertora, courtesy Santarcangelo Festival
The 55th edition of Santarcangelo Festival closes under the sign of its most authentic mission: being a laboratory of radical experimentation and a space of cultural resistance. If the performances of the inaugural weekend have demonstrated how the female body has become a privileged territory of aesthetic and political investigation, the last days of the festival (July 11-13) promise to maintain this experimental tension high. Among the scheduled shows: Qui a peur by Davide-Christelle Sanvee (Lomé / Geneva), which addresses the traumatic legacy of episodes of racism experienced directly by the artist, Magic Maids by Eisa Jocson and Venuri Perera (La Union, Colombo / Amsterdam), a performance that demystifies the links between the European history of witch hunts and global networks of exploitation of female domestic labor by collecting the untold stories of domestic workers from the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Indonesia and Language: no broblem by Marah Haj Hussein (Kofor Yassif / Antwerp), an exploration of multilingualism through a journey between geographies, voices and imaginaries. Santarcangelo Festival thus confirms its ability to be a litmus test of contemporary tensions, transforming the uncertainty of our time into creative energy and the “not yet” into a promise of the future.
Info:
Santarcangelo Festival
55th edition: Not yet
July 4 – 13, 2025
www.santarcangelofestival.com
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
NO COMMENT