We have been discussing a lot about the theme and the speech by the Artistic Management for this edition of WAM! Festival. The result was a conflict of ideas, emotions, and feelings. We decided to respect this outcome and show it to our audience. On the one hand, some of us want to turn to the dark side of our times, a condition that allows access to the most intimate and secret parts of human beings and prefer to abandon themselves to a slow drift. On the other hand, others want to focus on the small light that can be glimpsed at the end of the tunnel.
For the 10th edition of WAM! Festival we pay tribute to Leopardi. We continue to ask questions, push for considerations, highlight even very distant points of view, not to conform, not to destroy our critical thinking.
ME
We haven’t yet recovered from the devastating effects of the pandemic still in progress, we saw a faint light of hope on the horizon and then a new humanitarian catastrophe burst into our daily life, opening up forgotten and surreal scenarios that we hoped belonged to a distant past.
YOU
If someone faces a crisis, it means that things no longer worked and that those situations and values could no longer be. Problems give us the opportunity to change, remodel, fight for the things we believe in, shed a light on our differences and similarities. Crisis is the conscious transition from one state of reality to another, that is inevitably different. The crisis is a threshold and a transformation at the same time. It requires a radical reconfiguration of the paradigms, of the reference points that regulate our perception of the world.
ME
We chose to pay tribute to an artist who, with his absolutely unique and original thought and poetics, better than anyone else knows how to summarize the sentiment of the times we are going through.
Twenty years without Bene is not just a tribute to a theatre man still too little understood, it is the inevitable awareness that it is time to get rid of with comforting words and fictitious hopes.
YOU
A reinterpretation of a nocturnal poem, which sinks into the depths of the soul, allows us to travel through ourselves. To become aware or of ourselves or at least try to. Darkness is the condition for accessing our most intimate and secret recesses.
ME
A sense of profound helplessness surprised us, as if it were all in vain, as if by now, while we are facing the end of our world, there is nothing left but to abandon ourselves to a slow drift.
We are the ship in the midst of the storm that, now at its last, lets itself be overwhelmed by the impetuous waves, waiting for the final crash. Resistance. Resilience. Restart. All in vain. Everything useless. Facing the inevitable, we just have to give up and be shipwrecked.
YOU
Facing the inevitable, do we just have to give up and be shipwrecked? What to do? What to schedule? How to organize a festival in times of pandemics, war, glacier melting, deforestation, humanitarian crises. Will this be the end of the world? Will this be the end of our world? What can we offer this year? What do we choose to support?
Participation, shared experiences, hope, energy, research, sustainability. We will dance the desire for belonging and sociability, we will celebrate dance as a collective ritual.
ME
When there is nothing more worth fighting for, art is the only possible option.
Not because it can illuminate with meaning what no longer has a meaning (assuming it had one before), on the contrary, precisely because it can blow up the contradictions, nonsenses, and the end of the illusions we have always nourished ourselves with.
We will dance the solitude to which we are all inexorably called. We will highlight the unbridgeable distance that exists between body and body, between a being and his/her counterpart.
YOU
The distance between body and body is not unbridgeable. It is a dance. Sometimes it approaches, sometimes it moves away, sometimes it overlaps, sometimes it just disappears. We keep dancing and feeling a strong sense of belonging to mankind, to the earth, to our fellow or unlike human beings. I believe it is the only way to live in this world.
We are alone but also together with others and that is why a contagious disease, a war so close to us, one less tree, one more violence make us feel so bad.
ME
We do not wish for any possible consolation, even a small one.
YOU
We don’t want any consolation, we want actions and getting people to perform in and/or see a show is an action.
ME
With a sense of abyss that swallows us, we want to present this tenth edition to the city and the audience of Faenza. With a knot of suffocating anguish that assails us when we dare to think that this is the last time we repeat a gesture, a phrase, a look, an encounter.
Without conceding anything, absolutely nothing, to the thought of what will be next. Here and now. Without escape or safety. Open-mouthed, facing the void that opens up and swallows us.
YOU
With the euphoria of possibilities, with the power of the action of the here and now, fully enhancing its importance, to fully live the experience.
With open eyes: wonder, the dramatic passion par excellence. It will be the agent of transformation and a key to overcome fear and be prepared for a different feeling.