For 2023, the choice of an all-female programme remains steadfast. Already last year, this choice brought only women artists to the Festival (a drop in the ocean if one hopes for a rebalancing). Once again, I went back to questioning what is happening on the contemporary European scene.
I read scripts, selected otherwise invisible works. I have recalled (perhaps) outmoded questions.

What is the relationship between the audience and the stage today? Between spectators and actors/performers? What remains of the scenic and dramaturgical device? What remains of the body and its power of representation, which helps to create and strengthen the narratives of the present, but which can also be a subversive space for sabotaging the major narratives? And where and with what forms does it all come together?

Some of these questions are at the heart of this edition of the Festival. What is left of the verbal score (and not of the play)? What of the dramaturgy of movement and of the body?
Are there or can there still be threads connecting written words/text and human beings/spectators?
Between body and dramaturgy, and between them and the spectator? And how do they appear?
The aim is not to compare or contrast the value that the theatrical text had in Aristotelian theory with the fact that contemporary theatre has deconstructed logocentric supremacy (examples, to name the most famous, range from Robert Wilson’s A Letter for Queen Victoria – 1974 to Romeo Castellucci’s Shakespearean Giulio Cesare -1997).
It is apparent that in such an articulated, heterogeneous and vast landscape, it is not possible, nor would it make sense, to ask whether there is still some unifying element left, for a theory that would dare to attempt to embrace all this complexity. But to go back and make sense of these questions that are all inherent to ‘theatre and its world’, and to see if and how there is any tangible return, seems interesting to me.
I try to give an answer to my reflections through a multiform curatorship that on the one hand features artists who go back to a strongly semantic use of the words/text and on the other hand performers who use the body as a strongly dramaturgical tool.

Words
Mujer en cinta de correr sobre fondo negro by Spanish artist Alessandra García is first of all a script, then a performance, but above all an x-ray of the humble neighbourhoods of any city. With this story, the artist makes the world “happen” right on her stage tapis roulant.
A family stuck in a closed space… a modern tragedy with no escape. Marleen Scholten is back at FIT with Il disperato, a text about an ordinary family, a family like so many, maybe not much money, just average. Who is this ordinary family? And how can you save the other if you cannot even save yourself?
Again a closed space, a family. Again, a plot of words before becoming a scene. How to talk about patriarchy? This is the question that Winter Family, that comes back to FIT, addresses in Patriarcat. It is not only a question of substance but also of form. A disturbing, corrosive and disruptive game of mise en abyme.
Yet the climax of this choice of working with and through ‘words’, is attained by two guest artists in particular. Rubidori Manshaft through Alcune cose da mettere in ordine tells the story of a woman just over the threshold of sixty who begins to ask questions about the journey of life. An inner and real journey toward something, an assemblage of events, poignant, ironic, in the game that life plays in an attempt to reshape a human dimension that today perhaps is lost.
Daria Deflorian, on the other hand, makes her return to the Festival with Elogio della vita a rovescio, a project freely inspired by The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Man Booker International Prize 2016). ‘What fascinates us,’ says the director, ‘is trying to write, while travelling through her literary worlds, about a possible – and impossible – response to the violence of the world. How is it possible to resist violence without exercising a violence of reaction?’

Hybrids
Threads between spectator and stage are again woven by Camilla Parini/Collettivo Treppenwitz through the story-telling of a photo album that remains extremely essential. Parini is a performer and author with an intimate vocation: Je suisse (or not) is a narrative of recollection, a one-to-one encounter where she assembles and decomposes an idea of family, identity and memory.
¡AY! ¡YA! is on the other hand an exercise on the gaze. That illusion that occurs when the image in front of us is transformed into another, when it multiplies or takes impossible forms. Bodies with various limbs, incomplete, transformable and adaptable. A performative dance piece designed to show, in a very simple way and, by revealing its tricks, the essence of theatre itself.

Body
From theatre, the programme shifts to dance with Kick Ball Change by Swiss artists Charlotte Dumartheray and Kiyan Khoshoie. What begins as a simple competition ends as a loop in which we are confined, to become a danced metaphor for human relationships.
‘Body’ with Demain est annulé by Tabea Martin questions us about revolutions as turning points in history. What does it take to generate change? A performance about the impossibility, the urge and the longing for change.