Romaeuropa Festival 2019 – October Calendar

Romaeuropa festival

Romaeuropa Festival’s October events

This year, the jam-packed line-up of the 34th edition of the Romaeuropa Festival is set to delight, inspire and entertain all ages from the 17th of September until the 24th of November. A dazzling array of theatre, dance, circus, art, technology and music will be showcased at 20 different venues throughout the city. Here, we list all of the festival’s events in store for October.

 

James Thierrée
Compagnie du Hanneton
Raoul

Circus
October 2 – 6
Teatro Argentina

A magician of the theatrical stage, as well as an innovator of circus forms, James Thierrée is an artist capable of extracting emotions and dreams from space and matter, combining the languages of new circus, dance and theatre. Raoul immerses us into an enchanted world inhabited by talking teapots, animated clothes, jellyfish umbrellas and phantom elephants, all embued with secrets and shadows. Loneliness and our small personal existential crises appear to acquire substance and form and rise up towards the light through dance and movement.

Marco Donnarumma
& Margherita Pevere

Humane Methods

Dance – World Premiere
October 4
Mattatoio

Donnarumma and Pevere, winners of the Digital Award 2018, are premiering their new production: a dialogue between human, robotic and synthetic entities. The duo transcends the boundaries between dance, theatre, music, visual arts, biophysics, technology and BioArt to address the theme of violence and its many forms of expression: physical violence, violence manifested through digital technologies, violence which leads to the destruction of an ecosystem.

ZU
Terminalia Amazonia

Digitalive
October 4
Mattatoio

In another exclusive preview, Zu’s new project derives its roots from the Amazon jungle (a part of the world that Massimo Pupillo and Luca T. Mai have explored over four years) and immerses us into the nocturnal ceremonies of the curandero shamans: indigenous people who have never left their land. The sounds collected during this experience reconstruct a stimulating environment, a sort of macro laboratory in which nature provideseverything, fluidly and generously.

Mara Oscar Cassiani
Spirit x Roma

Dance – Digitalive
October 4
Mattatoio

The artist constructs a journey based on the transition from the traditional vernacular masks of Sardinia towards newly evolved contemporary rituals. A spectacular, installational analysis is born from the ontological necessity of rituals for humans- and their contemporary evolution.

Enrico Malatesta plays Eliane Radigue
Occam Ocean – Occam XXVI

Music – Digitalive
October 4
Mattatoio

A solo version for percussion of the Occamseries by French composer Eliane Radigue: one of the first musicians to experiment with ambient music as an introspective and analytical flow. Enrico Malatesta, with two plates and a frame drum, develops a continuous evolution of resonances, phantom sounds and overlapping of harmonies and sonar textures.

 

Maria Di Stefano
World Hello / Rouge

Digitalive – Visual Art
October 4 – 6
Mattatoio

Di Stefano presents 2 unpublished video works, created from photographs from his travels and centered on the themes of globalization and cultural capitalism. The first video is set at the Dong Xuan Center, known as the “Vietnamese shopping centre” in Berlin- a cultural, social and economic collision point between East and West. The second, however, is set in French Guyana, between Cayenne and Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni- a place of meeting and resistance for diverse ethnic groups.

Free Entrance

Progetto Rufa

Digitalive – Visual Art
October 4 – 6
Mattatoio

For the second year running, Digital Live welcomes the most interesting work created by the students of the Multimedia Arts and Design course of Rufa (Rome University of Fine Arts). The work is selected by the professors of the academy, together with the artistic direction of the Romaeuropa Festival, in the context of a formative course promoted by the two institutions.

Free Entrance

Sandra Mason
Untitled

Digitalive – Music
October 4
Mattatoio

One of the best diggers around, Sandra Mason proposes through her music a journey of sounds dedicated to the themes and reflections that animate the selection of artists and projects presented by Digitalive 2019: contemporary tribalism, new rituality, a genderless and borderless post-internet identity.

Free Entrance

¡miércoles!
Nicolas Jaar – Stephanie Janaina

Digitalive – Dance – Music
October 5
Mattatoio

¡miércoles! is an improvisational group consisting of dancer / choreographer Stéphanie Janaina (Mexico), and musician Nicolás Jaar (Chile + USA). All the movements and sounds that happen during a ¡miércoles! performance are improvised. However, the performance is tied to a small show-specifc publication that is written by Stéphanie and Nicolás prior to the show. It is as much a footnote to the performance as the performance is a footnote to the text. It is compiled and laid out by close collaborator and visual artist Maziyar Pahlevan. ¡miércoles! means ‘¡wednesday!’ in English but in Chile it also means ‘¡shit!’

Hiroaki Umeda
Median + Intensional Particle (adapted version)

Dance – Digitalive
October 5 – 6
Mattatoio

Japanese artist Hiroaki Umeda thinks of her performances as a fusion of dance, music and video. Sounds and particles of light and body contribute to the construction of immersive and perceptive environments, like those presented by REf19 with her choreographies Median and Intensional Particle. Microscopic elements like cells and molecules, or infinitesimal particles of light, break up and reinvent the space and the body of the dancer, giving life to a hypnotic spectacle suspended between the real and the virtual.

Ultravioletto
Sonic Arms

Dance – Digitalive – Performance
October 5 – 6
Teatro Argentina

A dance of mechanical arms, lights and images, a choreography based on generative music in which the movements of a robot and the stream of sound are indissolubly linked. Through an interdisciplinary and collaborative attitude, Ultravioletto explores the possibilities that exist between analog and digital, in order to examine the relationship between humans and technology.


Enrica Beccalli, Roula Gholmieh
Complessità: a human at the mercy of an algorithm

Dance – Digitalive – Performance
October 6
Mattatoio

Complexity: A human at the mercy of an algorithm by Enrica Beccalli and Roula Gholmieh, is the winning performance of Re: Humanism, the new award curated by Daniela Cotimbo and dedicated to the relationship between artistic creation and the use of artificial intelligence algorithms- an award for which Romaeuropa Festival is a partner. The artists present a choreography where human and machine appear to establish a new symbiotic existence.

Free Entrance

Franz Rosati
Hyletics

Dance – Dancing Days
October 6
Mattatoio

Rosati’s new audiovisual live set focuses on the portrayal of a borderless mental landscape. An invitation to imagine matter transformed into pure energy through melodies hidden in distortion, microscopic movements cadenced by slow and deep percussion, and chromatic contrasts and algorithms.

Arno Schuitemaker
The Way You Sound Tonight

Dance Dancing days
October 8 – 9
Teatro Vascello

With The Way You Sound Tonight, Arno Schuitemaker investigates the relationship between stage and audience, between the language of choreography and perception. Five performers involve the spectators-literally, on stage- and envelop them in sound through cycles of pulsating movements, dilated over time. Space and energy, distance and proximity, night and day, are the poles of an artistic experience that enters the body and restores its transcendence.

Chiara Taviani + Henrique Furtado Vieira
Stand still you ever-moving spheres of heaven

Dance – Dancing Days
October 9
Mattatoio

Two figures speak in a language that belongs only to them, in a space-time that eludes us. They mix and interweave remnants of words and reminiscences of English and move forward in their conversation according to established terms of dialogue. We recognize attitudes, words, intonations, but the understanding is constantly blurred. They use their hands to connect, to dialogue, to create meaning: these are hand-objects, hand-masks, hand-prostheses that awaken and sculpt the imagination on their way. The languor and the delicacy of this pantomimic gesture encourage the appearance of the fantastic. In a dadaist impetus, Stand still you ever-moving spheres of heaven unrolls a long white linoleum, minimalist microcosm of imagination in motion. Visual and sound poem charged with surreal spurts, the piece brings into play the possibilities of imagination.

Hamdi Dridi
I listen (you) see

Dance – Dance – Dancing days
October 9
Auditorium Parco della Musica

In order to create I listen (you) see, Hamdi Dridi is inspired by the movements and bodies of Tunisian manual labourers, in direct contrast to those of the dancers. The choreographer creates a performative score in which the most trivial gestures merge with hip hop, pop and rock, in a practice that, through sheer exhaustion, allows the gestures of the workers to transform into pure dance.

Alsarah and the Nubatones
+ J.P. Bimeni & The Black Belts

Manara
+ Free Me

Music
October 10
Auditorium Parco della Musica

Alsarah is the icon of East African retro-pop music. After escaping from Sudan and then from Yemen, the musician moved to the US, where, together with his sister Nahid, he founded the Nubatones. With Arabic and Sudanese lyrics and an affection for traditional instruments, the band has garnered international attention.

Blick Bassy + Mayra Andrade
1958
+ Manga

Music
October 11
Auditorium Parco della Musica

Cameroonian Blick Bassy, of Bassa ethnicity, displays an artistic journey that mixes African, Latin and American influences, guitars and banjo, cellos and trombones. 1958, his concept album presented in Rome, is dedicated to the death of Ruben Um Nyobé at the hands of the French forces: an anticolonial leader who fought for the independence of Cameroon. Mayra Andrade is another globetrotter- originally from Cape Verde and having passed through Paris, she settled in Lisbon coming to be considered the heir of Cesaria Evora. Manga (mango), her fifth album, embraces western romanticism and southern sensuality, afrobeat, as well as the traditional sounds of Cape Verde, to build an intimate and poetic self-portrait of the artist.

Hamdi Dridi
Tu Meur(s) De Terre

Dance Video
October 13th – 14th 2018
Teatro Vascello

A second encounter with Hamdi Dridi, this time in a poetic and touching solo that has him narrating the story of his father through movement, while attempting to evoke the body of the parent through his own. “I express pain through my dance, calmly, transforming a tumor into a poem,” says the choreographer. The solo soon becomes a duet between two bodies, between heaven and earth, towards accepting the pain that arises from loss and preparing for the possibility of a next encounter.

Sylvain Bouillet
Lucien Reynes
NAÏF Production

Des gestes blancs

Aerowaves – Dance – Dancing days
October 11
Mattatoio

A delicate duet for father and son, this piece is built on dialogue and on the balance established between the body and weight of a child and that of his father. A tender game of improvisation, aimed at investigating paternal identity in poetic terms, but also two different ages of the male body.

Jan Fabre, Lino Musella
The night writer. Giornale Notturno

Theatre
October 11 – 13
Teatro Vascello

Conceived in Italian especially for actor Lino Musella, The Night Writer. Giornale Notturno brings together fragments of Jan Fabre’s personal diaries, giving life to an intimate and provocative autobiography. The ‘night writer’ reflects on his concept of art and aesthetics, on theater and on his personal life, by offering the audience reflections that reference his entire existence and center on the themes of family and love, of theatre, of art and beauty: questions posed by Fabre to the audience and to himself and of which Musella can only be a conduit and alter ego, a body and a voice.

Jan Fabre
The rhythm of the brain

Exhibitions
October 11 – February 9, 2020
Palazzo Merulana

The rhythm of the brain is a visual tour of the versatile and visionary art production of Jan Fabre. Produced by the Fondazione Elena e Claudio Cerasi and CoopCulture for Palazzo Merulana, in collaboration with Galleria Magazzino, the exhibition showcases some never-before-seen sculptures made specifically for this space, in dialogue with the artworks of the Roman school from the Cerasi collection. Completing the show dedicated to the Flemish artist are works never before exhibited in Italy, in addition to drawings and a movie performance realized with the italian neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti.

Entrance: €10

Elena Sgarbossa
Keo

Dance – National Premiere
October 12
Mattatoio

Elena Sgarbossa’s performance is inspired by the history of the Keo space time capsule: to be launched into orbit in 2019, the sattelite will return to Earth within 50,000 years, carrying preserved messages written by today’s inhabitants.What if the inhabitants of the future didn’t understand us? What happens when we don’t understand ourselves? Does the desire to communicate survive? Starting from these questions, the artist establishes a dialogue with the public, allowing this encounter to nourish her dance.

Theo Mercier & Steven Michel
Affordable Solution for Better Living

Dance – Dancing Days
October 12 – 13
Mattatoio

Visual artist Theo Mercier and dancer Steven Michel (recipients of the Silver Lion for Dance at the 2019 Venice Biennale) build an ironic and ruthless critique against the illusion of freedom and well-being promoted by major commercial powers. In fact, the protagonists of their choreography are IKEA shelves and furniture to be assembled at home- symbols of a “beauty within everyone’s reach”. We are presented here with a starter kit for building and deconstructing objects, bodies, norms and social standards.

Kim-Jomi Fischer & Marta Alstadsaeter
Engel

Aerowaves – Dance – Dancing days
October 12
Mattatoio

Performance on the intimacy and inner struggles that we experience in making decisions- whether concrete or metaphysical. Two performers on stage, a circus acrobat and a dancer, build a physical dialogue through a constant exchange of weight, quality of movement and physical trajectories.

Abdullah Miniawy, Peter Corser, Karsten Hocahpfel, Erik Truffaz
+ Rayess Bek, La Mirza, Mehdi Haddab, Julien Perraudeau

Le Cri du Caire + Love and Revenge

Music
October 12
Auditorium Parco della Musica

Abdullah Miniawy is a poet, singer and icon of an Egyptian youth fighting for freedom and justice. His hypnotic voice meets the trumpet of Erik Truffaz– a great figure of European jazz- the sax of Peter Corser and the cello strings of Karsten Hochapfel in a live performance halfway between rock, Sufi poetry, jazz, electronica, eastern sounds and slam poetry, and which tackles political, social and religious repression by transcending identity and boundaries.

Kor’sia
Double Bill: Somiglianza + Cul de sac

Aerowaves – Dance – Dancing days
October 13
Mattatoio

DNAppunticoreografici is a project supporting young Italian choreographers, divided into several phases of research and creation – collecting proposals, reviewing studies, creative residencies and contributions to production – that is the result of a national collaboration between the Cango/Centro di produzione sui linguaggi del corpo in Florence, the Centro per la ScenaContemporanea/Operaestate Festival del Comune di Bassano del Grappa, L’arboreto – TeatroDimora in Mondaino, the Fondazione Romaeuropa, Gender Bender in Bologna and the Triennale di Milano.

La Ballata dei Lenna
Libya.
Back Home.

Anni Luce – Theatre
October 15-16
Mattatoio

Miriam Selima Hay, an actress of the company, reconstructs the traces of her Libyan origins. During her research through social networks, she met Salem a Libyan cousin whose existence he did not know, the Iraqi Haidar, a former professor of English at the University of Tripoli and Khalifa Abo Khraisse, a journalist, documentary filmmaker and Tripoli correspondent for Internazionale and other newspapers, for which he reported the country’s political conflicts. Can a personal story be traced back to a collective memory? Can an autobiographical narrative become a public ritual?

Liv Ferracchiati
Commedia con schianto.
Struttura di un fallimento tragico.

Anni Luce – Dance
October 15 – 16
Mattatoio

S., a young Italian author, is struggling with his latest creation- a work that he himself cannot define. How can he stage a present in which it is increasingly difficult to place himself? Having not yet finished his play, he is found dead, floating in a swimming pool, surrounded by pears. The actors who work on the production try to trace the motives of this death. A love story gone wrong? A creative crisis? Or is it the fault of the current theatrical system?

Gaia Scienza
La rivolta degli oggetti (The revolt of the objects)

Theatre
October 17 – November 3
Teatro India

Presented for the first time in 1976 at Beat 72 (an iconic space of the Roman counterculture of the Seventies), La rivolta degli oggetti by Gaia Scienza returns to the stage, reborn from the will of the original members of the company: Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, Marco Solari and Alessandra Vanzi. A new group of actors inhabits a stage built with discarded violins, suspended chairs, a coat, ropes that cross the space and suitcases, realized in collaboration with the Italian artist Gianni Dessì. Objects in revolt- as in the eponymous poem by Majakovsky- flee the narrative dimension of the scene to restore it to a new perceptual dimension.

Dante Antonelli
Atto di adorazione (Act of adoration)

Anni Luce – Theatre
October 18 – 20
Mattatoio

Four twentysomethings meet in a park to prepare for an imaginary war, free from familial, academic and social constraints. The park for them is a primitive forest that binds them in a covenant of love and brotherhood. Inspired by Mishima’s youthful works, Antonelli confronts the theme of the end of adolescence through his traumas, his stories of love and sex, emotion and desire. His writing for the stage enters a dialogue with original live music for drums, trumpet, vocals and violin.

Industria Indipendente
Lullaby
Tragedia Aerobica

Anni Luce – Theatre
October 18 – 20
Mattatoio

United States of Europe, 2059: A society dominated by young people and by the increase in productivity through the exaltation of speed and physical prowess. To remedy the problem of an ageing population and to offer dignity to the elderly, when citizens reach 70 years of age they are led to one of the many Lullaby centres: surreal worlds of private rooms, wonderful meals, swimming pools and recreational activities. Golden cages that soon generate an unbearable lack of freedom…

Fabrizio Ottaviucci, Cornelius Cardew, Terry Riley
Treatise, Keyboard Studies

Music
October 20
Opificio Romaeuropa

Fabrizio Ottaviucci continues his journey on the Treatise of Cornelius Cardew: A 193- page graphic score created between 1963 and 1968 that stimulates the interpreter to conceive of new musical ideas and forms. He, as with all aleatoric music, is entrusted with the full responsibility for the effectiveness and meaning of the work. Ottaviucci has divided the 193 pages of the mammoth composition in six parts and after presenting the first (pages 1-19) last year-an execution defined by the press as “among the most memorable” of the festival-returns to REf19 with the second section (pages 20-40).

 

Gyula Várnai
One of the Few Moments II

Exhibitions – Visual Arts
October 24 – November 3
Sala Santa Rita

One of the Few Moments II is a site-specific work created by Hungarian Gyula Vàrnai for the Sala Santa Rita in Rome. The artist, known for his large-scale installations built as immersive environments, uses the architectural lines of the suggestive Roman space and alters them through the use of light. An internally illuminated model of the Sala Santa Rita oscillates and projects borders, windows, pillars and arches of light on the actual structure of the former church. Two architectures overlap, one symbolic and the other concrete, transforming the space into a phantom ship in perpetual motion.

Free Entrance

Julien Gosselin, Don Delillo
Falce e martello

Theatre
October 25 – 27
Mattatoio

Julien Gosselin returns to confronting contemporary literature through his exploration of Don DeLillo’s short story Hammer and Sickle. Jerold Bradway is a trader locked up in prison for financial criminal offences. Along with his cell-mates, he is forced to watch a children’s television programme written by his ex-wife and presented by his two daughters, which talks about constant financial crises. French director Julien Gosselin brings the story to life through a powerful monologue that reflects on the contemporary void and our relationship with money.

Scena verticale / Saverio La Ruina
Mario e Saleh

Theatre
October 26 – 27
Mattatoio

In the aftermath of the Aquila earthquake, Mario who is a western Christian and Saleh who is a Muslim, find themselves in one of the tents. Their relationship is redefined through dialogue and external events that unravel an already highly precarious situation. Saverio La Ruina chooses to share the stage with a Muslim migrant in order to interpret their story and to address the clash between two different cultures and mentalities, through their relationship with the problems of daily life- removed from the clichés of contemporary debate.

Bartolini/Baronio
16,9 Km. Home Concert

Theatre
October 26 – 27
Teatro Biblioteca Quarticciolo

16,9 Km is a performance-concert built around the theme of the home as a space that embodies the symbolic concentration of human coexistence on our planet. The Bartolini/Baronio duo builds a path traversing the city of Rome, as a way to converse with contemporary art and as a means to gather- through encounters with its inhabitants- sounds, melodies and life stories. After visiting the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and Trajan’s Market, these very elements will return on stage to construct a musical narration that investigates in depth the meaning of the verb “to dwell”.

 

DNAppunti coreografici 2019
Support project for young Italian choreographers

Dance
October 30
Mattatoio

The project supporting young Italian choreographers returns, aiming to identify emerging figures in dance and offering them paths for research through diverse means of support: itinerant creative residences, financial resources and visibility. Hosted by the REf, the prize final will see the semifinalists present a few minutes of their choreographic proposal to a jury of experts. The finalists of this edition are M_I_N_E (a project by Francesco Saverio Cavaliere, Fabio Novembrini, Siro Guglielmi, Roberta Racis and Silvia Sisto) with Esercizi per un manifesto poetico, Giovanfrancesco Giannini with Cloud, Matteo Marchesi with Run(a)way and Maya Oliva con Bolero.

Entry: €5

Enzo Cosimi
Perhaps there is enough sky on these meadows

Performative act
October 30
Mattatoio

Perhaps there is enough sky on these meadows is the outcome of a project proposed and carried out by Enzo Cosimi together with the third year students of the Accademia Nazionale D’Arte Drammatica Silvio d’Amico, and the students of Accademia di Belle Arti and of Accademia Nazionale di Danza, together with some performer from the Company. Inspired by the first part of Ecstasy Cosimi builds a training path that culminates in a site specific event. A multidisciplinary path around the theme of eros, explored with a disenchanted eye, full of humor, open to grotesque and violently pop landscapes.

William Forsythe
A quiet evening of dance

Dance
October 30 – 31
Teatro Olimpico

William Forsythe, one of the greatest choreographers of international contemporary dance, returns to Rome after many years of absence with A Quiet Evening of Dance. On stage, seven of Forsythe’s most famous collaborators gathered for the occasion, draw an overview of the function of ballet and the choreographer’s mind: the phrasing built by their breaths accompanies geometric images, positions and movements traced to the origins of classical ballet, with an overwhelming finale set to the musical score of Rameau.

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