Romaeuropa Festival’s September 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 September.
Lia Rodrigues
Furia
Dance – National premiere
September 17th – 19th 2019
Auditorium Parco della Musica
With Furia, Brazilian choreographer Lia Rodrigues reflects on the nature of a group of individuals who confront their loneliness and their corporeal existence. Energetic, wild, edgy, the show combines contemporary dance with the ritualistic music of New Caledonia. Furia presents material ecstasy as a means to delve deep into the most fantastical realms of human imagination: nine dancers venture on stage as if it were a land unknown and in constant flux, an imaginary landscape in perpetual vibration, conversing with the reality in which we live.
Akram Khan
Xenos
Dance – National premiere
September 18th – 20th 2019
Teatro Argentina
Xenos, the latest solo by Akram Khan, will also be the last chance to admire the British-Bangladeshi choreographer on in a full-length production. Accompanied by an ensemble of five musicians performing an original score designed by Vincenzo Lamagna, Khan takes his blend of kathak and contemporary dance and carries us to through the struggles of a colonial soldier during the First World War. The human condition is embodied in the figure of a dancer whose body is in a state between mythology and technology, becoming an instrument of war. Questioning what makes us human, XENOS is a memento mori for our own times of violent estrangement from one another and our world.
Milo Rau, NTGent
Orestes in Mosul
Theatre – National Premiere
September 23rd – 25th 2019
Teatro Argentina
With Orestes in Mosul Milo Rau confronts the Oresteia, setting it in the context of the war against ISIS, the Syrian-Iraqi conflict and the treatment reserved for jihadi veterans. The Swiss director has set his show in the barracks of the Peshmerga fighters in Kurdistan and in the central square of Mosul – an emblematic site for having hosted the ISIS command and for being a theatre of executions. The performance, drawing on testimony and video footage, brings together militants, poets and local citizens. Hovering between reality and representation, his urgent and current theatre-tribunal reopens the discourse on violence, compassion and forgiveness.
Bruno Beltrao | Grupo de Rua
Inoah
Dance – National Premiere
September 25th – 26th 2019
Auditorium Parco della Musica
Removed from its context, deconstructed and reconstructed in its forms,the Hip Hop of Bruno Beltrao and his company Grupo De Rua embodies all the rigour of contemporary dance. INOAH, the latest creation by the Brazilian choreographer, sets ten dancers on stage to perform a fascinating choreographic composition, inspired by human relations and their poetry. Abstract yet strongly rooted in urban cultures, energetic yet at the same time sweet and reflective, this choreographic practice is fascinating in its strength, precision and mastery.
Pascale Marthine Tayou
Open wall
Exhibits – Visual Arts
September 26th – November 24th 2019
Mattatoio
A site-specific work built with luminous signs in different languages, accumulated by the artist around the world. Through these luminous signs, Tayou reflects on the institutional dimension of the spaces dedicated to art, transforming the interior of the Mattatoio into a space of communication and cultural exchange but also of a critique of globalization.
FREE ENTRANCE
Pascale Marthine Tayou
Arbre de vie
Exhibits – Visual Arts
from September 26th to October 6th 2019
Mattatoio
This installation is an example of the ability of Tayou to work with contemporary symbolism, positioned on the borderland between Africa and Europe. On a tree -symbol of nature and life- are hung plastic fetishes, residues and traces of a humanity that produces waste but also stories and myths. Each branch is a reflection on environmental sustainability, globalisation and immigration.
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Hans Op de Beeck
Staging Silence (3)
Exhibits – Film – National Premiere
September 26th – 29th 2019
Mattatoio – Teatro 1
‘Staging Silence (3)’ is the final instalment in a series of autonomous art films by Hans Op de Beeck. Two pairs of anonymous hands construct and deconstruct fictional interiors and landscapes from everyday household objects, taking us on a visual journey through depopulated, enigmatic, often melancholic, but nonetheless playful, small-scaled places. These locations are teaming with cultural and subcultural references, including historical as well as current themes that refer to the way in which man – both in his dealings with architecture and with nature — ‘humanises’ the open space in an attempt to create meaning, identity and a logical interaction with time. Op de Beeck’s film is accompanied by a score inspired by the images, composed and performed by composermusician Scanner (uk).
FREE ENTRANCE
Hans Op de Beeck | Eric Sleichim | Bl!ndman Ensemble
The Valley (apocalypse)
Music – Visual Art – National Premiere
September 26th – 27th 2019
Piazza Orazio Giustiniani
The Valley is the story of the banality of violence and our little daily apocalypses. A man finds himself in the middle of a small arena, surrounded by musicians who support, comment on and accompany his tragic story. Among them is a mysterious woman-perhaps his guardian angel or his lost daughter. Visual artist Hans Op De Beeck directs a musical theatre performance in which the visionary quality of the images powerfully connects with the music performed by sax quartet BL!NDMAN, under the direction of Eric Sleichim.
Pascale Marthine Tayou
Big Jumps
Installation
September 26th – November 25th 2019
Mattatoio – Teatro 1
Pascale Marthine Tayou realizza quest’opera appositamente per il REf19 e come regalo alla città di Roma. L’artista sarà impegnato nella realizzazione di un murales su Piazza Orazio Giustiniani, un manifesto della sua estetica e della sua pratica artistica.
FREE ENTRANCE
Cyril Teste, John Cassavetes, Isabelle Adjani
Opening Night
Theatre
September 27th – 28th 2019
Teatro Argentina
In order to shoot his cult film Opening Night, Cassavetes transported his actors, including the mythical Gena Rowlands, to a theater in Pasadena where, in the presence of an unsuspecting audience, he staged The Second Woman – an unusual piece of theatre and starting point of the film. Director Cyril Teste, assisted by iconic actress Isabelle Adjani, wishes to revive this experience for his audience. To achieve this, he breathes life into a singular theatrical language, fused with cinema, which merges reality and fiction, video image and theatrical staging. An acting workshop that sees Adjani and the other performers measure themselves against the cinematic masterpiece and engage in discussion night after night.
Lubomyr Melnyk + Craig Leon
Fallen Trees + The Canon
Music
September 27th – 28th 2019
Auditorium Parco della Musica
Ukrainian Lubomyr Melnyk (class of 1948) was called “the prophet of the piano” but also “the fastest pianist in the world” and is considered the originator of continuous music: a personal piano language that today boasts many heirs, including Nils Frahm. His last album Fallen Treescelebrates his seventieth birthday and sees the musician composing and interpreting vibrant and energetic pieces.
Vanessa Wagner, Murcof
Statea
Music
September 28th 2019
Auditorium Parco della Musica
Already engaged with the cross-pollination between classical and electronic music, Mexican artist Fernando Corona -AKA Murcof- of Nortec Collectiv fame meets French classical pianist Vanessa Wagner to reinterpret nine chapters of twentieth century music, stradling classic high-brow avant-garde, minimalism and electronica. With an ambience that’s part cinematic and part piano, the repertoire of this live performance includes compositions by John Cage, Gyorgy Ligeti, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Aphex Twin, Erik Satie, all the way to an Arvo Pärt so transformed as to assume a post-rock flavour.
