VENICE — Imagine if Lincoln Center handed the keys to its theaters to little-known American companies for a season. Or if France’s Avignon Festival, one of the biggest theater events in Europe, lifted its entire lineup from the open-access Fringe festival that runs alongside the main event.
That’s effectively what Antonio Latella, the director of Venice’s Theater Biennale, has done this year. Even before Covid-19 hit Italy, the 2020 edition of the festival — which opened Monday under social distancing after being postponed — had been conceived as a showcase for under-the-radar Italian theater-makers, described in the official program as “hidden or niche.” And Latella commissioned their work sight unseen: the 28 productions on offer are all premieres, and the vast majority were made on a purposely limited budget of 40,000 euros (around $47,000).
It’s a radical move, and a gauntlet thrown down to other major theater festivals, which have grown to rely heavily on international stars and showy premieres. Many of the Italian directors present in Venice are in their 30s and, based on a sample of productions, their works take on big themes with few props and little egotism.
The Theater Biennale’s loose theme, censorship and self-censorship, proved an invitation to many theater-makers to explore unconscious bias. For English-speaking visitors, Daniele Bartolini’s “The Right Way” was an especially intriguing investigation.
This 20-minute installation, designed for one audience member at a time, draws on Bartolini’s experience working in Canada, where he has lived since 2012. After a short introduction via a virtual-reality headset, I found myself in the director’s chair on a film set. Two older actors entered, ready to film an intimate scene on a bed. It soon became clear they were at cross purposes with the younger crew members, who included an intimacy coordinator and a nonbinary assistant who suggested the couple think “beyond gender.”
The intimacy coordinator essentially directed the scene, although she regularly turned to me — as the directorial figure — for approval. There may be room for each audience member to alter the course of the work, but the scene was so fast-paced, intervention beyond a few nods didn’t seem possible.
Mostly, “The Right Way” is an affectionate sendup of Canada’s tolerant, equal-opportunity ethos, and the language contortions that may result in trying to avoid offense. Bartolini’s insistence on playing devil’s advocate sometimes wrong-foots him, however, and the work comes close to framing insistence on consent as a limitation placed on artists, or a new form of censorship. Even played for laughs, this seems to me a false equivalence.
Like the Venice Film Festival, which is run by the same organization and concluded last Saturday, the Theater Biennale awards a Golden Lion and a Silver Lion. Since taking over in 2017, Latella has steered the prizes toward creatives who don’t usually receive the same recognition as directors. This year’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement went to Franco Visioli, a veteran sound designer.
Visioli directed a production of his own for the occasion: “Ultima Latet,” a Latin phrase meaning “the last is hiding.” In it, a cynical visitor ends up by mistake — or so it seems — at the home of a reclusive, religious woman who cares obsessively for a single plant.
Ingeniously, the plant is actually composed of cables, and acts as a musical installation and a third character. The actors don gloves to touch it, and early on, whenever they lift one of its stems, an electronic heartbeat fills the auditorium. Slowly, it draws the women in until the visitor starts twisting and bending the stems, manipulating the music like a D.J. and sending them both into a trance.
While “Ultima Latet” is a brilliant example of sound-based dramaturgy, the winner of the Silver Lion, Alessio Maria Romano, a choreographer and movement director, didn’t quite achieve the same synergy. Perhaps the pitch-perfect introduction of “Bye Bye,” his stage offering, set overly high expectations. A singer welcomed the audience into the auditorium with the song “Bye Bye Blackbird,” crooned into an old-fashioned microphone and interspersed with absurd words of welcome.
Unfortunately, the tight direction of that scene was missing from what followed, a spare contemporary dance work for five dancers in which movement was progressively deconstructed, until little of interest remained.
While most artists didn’t address the pandemic directly, the Theater Biennale opened with a requiem of sorts in the form of a staged reading by the formidable poet Mariangela Gualtieri, “Opening Voice (A Sound Ritual).” Under the direction of her longtime artistic partner Cesare Ronconi, the barefoot Gualtieri whispered to “all the dead of this time” in her wise, pensive opening ode, and included a poem she wrote during lockdown, “March the Ninth Two Thousand and Twenty,” which went viral at the time in Italy.
Under Latella, the Theater Biennale has also offered training opportunities to young Italian theater-makers through a program known as the Biennale College. There are prizes to be won there, too, and both Martina Badiluzzi (the 2019-20 winner in the “Directors Under 30” category) and Caroline Baglioni (the top “Author Under 40” between 2018 and 2020) were offered the opportunity to direct a new production this year.
Baglioni didn’t quite succeed with “Il Lampadario,” a play ostensibly inspired by the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa in 2018, across which Baglioni had driven earlier that same day. “Il Lampadario” is full of ghosts and jumbled timelines, to the point that it’s difficult to latch onto any specific relationship. Disappointingly, the sole female character is also a cipher, overshadowed by the three men around her.
Badiluzzi made a stronger impression with “The Making of Anastasia,” which explores the stories of Anastasia Romanov and Anna Anderson, who claimed for decades to be Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Russian czar. Badiluzzi’s play is no biopic, however: instead, it focuses on the audition and rehearsal process for a fictional production about the two women.
The five cast members took turns playing different roles and satirizing the relationship between director and actors. Grappling with their elusive characters, they navigated assumptions about how young or feminine they should be, and even reimagined Anastasia as a Bolshevik revolutionary. Unfortunately, a technical issue meant the English subtitles were cut off just as the final scene gathered pace — all the more reason for programmers to take note and ensure “The Making of Anastasia” is seen again soon.
Like “The Making of Anastasia,” other performances had minor slips betraying works in progress, but this didn’t stop the festival being an energizing showcase of works. Young theater-makers often complain of the outsize power of gatekeepers, especially when it comes to major platforms. In Venice, Latella, whose contract expires this year after four editions with him at the helm, shows there is another way.
For the next edition of the Theater Biennale, there will be a new director. He or she will have a very tough act to follow.
Theater Biennale. Various venues in Venice, through Sept. 25.
