The activities of the Theatre section of the Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, will be held this year from July 30th to August 9th: 43rd International Theatre Festival directed by the Spanish director Àlex Rigola.

“The spirit of the Biennale College – stated Paolo Baratta – is increasingly permeating the programmes for theatre and dance. Àlex Rigola has brought together Festival and College, summoning the finest directors to both participate as directors of theatre productions and to programme activities to be carried out with the selection of young artists (last year 164 out of a total of 1370 applications)”.

Structured as a workshop–festival that places Venice at the centre of a participated reflection upon theatre, the 43rd International Theatre Festival directed by Àlex Rigola will be held from July 30th to August 9th. The productions – 13 in the programme, including 9 Italian premiere performances – will be accompanied by 18 workshops, with internationally-renowned artists, playwrights, directors, choreographers and companies, who each with their own style are the expression of a type of theatre that feels an urgent need to narrate the present.

They include Christoph Marthaler, Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement 2015, who will inaugurate the Festival with Das Weisse vom Ei / Une île flottante, in which he shatters the certainties of language and the deception of communication in the exhilarating blend of German and French spoken by the characters (the text is inspired by Labiche’s La poudre aux yeux); Thomas Ostermeier with a version for the theatre of Fassbinder’s famous film The Marriage of Maria Braun, a bitter parable about the so-called “German miracle” after World War II (the production was revived last year for the Festival d’Avignon); and the younger Fabrice Murgia, winner of the Silver Lion at last year’s edition of the Theatre Biennale, considered as the bard of urban solitude and generational anxieties, who in Notre peur de n’être examines the hikikomori, hyper-connected young people who live their lives in total isolation from the rest of the world.

And also: Falk Richter, a playwright and director who comes to Italy for the first time, and who in Never Forever, with Israeli choreographer Nir de Volff, illustrates a post-human society, with its metropolitan warriors, individuals battling to survive and ready to commit the most extreme of acts; the Spanish company La Zaranda who in El Régimen del Pienso, brings alienation on the job to the stage; the political theatre of Milo Rau with his International Institute of Political Murder who in Hate Radio reconstructs the story of the radio station Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines and its broadcasts, which became the voice of an aggressive racial campaign that played a major role in the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in 1994; Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy, who like Richter come to Italy for the first time at the Biennale, stages a classic by Strindberg – Julia - in the present time as she creates a coexistence between cinema and theatre, the real world and the virtual world; Antonio Latella with his three monologues A.H., Caro George and MA, all gathered in a single evening: a triptych about the twentieth century that examines three emblematic figures (Adolf Hitler, Francis Bacon, Pasolini), who represent three different views of man and his relationship with the world; Jan Lauwers and Needcompany with The Blind Poet (the debut of which is scheduled for May 12th at the Kunstenfestival des Arts in Brussels) in which, starting from a visit to the Mosque in Cordoba condemns the lies of history and the manipulation of information across the centuries; Oskaras Koršunovas who transforms the actors’ dressing rooms into the castle of Elsinore for his Hamlet; while Romeo Castellucci and the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio in Giulio Cesare. Pezzi staccati extrapolate the two monologues by “…vskij” and Marc Anthony from the 1997 historic production, pieces broken off from “the drama of the voice struggling with the rhetorical power of the word”; the company Agrupación Señor Serrano, the Festival’s Silver Lion for innovation in theatre, in A House in Asia tells the story of a manhunt as if it were a western movie, a story of cowboys and Indians: with a device that mixes scale models, video projections, the manipulation of images in real time and performance, Osama Bin Laden’s house turns into the container for all the scenes in the production, from the White House to the prairies of Afghanistan.

And finally, the festival will present that great metaphor of intolerance and abuse of power, El Caballero de Olmedo by Lope De Vega, a classic from the siglo de oro, which Lluís Pasqual brings to the stage with young actors supported by two public theatre companies, in a project that runs parallel to the work of the Biennale College.