News

Enormous success for Le vie della seta, Astràgali Teatro’s project that, this past 06 to 15 May, brought Wu Xiaojiang and Du Shuaiqiang from the Beijing National Grand theatre for the very first time to the Salento area, in a very busy calendar of activities.

Open classes for young actors / students / theatre apprentices, Master classes for professional actors, meetings with secondary schools in the province of Lecce, seminars hosted by Accademia di Belle Arti and by the University, working demonstrations, and shows: this dense calendar of appointments has been met with enormous interest.

Supported by Regione Puglia as part of the reinforced FSC 2007-2013 – AQP “Cultural assets and activities” development and cohesion fund, the residence project came under the “2016 Internationalization of theatre and dance research” project, overseen by Teatro Pubblico Pugliese, a partner of International Theatre Institute Italia and International Theatre Institute-UNESCO, in collaboration with the municipalities of Lecce and San Cesario.

“For Astràgali Teatro, the presence of Wu Xiaojiang and Du Shuaiqiang was a particularly important moment, confirming a relationship already in place for some time, and a path of relating and working that will be developed in the months to come,” stated Fabio Tolledi, Astràgali Teatro’s director and art director.

“Theatre culture and theatre tradition in China have a centuries-long history – a history that is fascinating, complex, and, for the West, largely unknown. For us, it was thus a matter of initiating a project of building relationships and knowledge, of exchanging practises and viewpoints on the theatre, and of reflecting on how to share different theatre pedagogies, while trying to allow different systems dialogue with one another.

Our theatre practise – which, during these years, has brought us to a great many countries in the Mediterranean and the Near East, as we question our own role and sense of theatre in places of conflict – now encounters a theatre that is both distant and close, and in its own turn questioning what the contemporary means in the theatre, and how tradition and the contemporary can resonate with one another.

It is no accident that the project is in collaboration with the Italian Centre of International Theatre Institute, which has its main office in Lecce, and with the ITI-UNESCO World Secretariat, the largest theatre network, capable of containing within it the practises of theatre, of acting, of playwriting, of experience, of directing, and of communication, as well as artistic communities from more than one hundred countries, thereby allowing enormously different theatre cultures and traditions to relate to one another.

Internationalizing theatre means forging relationships between – and listening between – different worlds and different cultures.”