From the history of theatre to today’s masters, to the future: the program of the Biennale Teatro directed by Willem Dafoe
Venice 75/25. Fifty Years of New Theatre
Willem Dafoe opens his first Festival with a tribute to the 1975 Biennale Teatro, directed by Luca Ronconi, which radically transformed the way of understanding the stage. That year Venice hosted artists such as Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Ariane Mnouchkine, Meredith Monk, Eugenio Barba, Robert Wilson and the Living Theatre, protagonists of a season in which artistic research merged with politics, the body, and urban space.
Theatre abandoned the logic of the finished performance to become an open process, traversed by rehearsals, encounters, and collective practices.
That Biennale became a reference point for subsequent generations and continues to question the present. With Venice 75/25, Dafoe recalls some of the protagonists from that time and reactivates their paths through new productions, performances, and public encounters.
The Venice 75/25 Events
Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley are in Venice with Hamlet’s Cloud, the latest work by Odin Teatret, built around a reflection on power, betrayal, and the survival of stories. Thomas Richards, with his company Theatre No Theatre, presents the European premiere of Inanna, a work that interweaves voice, body, and ritual, born from the legacy left by Grotowski and developed over thirty years of fieldwork.
Richard Schechner delivers a lectio magistralis and participates in the public encounter dedicated to the 1975 Biennale, together with Satyamo Hernandez, Chris Torch and Toby Marshall from the Living Theatre, already present fifty years ago. The same encounter features Giorgio Sangati and Sandra Toffolatti, protagonists of Luca Ronconi’s work, alongside Dafoe and historian Andrea Porcheddu.
Willem Dafoe and Simonetta Solder present No title, a performative experiment in homage to Richard Foreman, pioneer of the American avant-garde, who recently passed away. The Wooster Group, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, brings the European premiere of Symphony of Rats, a performance by Foreman, restaged forty years after its premiere.
The section also includes videos, archival materials, and visual and sound contributions documenting that time. The Cinema Space or Cinema Arena presents three films: Dionysus in ’69 by Schechner, filmed by Brian De Palma, Action by Thomas Richards, and In the Beginning Was the Idea, based on the Gospel of Oxyrhynchus, staged by Eugenio Barba in 1985.
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Today’s Masters
The Festival explores the legacy of new theatre through the works of contemporary artists who share its spirit and formal freedom. Willem Dafoe brings them together through affinity of thought, paths that have crossed, and choices that continue to pose questions to the stage.
The Performances
Romeo Castellucci presents The Potato Eaters, a site-specific creation in world premiere at the Island of Lazzaretto Vecchio. Thomas Ostermeier, director of the Schaubühne in Berlin, brings to Venice Changes by Maja Zade, in national premiere. Milo Rau arrives with Die Seherin, performed by Ursina Lardi, Silver Lion of the Festival.
Davide Iodice proposes an “anti-ritual” Pinocchio, built around the question What is a person? On stage, a working group composed of performers with Down syndrome, autism, Williams syndrome, and Asperger’s. Different figures, each with their own scenic quality, who bring to life a multiple, fragile, necessary narrative. Iodice will also conduct a workshop, part of a three-year project that opens to human and urban distress.
Gardi Hutter presents Giovanna D’ArpPo, a performance that interrogates the comic body with rigor and lightness. An internationally renowned clown, Hutter brings to the stage a performance in which irony, gesture, repetition, and physical precision become tools to reflect on how the body can make one laugh, move, unbalance, with very few or no words. It is the classic case in which apparent simplicity arises from perfect control of scenic language.
The Istanbul Historical Turkish Music Ensemble brings to the stage the ritual of the whirling dervishes. Music guides movement, the body enters continuous rotation, constructing a space of concentration, prayer, and vision. Bob Holman, American poet, creates an urban performance We are the Dinosaur and participates, together with the collective Industria Indipendente, in Talking Poetry / More Than Heart II, an intervention that works on voice, rhythm, and the hidden meaning in sound.
A look to the future
The third section of the Festival is dedicated to emerging generations. Willem Dafoe looks to those working with new languages, to those constructing unexpected interpretive forms, to those moving between theatre, music, video, and word. It is an investigation that will continue into 2026, opening to even more distant contexts and geographies.
Evangelia Rantou, Greek choreographer and director active in cinema and theatre, presents the world premiere of Mountains, a creation with her company Garage21, the result of a journey between movement, image, and body architecture. Princess Bangura, Afro-Belgian artist, brings: Oedipus monologue and Great Apes of the West Coast, works that traverse trauma, myth, and biography with unfiltered physicality. Both will also conduct a workshop.
Yana Eva Thönnes, German director and author, presents Call me Paris, a performance in world premiere, and will in turn conduct a workshop. Anthony Nikolchev, American, debuts with The (Un)Double, a rewriting of The Double by Dostoevsky with references to documents from the Christchurch massacre and texts attributed to Radovan Karadzic, in a claustrophobic structure built on the tension between identity and representation.
The Roman collective Industria Indipendente, in collaboration with Bob Holman, brings Talking Poetry / More Than Heart II, a vocal and rhythmic intervention between sound, text, and presence.
The Festival closes with the concert by Spira, by singer-songwriter, composer, and musician Daniela Pes, the only Italian date in 2025.
Biennale College Teatro
Biennale College is the multi-year project that La Biennale di Venezia dedicates to the training and support of new talents. A place of work, transmission, and creation. A program that develops in multiple directions and involves directors, playwrights, actors, pedagogues, and critics.
For the 2025 edition, the works of the winner of the Directing call, Mariasole Brusa, author and director of Golem_and clay is the world, a world premiere performance, are presented; and those of the winners of the Playwriting call, Jacopo Giacomoni and Athos Mion: the former with Tacet, a mise en lecture curated by Silvia Costa; the latter with Orgies for George, directed by Arturo Cirillo and performed by students of the Teatro Nazionale di Napoli school.
The College also includes the collaboration between Antonio Latella and the Accademia d’Arte Drammatica Silvio d’Amico. The project www.wordworldwar.bomb, curated by Latella, brings together a series of essay-performances by second-year acting students, with direction entrusted to Thom Luz, Sebastian Nübling, Jackie Poloni, Natalie Beasse and Alessio Maria Romano.
The pedagogical perspective of the College is enriched by workshops conducted by teachers from different generations: Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley, Richard Schechner, Thomas Richards, Giorgio Sangati and Sandra Toffolatti, Yana Eva Thönnes, Princess Bangura, Romeo Castellucci and Gardi Hutter will work on the art of acting, on the body on stage, on physical actions as the core of theatrical practice.
Davide Iodice leads a workshop that opens a dialogue with areas of human and urban distress. The journey begins this year and will lead to a new creation in 2026.
The program is completed by a theatre criticism workshop curated by Roberta Ferraresi; Writing in Residence, a project entrusted to Katia Ippaso and promoted by the Biennale Historical Archive; a series of public conversations with the artists, led by Maddalena Giovannelli and Lorenzo Pavolini.
A Cinema Space at Biennale Teatro
Alongside performances, encounters, and shows, the festival offers a Cinema Space with a film series at the Sala d’Armi E of the Arsenale, on June 6, 7, and 8. “To encourage and foster dialogue between theatre and cinema – writes Willem Dafoe – I invited the artists present at the Festival to contribute to the program by indicating the title of a film or documentary that could narrate a creative journey, reveal details, document a performance or a staging project to better understand what theatre is today.”
53rd International Theatre Festival
Artistic Director: Willem Dafoe
Dates: from May 31 to June 15, 2025
The Complete Program
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Article by Lucia Pecoraro.
Photos courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
