Director Armando Punzo, the founder of the historic Compagnia della Fortezza, the first company ever instituted in a prison which became one of the most important in experimental theatre, is the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of the Biennale Teatro 2023; the Belgian collective FC Bergman, which authors productions that represent an original blend of cinema, literature and the visual arts, has been awarded the Silver Lion.
Followed by a conversation with the artists
moderated by Andrea Porcheddu
In their motivation for the award to Armando Punzo, Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte (ricci/forte) write: “The search for the meaning of theatre begins when we venture into human territory driven by the need for a personal, original cultural identity. Where the stage is nurtured by real life. In the attempt to communicate through isolation, both artistic and geographical; prison and its barriers. Force a limit, the absence of freedom that shatters axioms through Theatre to become exuberant harvesting. Start to dream of a new man and impose him on reality. A visionary form of communication that distils a language reconstructed in the shadow of a prejudice: there are no bars that can restrain the spirit and the imagination, but more importantly, are we certain that the Others are the prisoners condemned to confinement within a perimeter? Our limits, fears, need for social assertion, blindness when it comes to others; to make the intangible, the unconscious, visible: a cultural utopia of which Armando Punzo and the Compagnia della Fortezza are the shining embodiment”.
“With their creations – write Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte (ricci/forte) – the Flemish artists of FC Bergman, drawing inspiration from cinema, literature and art history, and blending a painterly aesthetic and the use of highly advanced technology with the great allegorical-Medieval-biblical stories, shape an original language of site-specific-theatre-dance, poetic yet at the same time irreverent, which arouses a feeling of disconcerting apprehension in the viewer. Using references, symbols and images that are deeply rooted in western culture and civilisation, eluding the dictatorship of the vanishing point in Italian-style theatres with perspectives organised as a whirlwind of tableaux vivants and allowing themselves a margin of unpredictability and improvisation, FC Bergman flirts with the limits of feasibility, creating modern apocalyptic tales, often without words but with surprising plastic potency and evocative power, thus focusing on Man – torn between the existential desire to transcend his perimeters and the fear of change – following him in his moving odysseys that metamorphose into tragicomic misadventures”.