The second edition of the Napoli Teatro Festival Italia will be held on 4-28 June 2009.
The festival is broadening its international horizons through collaborations with European theatres and festivals such as the Edinburgh Festival, the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and the Wiener Festwochen.
Artists from different nationalities will come together on the stage: Italian and British actors for Matthew Lenton's Interiors, Italian and German actors and directors for the workshop led by Matthias Langhoff on Heiner Müller's The Scab. Karole Armitage, David Lescot, Tadashi Suzuki and Enzo Moscato are among the artists who have been invited to create new productions.
The festival has commissioned works from Manlio Santanelli, Antonio Skármeta, Eugène Savitzkaya and Colum McCann. Giorgio Barberio Corsetti will direct a play written by Chay Yew, inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and dedicated to Naples and Singapore.
The city's underground vaults will feature in projects by Andy Arnold and Muta Imago, while the rooftops of some of its highest buildings will host a play by Rodrigo Pardo.
A section of the programme will be dedicated to the 18th century in France and Spain, with Le Poème Harmonique's Carnaval Baroque, La Partenope by Leonardo Vinci directed by Gustavo Tambascio and the Marquis De Sade's scandalous philosophy reinterpreted by Enrico Frattaroli.
The festival is characterised by international collaborations and co-productions with festivals and theatres around the world, special productions and new creations and original works commissioned from writers in Italy and abroad.
This second edition of the Napoli Teatro Festival Italia will also be held throughout the city, from Decumani to the Quartieri Spagnoli, in 17th-century halls and churches, in the Real Albergo dei Poveri, a former royal almshouse, and in Santa Maria della Pace's Sala del Lazzaretto. This year the festival will bring its performances to the city's ancient subterranean vaults and the rooftops of its tallest palazzos, playing with high and low - one of the most distinctive and symbolic dualities of the city and contemporary culture in general.
www.teatrofestivalitalia.it