From 2 July to 15 September, Bassano del Grappa and the surrounding area become the focal point of a diffuse stage of dance, music, and high quality theatrical performances. Operaestate confirms itself as a cultural platform of absolute standing on the national scene.
The 44th edition of Operaestate Festival Veneto will produce over 100 shows – dance, theatre, music, circus – in several places in the Venetian inland. Important co-productions, national premieres, and celebrated performers from Italy and abroad as well as emerging talents for an edition dedicated to Relations and building upon multi-disciplinarity. Michele Mele worked as the art director for the Dance section of Operaestate since 2023. We talked with him about his work as curator and the upcoming programme at Operaestate.
Challenges and results.
The greatest challenge has been, and still is, to preserve artistic communities, whether professional or non-professional, as well as the audience, which together make up a critical mass that is essential in our business. It visualizes our best expectations, and it channels needs that feed beautiful, continuous conversation. From this point of view, I want to thank Roberto Casarotto for the work he carried out in this direction before I came around. My proposal is one of continuity and, at the same time, innovation with new programmes that look quite unlike what we’ve done before. I cannot comment on results yet, because none of my goals can come to fruition in two short years. I think it is good that the Ministry of Culture praised our work and, no less importantly, that audiences reacted very positively to last year’s programme.
Being an art director.
In my professional life, art direction was a step I wanted to take, with passion and with decision. To promote the work of others has been important to get to know and study how the job is done best. There’s quite a difference between buying and selling, and in a certain way, I think my position, today, is one of privilege. On the other hand, I feel it is the natural evolution of professional growth. I hope artists and producers will appreciate my awareness of how hard it is to get in touch with the right people, present a project, build relationships, and in the best of cases, sign up for collaboration. I can be demanding, too: when artists say they want to perform with us, I ask them: have you ever been here? Do you know about our Festival? Do you know our audience? We need to stimulate mutual curiosity to build a solid business relationship. I treasure my experience working with performers for the amount of resources I can use now in terms of choice.
The highlights of the season.
The musical programme at Operaestate has been curated by Sofia Girardi. We work very closely together. Sofia knows the local festival scene very well, which means the reason the programme is so diverse is due to her careful mapping of all the greatest shows and performers. One example: we can’t wait for the C’mon Tigre concert on July 12. Other great shows will be Alessandro Sciarroni on July 26; Anagoor’s dance show Bromio on July 27 and 28; a film-inspired choreographic installation by Gruppo Nanou with live music by Bruno Dorella, Redrum on July 20 and 21; MK’s project in cooperation with the Mendrisio School of Architecture, Creatures on September 9 and 10; two shows by Operaestate aficionados Marco Paolini (Latitudini on July 18 and 19) and Alessandro Bergonzoni (Sempre sia rodato on July 22); two shows by Italian choreographers Cristina Kristal Rizzo (Monumentum on July 31) and Silvia Gribaudi (Grand jeté on August 8); and the much anticipated return of Sharon Fridman (Go Figure on August 6) and Motus (Frankenstein on July 23).
The B.Motion sub-programme.
For the first time, we will be going beyond the usual scheduling by art form, with one weekend dedicated to dance, one to theatre, and one to music. This year, there will be one multi-disciplinary programme. We invited the several communities and audiences that grew up with B.Motion to mix and mingle, to break past boundaries, to stop thinking of, say, the audience of a dance show as being uninterested in music or theatre. We made this decision to remark our interest in showing works that are less easily classified under the label of a single discipline viz. the main programme, though also to show awareness in terms of modern international trends. Fortunately, younger generations, who are the main addressees of the B.Motion programme, are much less rigid as far as the different languages of performance arts go. I would like to point out two events in particular. The first is the Koltès project, three translations of Bernard-Marie Koltès’s The Night Just Before the Forests in Venetian, Neapolitan, and Sicilian dialects. The second is BNetwork, a workshop that will involve local and international projects and that will participate with several shows.
