At a stage of life when memory fades, what remains becomes essential: a face, a gesture, the trace of an affection. From this fragile yet luminous edge comes Promemoria, Davide Iodice’s new work for Biennale Teatro, following the strong impact of Pinocchio. Che cos’è una persona?, which earned a Special UBU Prize in 2024. A director and pedagogue deeply committed to community-based theatre, Iodice has long developed creative processes that involve people far from professional stages, turning theatre into a space of relationship and testimony.
Promemoria was born in Venice after the intensive workshop L’enciclopedia delle Emozioni, held within elderly care facilities. Gathering stories, bodies and fragments of lives that time tends to erase, Iodice shaped a performance set inside the San Giobbe residence, where the scene arises directly from the people who live there.

I don’t want life to be anything other than my theatre, I don’t want it to be somewhere else; I want it to be intertwined with it, so that what is on stage holds that very same intensity

Origins and personal encounters
Every dramaturgical work starts from a personal impulse. In Promemoria, this impulse is linked to the final images of his parents’ lives and to the “ancestors” we all stem from. Alongside this intimate dimension lies an ethical urgency: the need for memory in a country that often lacks it, and the need to affirm artistic citizenship for socially fragile groups, who are too often reduced to mere recipients of care. The project demands a reversal of perspective, including within theatre itself.

Working with non-professional performers
When theatre meets real lives rather than trained actors, I believe it reconnects with a lost sense of necessity. The presence of unprotected, often unheard bodies reopens theatre to the present, challenging its forms and its modes of reception. The spectator is no longer a passive viewer but becomes a witness to lived experience.

Memory, loss and what endures
Set in a place where memory can biologically fade, Promemoria is not an archive of the past but a reminder for the living. When time or illness erase details, what remains illuminated is the essential: love, belonging, acts of care given or received. What truly matters is precisely what cannot be forgotten.

The Biennale inside a care residence
Bringing the Venice Theatre Biennale into an elderly residence breaks the boundaries of the festival. In my view, this is entirely natural: the residents themselves are the artworks. The guests are the artists and spectators who enter that space; San Giobbe is the residents’ home, and they welcomed the project with the familiarity reserved for long-lost relatives, themselves recognized more by feeling than by memory.

Ongoing artistic search
Good question, and a dangerous one, too. If I had an answer, that would mean I had found everything I expected, which is kind of sad. I am happy to say I cannot answer that. It might mean I am still researching, I am still living, and so is theatre.