<\/p>\n
\n\tWillem Dafoe<\/a> has unveiled his second lineup as artistic director<\/a>\u00a0of the theater department of La Biennale<\/a> di Venezia \u2014 the Italian arts organization that also oversees the Venice Film Festival<\/a>. The theme for the 54th International<\/a> Theater Festival, which runs June 7\u201321, is \u201cALTER NATIVE.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThere is no precise meaning as the etymology can be vague or evocative,\u201d Dafoe said at a Monday press conference. \u201cThe idea is to think ALTER as in change \u2014 NATIVE as your nature. Or ALTER as in other \u2014 NATIVE as the culture one is from.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn a \u201ctruth-challenged world,\u201d Dafoe said his goal was to platform voices and cultures that many audiences won\u2019t be familiar with \u2014 and to push back against a theater landscape he feels has lost its edge. \u201cProfessionalism has flattened its soul,\u201d he said. \u201cIt can feel polished to the point of sameness. I miss the amateur spirit.\u201d His 2026 program, he suggested, would favor cracks over polish.<\/p>\n \n\tThe lineup spans India, China, Indonesia, New Zealand, Rwanda, Greece and Italy, among others. Italian playwright and director Emma Dante will receive this year\u2019s Golden Lion, while young Greek-Albanian director Mario Banushi will be honored with the Silver Lion. Dante will present a new creation, I Fantasmi di Basile<\/em>, inspired by the fairy tales of Basile\u2019s Lo Cunto de li Cunti<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\tOther highlights include Sharmila Biswas\u2019 company performing Mischief Dance<\/em>, described as \u201ca subtle reinvention of traditional Odissi dance\u201d; Indonesian dance theater collective Bumi Purnati Indonesia presenting two pieces drawn from late 19th-century legends; and from Rwanda, Dorcy Rugamba\u2019s Hewa Rwanda, Letter to the Absent<\/em> \u2014 a music theater tribute to his family, killed in their home on the first day of the Rwandan genocide. Samoan director Lemi Ponifasio brings his Star Returning<\/em>, exploring the rituals and traditions of China\u2019s Yi people, while Japanese director Satoshi Miyagi presents Mugen-Noh Othello<\/em> \u2014 his company\u2019s first appearance in Italy. Davide Iodice, who brought his take on Pinocchio<\/em> to Venice last year, returns with Promemoria<\/em>, staged with residents of Venice\u2019s elderly nursing home San Giobbe.<\/p>\n \n\tLa Biennale di Venezia\u2019s theater department was founded in 1934, making it one of the organization\u2019s younger arms \u2014 following art (1895), music (1930) and cinema (1932). Since 1998 it has been programmed annually, with past artistic directors including Romeo Castellucci, Peter Sellars and, most recently, Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte (2021\u20132024).<\/p>\n Dafoe spoke with The Hollywood Reporter<\/em> about this year\u2019s program, its themes and what it means to champion the amateur spirit at a moment when the world feels anything but settled.<\/p>\n \n\tSome themes, such as the importance of the body in acting, seem to continue this year after your first. But there are also new approaches. Can you highlight what\u2019s different<\/strong> this year?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tI wanted to have a program that\u2019s fresh and does not get too much of the same old, same old. I was interested in having people here who aren\u2019t always seen. But also, just geographically, I wanted to spread out the selection, since in different countries, theater has a different relationship to the people, to the culture. It is always instructive, because their impulse of what they\u2019re trying to make is conditioned by different things, and sometimes that can make a very different kind of theater \u2014 how much they lean into their cultural past, their stories, how much they use developed or not developed technology, what kind of theater language they have.<\/p>\n \n\tWe\u2019re not talking about taking people from faraway places who go to London or NYU and get the same kind of training that people in the West get. We\u2019re talking about people who are making work there, and they\u2019re dealing with their experience in their work.<\/p>\n \n\tThe first year, I was dealing with people I worked with, people I admired, people whose work I knew. This year, it\u2019s a little bit more roll of the dice, and I invited people that I didn\u2019t know so well. Some of them are making pieces, based on the strength of their earlier pieces, that I haven\u2019t seen yet. So there\u2019s a risk involved, but for me, it\u2019s very much about the impulse behind what they make and the theater language they use.<\/p>\n \n\tI always go back to when I was a young actor, and I went to this marvelous place in Holland [the Mickery Theater in Amsterdam,] that had a lot of financing, and [artistic director Ritsaert ten Cate] would go around the world, and he\u2019d take things that he found interesting. I benefited from that, because I was working there, on and off, for many years. I would see stuff from all over the world. And because of the difference, not just in terms of culture, but in how theater functioned in their country, they were bringing a different impulse. It widened my vision of what theater could be. And that\u2019s the impulse behind this.<\/p>\n \n\tSo, you are hoping to make theater more about the challenge and experience of discovery instead of serving up known comfort food?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tPeople think what they need more than anything is to escape from their life and be entertained or distracted with something that\u2019s pleasurable and that\u2019s cool. But I think it\u2019s far more rewarding if you find something that surprises you, gives you a new take on something, and you learn something. How you see, think, [and] how you feel is opened up in a way that accommodates more pleasure, love, inquiry, curiosity. The secret of going to any performance, or any kind of performative art form, for me is [about that]. I love it when you\u2019re there and you\u2019re like: \u201cWhat is this? What does it mean?\u201d It\u2019s not just about stories or sharing an experience. It\u2019s about mystery, too.<\/p>\n \n\tYou mentioned the \u201ctruth-challenged\u201d world of today, which I took as a timely reference to the social media and \u201cpost-truth\u201d age. Can you talk about that a bit more and what seems to be your invitation to all of us to open our hearts, eyes and minds?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tSocial media and the internet can give us wonderful things, but they can also give us [a sense of] false freedom. You feel the anxiety of yourself out in the world, and the connectivity is anomalous, whereas with something like theater, you\u2019re there. You\u2019re experiencing something, and you\u2019re there for it. That\u2019s the value of theater, whereas people with a mediated experience, virtual experience, are always going places that they feel they\u2019re free to go. But the truth is, they\u2019re all built to send you to certain places just by algorithms.<\/p>\n \n\tNow, I don\u2019t want to be a critic of technology, because technology can do many great things. I just want to highlight the very visceral thing of being present in front of a human being. Doing things in an invented context can be very illuminating and very freeing.<\/p>\n \n\tWas your mention of a \u201ctruth-challenged\u201d world a reference to anything specific?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tMy experience with AI, as an actor in the movies, is that they\u2019re getting away with murder, and there are no guardrails right now. Someone sends me stuff that\u2019s on the internet that seems ridiculous, and then I show it to someone, and they say, \u201cOh yeah, I saw that, too. I thought it was real.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tYou won\u2019t be performing in Venice this year, but you will have a role beyond that of artistic director, correct?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tI won\u2019t be performing, but we\u2019ll be doing a workshop. We did this beautiful international open call and received hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of applications. I personally went through them \u2014 I really did \u2014 and picked 11 people. They will come for a month and have a different mentor every week. I take over for a week, too. So that\u2019s my hands-on experience. I worked with the Wooster Group for many years, and then I\u2019ve done theater through the years, but I haven\u2019t done theater for a while, and I\u2019m looking forward to doing this because theater becomes more and more important to me.<\/p>\n \n\tIs there anything else you\u2019d like to share?<\/strong><\/p>\n \n\tIf anyone has a chance to come to Venice, it\u2019s really beautiful here when the Biennale happens. So if you\u2019re needing a cultural vacation, it takes place June 7-21. It was really beautiful last year, so I recommend it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Willem Dafoe has unveiled his second lineup as artistic director\u00a0of the theater department of La Biennale di Venezia \u2014 the Italian arts organization that also oversees the Venice Film Festival. The theme for the 54th International Theater Festival, which runs June 7\u201321, is \u201cALTER NATIVE.\u201d \u201cThere is no precise meaning as the etymology can be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4637,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[4340,332,1582,722,2699,4339],"class_list":{"0":"post-4636","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fashion","8":"tag-dafoe","9":"tag-festival","10":"tag-program","11":"tag-theater","12":"tag-venice","13":"tag-willem"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4636"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4638,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4636\/revisions\/4638"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}