Santarcangelo Festival Internazionale del Teatro in Piazza

The international theater festival of Santarcangelo, 46 years of theatrical research, a walk through history.
Take the full Virtual Tour of the Santarcangelo Festival here.

Over the years, piazza Ganganelli has hosted performances and events confirming its central role in the life of the city and the festival. Turned into a beach, covered in a public billboard, set as a zoo and as a public living room where to sit, read and rest or simply listen to artist talks, or becoming the main stage for international renowned performers or musicians, the main square of Santarcangelo is the crossroad and meeting point for the temporary community of the festival, the mix of artists, citizens, staff, and audience who live in the city as a shared space.

Streets are a feature of the festival. Among citizens and tourists, artists have set out improvisations, shows, performances, and projects to reflect upon the urban and common places in an open air context.

Santarcangelo festival internazionale del teatro in piazza builds a temporary community of artists, citizens and spectators, who gather around contemporary performing arts. It is a festival where creation and production take place, as it commissions and co-produces artistic projects.

The festival works with national and international cultural institutions and artistic organisation and it engages in a continuous reflection on the relationship between art, the city and the public dimension that articulates its approach to both the physical spaces and the thematic and artistic trajectories of research.

The association Santarcangelo dei Teatri organises the oldest Italian festival dedicated to the contemporary performing arts in Italy and one of the most significant in the European context of theatre and dance. A tight relation between the city and the commitment to the arts led to its foundation in 1971, which was marked by the international dimension and the relationship with the public square.

The first artistic director and ex lawyer, Piero Patino, stated: “Let the theatre rise from the local communities to give it back to the communities”.

It is to the square and to the streets that the Festival is dedicated. It was born from the ideas and the thoughts of the screenwriter Flavio Nicolini (who worked with Elio Petri and Michelangelo Antonioni), Piersilverio Pozzi and the mayor Romeo Donati, who realised the Festival following Patino’s guidelines.

For the last 46 years, the city of Santarcangelo witnessed its change for less than a fortnight in July. An experience that started out of issues connected to the needs and politics of the time it lived, thus involving the community and the architecture of the city as a sign of the publicity of art and culture.

It then slowly shifted to a more accurate reflection upon the arts, upon the power of the arts and the relationship with the audience, to ultimately embark on a question that relates the public space and the living together as a community, as well as the responsibility of institutions in a perspective of an organizational and theoretical reformulation.