Teatro Metastasio - Contemporanea 2021

The future enters into us long before it happens. On August 12, 1904, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a letter to a young poet in which he urged him to welcome the future, the unknown and the unexpected as something that has already happened to us transforming us, as a house into which an unknown guest has entered changes. One could easily convince oneself that nothing has happened, and yet we have transformed. “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself into us, long before it happens”. Starting from this suggestion, CONTEMPORANEA FESTIVAL 21 addresses its attention to the future and in particular to the strength of frailty that is nothing but life, the unraveling of our intimate destiny that keeps us in balance without letting us fall. Because after all, the only courage that we are asked to have, during the most difficult and unprecedented moments of our lives, it’s to accept our own frailty and humanity as if it were the most prodigious experience to run into. With this awareness we will perhaps understand that there is no constant happiness and that, unlike the comfort of pleasure, the strength of frailty sets in motion some reflective processes and gives the spirit the “dialectical clarity par excellence”, making the soul visionary and ready for a brand new perspective on the future . CONTEMPORANEA FESTIVAL wants to measure itself with our time and inhabit the space of reflection and change, keeping itself in a state of permanent foundation. The multiplication of the impetuous transformations of contexts, the role models crisis, the pandemic shock, require words and updated reflections that connect projects and thought. The cultural practice of the festival wants more than ever to stimulate opportunities as a chance of transformation and relaunch, in continuity with the processes and with its history; a moment of construction, inclusion, meeting, creative development to outline new trajectories, build relationships, projects, places, strategies, for the research of new project spaces. We believe that we are in front of a new dialectic on freedom: the current situation and the needs of this time lead us to rethink the connection between the artist and the audience, between the work and the audience’s experience, between the process of creation and the sense of community, asking the parties to take up a different position, an inner movement in favor of a dimension that can still make present the potential for transformation of the scene, culture, art. 3