Advisory Board Meeting in Milan
In Milan, the theatres’ artistic directors met with the directors and set designers before the rehearsals began at the end of May for the big Final Production near Pilsen. The Italian partner Elsinor Teatro Stabile d’Innovazione in Milan was the host of this meeting.
Elsinor Theatre has been co-organizing the Segnali Festival for X years. This year was the 28th time that the festival has taken place. Because the subsidy had been completely cut, the program was reduced from the usual three days to two days. All of the groups performed for nothing. The humorous and poetic production ‘Secondo Pinocchio’, with its simple staging, performed by Com- pagnia BURAMBO, proved that thriftiness doesn’t necessarily lead to a loss of quality. The convincing narrative style of the well known story was honoured with Eolo 2012, the national Italian Theatre prize for children’s theatre plays.
Naturally enough, the host theatre Elsinor also had a production in the pro- gram. Their play ‘Il Cosaro Nero’ was adapted from the well known Italian novel written by Emilio Salgari. This play, with its combination of emotional drama and theatrical scenic impact met the needs of the young audience exactly.
The presentation of the already tried and tested festival Platform 11+ co-production ‘HELP!’ von Aare Tooika (EE)/Peter Horvath (HU) gave the audiences the chance to convince themselves of the artistic quality of the European Project. Once again the production was thoroughly convincing, with its unusual use of language, the successful mixture of humour and dramatic highpoints, and last but not least, because of the achievement of the two excellent actors.
Two other events in the scope of the Festival proved the involvement of the host theatre in an extremely active European Network: The winner of the Italian Playwright’s contest was announced on the same night as the awarding of the Eolos, the National Theatre prize. The winner was Marco Renzi. His play ‘E? arrivato un barcone carico di europei’ will be produced at Teatro Elsinor next season and will become a part of the theatre repertoire.
The ‘Play Fair’ was proof of the fact that authorship is one of the key aspects of Platform 11+. In ‘Staged Readings’, further texts from the Italian authors’ competition and the Final production were presented. Parts of the texts were read by the members of the Advisory Board in English.
The Platform 11+ partners, however, had come together to talk, to plan and to think ahead. Thus many hours were spent in intense discussions about the re- hearsals and touring of the Final Production, about the next Youth Encounter in Groningen (NL) in autumn and about the future of Platform 11+.