La Spezia: two months of shows and workshops under chapiteau at the PIN 

La Spezia: two months of shows and workshops under chapiteau at the PIN.

Spice. Theatre, research, art and circus for two months of innovative and popular shows, laboratories open to the public, workshops and training sessions for sector operators. All this in an extraordinary space, immersed in the city's historic gardens: a chapiteau, from the name with which the tent placed above the circus ring is usually indicated.

Is called TRAC Festival the program of events and initiatives promoted by Municipality of La Spezia by the Civic Theatre, with the support of Artifice 23. The inaugural show will be staged at Civic Theater Sunday 17 December at 21pm; after that, until February 16 2024, the exhibition will continue inside the structure that will be set up for the occasion inthe external area of ​​the PIN at the Allende Center, which will make the spaces available for the event. There will also be shows for Christmas and the following days, including New Year and Epiphany.

The initiative was presented this morning at a press conference, attended by the mayor of La Spezia Pierluigi Peracchini, the manager of Cultural Services Rosanna Ghirri, the artistic director of the Civic Theatre Alessandro Maggi e Leonardo Pischedda, responsible for Artificio23.

“The planning of events in La Spezia does not stop – declares the Mayor of La Spezia Pierluigi Peracchini - and after the summer in La Spezia, the presentation of the rich program of the Civic Theatre, the events linked to the outdoors, sport and culture, today we present a project aimed at the whole family which will continue until February and which combines various artistic forms in a space that will add charm and charm. The objective we are working towards is that the city can offer initiatives that make it increasingly attractive for both tourists and residents who will be able to find opportunities for entertainment and cultural exploration to experience it to the fullest. La Spezia is experiencing a phase of profound change which also involves the planning of high-level events which are not concentrated in just a few months, but which continue throughout the year as never before.”

“We are really happy for the realization of this project aimed at everyone, from the little ones to adults. - comments Alessandro Maggi - Contemporary circus will combine with experimental theater and contemporary dramaturgy, in a month and a half of performances and training activities, in a very particular and magical space such as the chapiteau, while the inauguration evening of the festival will take place on the stage of the Civic Theatre. A further initiative that contributes to enriching the cultural and theatrical offer of the city.

“TRAC Festival is great news. - he claims Leonardo Pischedda - A type of proposal that recalls the most important European festivals, which sees workshops as an integral part to involve, excite and train. We are happy to participate in this project.

SHOW PROGRAM

17 December 2023 21 hours
Civic Theater La Spezia
SONICS acrobats
in TOREN
show created and directed by Alessandro Pietrolini
Produced and distributed by Fanzia Verlicchi for Equipe Eventi
Presented as a world premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, thanks to that incredible human and artistic experience, TOREN is a true "hymn" to colour, symbol of happiness, passion and hope.
For the Sonics “TOREN” represents a return to the origins – albeit with an aptitude for scenic and performative innovation – after the happy encounter between theatrical text and acrobatic gesture experimented in the previous show “DUUM”.

In TOREN the Sonics put dramaturgy aside to focus on the acrobatic, athletic and visual experimentation of the performers.
TOREN suggests a reflection: all the magic and emotion that color can create they are lost as the human being becomes an adult. On stage unfolds the story of a man who, trapped in his routine, lives a life inblack and white“, now unable to grasp the thousand and colorful nuances of reality. It will be enough to reverse your point of view for a moment and then you will immediately slip into a world of color and amazement. Incredible things begin to happen on stage as emotions they take shape in the play of light and in the aerial dances of the acrobats.
The secret of TOREN is to start looking at life with different eyes... only in that way will white reveal itself for what it really is, that is, the sum of all colors!

“TOREN is a sort of “Tower” with a thousand nuances, where the experiences and adventures of our lives are contained, which our memory has jealously guarded while waiting for someone to come back to take them back” declares Alessandro Pietrolini, director of SONICS. Memories flow quickly, they are unpredictable and changeable, they depend on our moods: in the show all this materializes in the scenography with rubber bands present on stage, which changes composition, shape and color with each painting, delivering us always different images.

Show duration: 1 15 hours and minutes
Entrance: full price (stalls and boats) 20 euros, reduced prices (gallery, boxes) 15 euros, reduced prices for students 7 euros

25 December 2023 at 18.30 pm / 26, 27, 29, 30 December 2023 at 21 pm / 1 January 2024 at 18.30 pm
Chapiteau TRAC – PIN La Spezia
LES ROIS VAGABONDS
Concert for two clowns
They will play halfway between tradition and innovation Vivaldi, Strauss, Bach... but musicians are clowns! Mime, acrobatics, music, to speak a universal language that reaches adults and children with fun and wonder.
The show was awarded the prestigious Audience Award at the Avignon Off Festival 2013.

Les Rois Vagabonds were born from the meeting of Julia Moa Carez and Igor Sellem. Their eclectic background, ranging from acrobatics to music, from dance to gestural theatre, gave rise to a common desire to explore the art of clowning. Since 2008 they have been developing the story of their duet through the search for a universal language without words.
Between 2010 and 2022 Les Rois Vagabonds they perform more than 900 performances of “Concerto for Two Clowns”. The theater tours have been going on for years Barcelona to Kiev, from New Delhi to Algiers, from Quito to Buenos Aires, from Salzburg to Marseille, from Montbrison to Pitres, from Village-neuf to Privas or from Orly to Cossé-le-Vivien.

Duration of show: 1 10 hours and minutes
Entrance: full price 10 euros, reduced 7 euros

5 January 2024 at 21pm and 6am, 7 January 2024 at 18.30pm
Chapiteau TRAC – PIN La Spezia
MAGIK FABRIK
Incognito
It's the story of two dirty, penniless fools. Strange ones, they watch the world go by with their crooked eyes, "in disguise"…And since you're there too, they'll make the most of it! Grumpy and fun-loving at the same time, foolish but cunning, without respect for authority or social conventions, they love to break the unbearable monotony of life!

The company Magik Fabrik specializes in physical theater and clown art dfor over 15 years with over 500 shows behind in the streets, festivals and theaters of France, Belgium, Spain, Italy and Japan. The duo was born in 2005 from the artistic partnership of Alice Wood and Romain Ozenne. Their complicity naturally leads them to produce shows that create a rarefied universe of humor and poetry through the languages ​​of physical theater and clowning. The unusual characters, captivating for their clumsiness, move in a poetic universe built to their size.

Duration of show: 50 minutes
Entrance: full price 10 euros, reduced price 7 euros

January 24 2024 21 hours
Chapiteau TRAC – PIN La Spezia
One evening, two shows!
GUN CIRC
Without feet on the ground
A journey into the past, in those summer afternoons, full of games and good moments, sometimes laughing, sometimes sweating, but always having fun, accompanied by authentic emotions and complicity, in search of the fragile balance between two people. Two friends give free rein to their imagination in a circus show that explores traditional techniques with a contemporary aesthetic.
Winner of the Zirkolika Award for the best street show of the year 2017.
By and with Enric Petit and Rat Serra.
In 2017, from the collaboration between Enric Petit and Tomàs Cardús of the Circ Pistolet company, the show “When we don't touch anyone to the ground...", an autobiography of their friendship born in 1996 thanks to the circus. A show that revolves around three main axes: balance, friendship and wood, all well linked in a great adventure game. The show received the Zirkolika Award for the best street show of 2017.

Show duration: 30 minutes

CIRQUE DE LA GUIRLANDE
Glow
At the center of a luminous circle, two bodies intersect, rise and merge. Time is suspended in ritualized movements, mixed with animality, between deformation of the bodies and muscles that move under the skin. A hand-to-hand show of and with Augustin Mugica and Zoé Mugica Ballanger.
Augustin Mugica and Zoé Mugica Ballanger met in 2015 at the age of 15. In the years spent together they have studied and refined disciplines that allow them to explore the body at different levels, between land and air, always supporting their desire to wander and affirming their independence. Lueur is their first creation as authors, a short, light and intense show capable of creating a moment of intimate sharing with the audience.

Duration of show: 25 minutes
Entrance (for both shows): full price 10 euros, reduced price 7 euros

January 13 2024 21 hours
Chapiteau TRAC – PIN La Spezia
ENRICO BONAVERA
Alichin of Malebolge
Entertainment by and with Enrico Bonavera
Directed by Christian Zecca
The show was created for the Dante festival 2021, as part of the annuals Dante celebrations in Ravenna. It is a monologue. He who speaks and acts is Alichino, a devil of the Malebranche who, chasing Dante and Virgil, who he said were guilty of having made him and his companion Calcabrina fall into the boiling pitch, ends up out of Hell and gets lost in the world of the living. She thus recounts her vicissitudes, which saw him for eight centuries accompanying companies of wandering theater people and being reincarnated from time to time as the performers of the Harlequin mask.
Now he has finally returned to Malebolge, thanks to a séance, but the return home always reserves many surprises for the 'veterans'. Many things have changed. Even Hell is no longer what it once was. Where have the Damned gone? Where is that beautiful reassuring smell? Where flames and pitch?
In a crackling hour and a half, in a false/Lombard-Veneto dialect, Bonavera wears the clothes of this 'poor devil', furious, naive, dazed, and clumsy, having fun playing with his imagination in the world of Dante's Comedy, in an existential journey full of paradoxical adventures, comedy but also a lot of poetry.

Duration of show: 1 30 hours and minutes
Entrance: full price 10 euros, reduced 7 euros

January 30 2024 21 hours
Chapiteau TRAC – PIN La Spezia
ROBERTO ANGLISANI
Job, story of a simple man
adaptation of Francesco Niccolini
from the novel by Joseph Roth
literary and historical consultancy Jacopo Manna
with Roberto Anglisani
directed by Francesco Niccolini
Winning show of the “Theaters of the sacred"2017
with the collaboration of Montagne Rac festival (Montagne – Treville, TN)
Collinarea festival (Lari, PI)

The tragedy and redemption of a simple man, in a show that crosses the Great History of the Twentieth Century, from the Russo-Japanese War to the First World War. «More than a hundred years ago, in Russia, in a very small border village, there lived a teacher. His name was Mendel Singer. He was an insignificant man. He devoted to the Lord. He taught the Bible to children, with much passion and little success. A stupid teacher of stupid children, as his wife thought of him."

Thus begins this story, which runs through thirty years of life of Mendel Singer's family, of his wife Deborah and his four children. But he also goes through the history of the early twentieth century, from Russia to America, from the Russo-Japanese War to the First World War and beyond. But above all it runs through the heart of Mendel, the stupid teacher of stupid children, devoted to the Lord, and - he believes - abandoned by the Lord.

Roberto Anglisani gives voice to all the thoughts of the protagonists, to the fears, hopes and desperation, to the prayers and revolts. As he says Skowronnek, great friend of Mendel Singer, «We are inside the design, and the design escapes us», this is why Mendel - and all the others - work so hard: life is a mystery, faith a refuge, and pain puts even the most righteous man to the test.

Show duration: 1 15 hours and minutes
Entrance: full price 10 euros, reduced price 7 euros

4 February 2024 21 hours
Chapiteau TRAC – PIN La Spezia
FLOATING CIRCUS
CabaretVariety • Circus cabaret (and more)
The CabaretVariEtà is a varied art show on stage young artists aged 15 to 20: numbers, presentation, technique, communication and everything needed for a show is designed by young people for young people.
Many disciplines on stage, circus theater dance music for an evening that amazes every time.
Floating Circus, first and only circus school in La Spezia, born in 2017.
The School's activities develop in the pedagogical field with courses for children, teenagers and adults, external laboratories, specific workshops and, in the performative field, with shows, all underpinned by a joyful and communal idea of ​​educational and artistic work.

Duration of show: 1 hours
Entrance: full price 10 euros, reduced 7 euros

6 February 2024 21 hours
Chapiteau TRAC – PIN La Spezia
JACOB OLESEN
The Non-Existent Knight
Literary recital from “The non-existent knight” by Italo Calvino
adaptation of Francesco Niccolini and Jacob Olesen
costumes of Margaret Raywood
directed by Amandio Pinheiro and Jim Calder
A character who would have all the human qualities to live, decides by vocation, by conviction, by his own (or others?) choice not to live and constitutes a point of denial, an antimatter of opposite sign to matter, but no less necessary and vital for this. Despite the various interpretations that have been given of the Non-existent Knight, since the publication of the book: the political one, the psychological one, or even the one he saw in the character a biographical reflection of Calvino himself which the author has always, almost with annoyance, rejected, recalling the simple happiness of telling stories like that of Orlando Furioso.
Well, ours would like to be, through representation a “textual” interpretation. The various characters in the story: Agilulf, his alter-ego turned upside down Gurdulu', Rambaldo, Teodora-Bradamante, Sofronia, Torrismondo, they wander around the story, they flee, they chase each other, they love each other, they challenge each other beyond the possible (all legitimate) interpretations.
All resolved in one actor who literally he dresses up in all the characters: between real and fake armour, stage clangs, music and songs (De sur le ponts de Bayonne), puppets. The history of the Knight it is that of someone who would really like to be taken into consideration proclaiming, despite his doubts and those of others, his own will to live and carry out valiant deeds that make it worth existing.

Duration of show: 1 hours
Entrance: full price 10 euros, reduced price 7 euros

14 February 2024 21 hours
Chapiteau TRAC – PIN La Spezia
UNTERWASSER THEATER COMPANY
OUT
OUT is a visual, multidisciplinary show, an original coming-of-age fairy tale told through the imaginative language of puppetry, a poetic work for adults, which can also be seen by children. An initiatory journey that leads the protagonist out of the house, a metaphor for certainties, to relate it to the world and its inevitable contrasts. The poetic language of the different techniques used transports the audience into a dreamlike dimension, conveying his universal message through the use of archetypes.

AWARDS
Eolo Award 2016, Best Puppetry show
Selection Visionari Kilowatt Festival 2015
Honorable mention Festebà 2015
SCENARIO Infanzia Award Finalist 2014

UnterWasser is a research group, founded in 2014 by Valeria Bianchi, Aurora Buzzetti and Giulia De Canio, which investigates the mutual contamination between puppetry and the visual arts.
The company undertakes work on two parallel tracks: on the one hand the performative one, on the other the exhibition/installation one.

The UnterWasser theater is a mobile installation to be enjoyed as the scenes evolve, in the fluidity of their flow. The material transforms before the spectator and the perspectives change according to the principle of cinematographic editing. The protagonists are the artistic object, the image, the sculpture, the moving matter. The performer is at the service of the object and becomes its animator. UnterWasser's installations have a theatrical dramaturgy, a narrative movement that makes them dynamic and evocative.
The images are taken from the dream world, well from which to draw suggestions of the inner universe, with aesthetic references inspired by figurative art.

Duration of show: 50 minutes
Entrance: full price 10 euros, reduced price 7 euros

INFO AND TICKETS

Tickets for the shows can be purchased at:
– the Box Office of the Civic Theatre – entrance from via Carpenino – from Monday to Saturday 8.30am-12pm (on Wednesday also from 16pm-19pm)
– PIN La Spezia – via Diaz, 2 – during opening hours which can be consulted on the website www.pinlaspezia.it
– the chapiteau ticket office – entrance viale Mazzini, 2 – which will open 3 hours before the shows
Online presales will be available on the circuit vivaticket.com