Willem Dafoe has unveiled his first lineup in his new role as the artistic director of the theater department of the Italian arts organization La Biennale di Venezia, the Venice Biennale, the foundation that oversees the Venice Film Festival, including a new take on Pinocchio and “a performance experiment,” of which he will be a part.
Last summer, the star signed on for a two-year term running through 2026, and on Thursday, he shared the lineup of performances for his first season, including Davide Iodice’s Pinocchio — What Is a Person?, a perfect fit for Dafoe’s vow that his theater program would be “charted by my personal development — a sort of exploration of the essence of the body.”
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The 53rd International Theater Festival in Venice will run May 31-June 15.
“My impulse was to present pieces that express what is powerful in the theater — the body, poetry and ritual,” Dafoe said in presenting his lineup on Thursday. The star also highlighted that the lineup features work from “people I have admired, like Thomas Ostermeier, Milo Rau and Bob Holman, also theater makers that have had an influence on me indirectly — Thomas Richards and the Odin Teatret, or artists newly encountered, like Davide Iodice, whose Pinocchio I saw in Naples, and I was moved and engaged from the first moment to the last.”
And he shared: “I will be doing a performance experiment with Italian actress Simonetta Solder in an homage to Richard Foreman, who passed away in January of this year.” Foreman was a director and pioneer of America’s artistic and intellectual avant-garde. The “performative experiment,” as the Biennale also called the project, is listed on its program as No Title (An Experiment), with a runtime of about 50 minutes.
In a section of the program dedicated to “Today’s Maestros,” Romeo Castellucci will be in Venice with the world premiere of a site-specific creation called I mangiatori di patate on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio; Ostermeier, the director of the Schaubühne in Berlin, will present the Italian premiere of Changes by Maja Zade; and Rau, the artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen, will be in Venice with his new work Die Seherin, “starring the extraordinary actress Ursina Lardi who will receive a Silver Lion during the festival,” the Biennale said. “These artists are a lesson in creativity and theatrical pedagogy that still has much to say about the idea and the possibilities of the poetic body.”
About Iodice’s Pinocchio, it said: “The ‘different’ bodies of the young people who compose the variegated work group and are affected with Down syndrome, autistic spectrum disorder, Williams syndrome or Asperger syndrome bring onstage many possible Pinocchios, each one precious and irreplaceable.”
And U.S. legend Holman, “the heir of the grand season of the Beat Generation, a master of New York’s spoken word scene for the past 40 years and of poetic incursions in unconventional contexts,” as the Biennale said, “will be the star of a street performance, We Are the Dinosaur, about the power of sound and the magic of sense nested in sound of words, and of Talking Poetry/More Than Heart II, in collaboration with the collective Industria Indipendente, an exploration of the idea of the vocal body and the rhythmic body.”
Meanwhile, the “A Look to the Future” part of Dafoe’s lineup will feature Greek choreographer and director Evangelia Rantou, “who is involved in film and theater with Dimitris Papaioannou, Robert Wilson, Lucinda Childs and Yorgos Lanthimos, among others, but also with her company Garage21,” which will present the world premiere of Mountains; the multidisciplinary African/Belgian artist Princess Bangura, who will present two solo shows, Oedipus Monologue and Great Apes of the West Coast; Germany’s Yana Eva Thönnes, the author and director of Call Me Paris, which will get its world premiere in Venice; and Anthony Nikolchev who will bring to Venice The (Un)Double, his personal take on Dostoyevsky’s The Double, interlacing it with texts by Radovan Karadzic and judicial acts from the Christchurch massacre in 2019.
The festival will conclude with “the only Italian concert this year by Daniela Pes, an extraordinary musician, singer-songwriter, and composer,” the Biennale said.
Dafoe began his artistic career as a university student in Milwaukee where at age 19, he joined Theatre X (1975-1977), one of the first experimental theater groups in the U.S. In Europe, where he lived in 1976, he worked at the legendary Mickery Theatre in Amsterdam, known then as the heart of alternative international theater.
Then, in New York, together with director Elizabeth LeCompte and actors Ron Vawter, Kate Valk, Jim Clayburgh and Peyton Smith, he co-founded The Wooster Group, with which he performed on stage 1977-2003, participating in many of its productions.
In 2016, he participated in the Biennale Teatro program in the master class section, teaching a workshop dedicated to acting. Dafoe has been nominated for four Oscars.
“Theater is body – Body is theater,” Dafoe summarized his vision in his previously published Biennale mission statement. “I am an actor. My idea is not to present a retrospective of contemporary world theater but rather an inquiry into the essence of theater and the presence of the body. At a time in history when we rely more and more on artificial intelligence, I want to focus on the element of human endurance: the intelligence of the body.”
