Keeping in mind its origin and today’s issues, this edition has developed around the theme of Mother Earth. It is a definition evoking the world of nature which, beyond all idealizations, bestows life but also causes death, can be a protective cave but also a burial place of bodies. Life and death held together. Beauty and tremendity. Mother Earth is, simultaneously, a bond, a ground for relationships and the acknowledgment of otherness: not a promised land for a few, but a common soil, a substrate belonging to and created by each and every one. The land is often meant as homeland – my homeland, we say –, and indeed it’s important to know where we come from, which is often much further away than we believe, but we need a wider thought. The Earth is both everyone’s and no one’s, we are just temporary guests, certainly unnecessary, and these last few years have patently proved that. The Earth is endowed with magical powers. According to matriarchal cultures, the Earth is the epitome of the feminine principle, the Great Mother open to the fruitful contact with the sky, which she gives power to.

Therefore, the Festival’s programme includes a significant presence of Italian and foreign female artists, enriching it with the issues they deal with in their projects: the relationship with death, with the sacred, with nature, with time passing by, while discussing gender and feminist issues. Political and poetic bodies loaded with messages and topics in a society demanding control.

The twenty-fifth’s edition unfolds consistently with the Festival’s first mission: to cross and crossbreed different codes, forms, and languages. It ranges over theatre, video art, cinema, sound experimentation and performance, open to different ways of engaging viewers to strike their eyes and trigger their participation.
Intuition, kindness, reception, wildness, self-determination of bodies, mystery, magic, invisibleness, power – but not authority: to all this we dedicate this important anniversary of Danae Festival.
Be with us!
Alessandra De Santis