We chose to start our talk about this year’s festival with these words taken from a small book titled The Lost Garden by a certain Jorn De Précy. It tells about the author’s real story, which is actually a story invented by the book’s editor, the writer and garden historian Marco Martella.
And yet it’s a story we believed right away, in an immediate suspension of disbelief. Just like the theatre, a dimension where you can experience worlds more plausible than real life.
We grew fond of this character, because his slow creation of the conditions that allow something to grow and develop – even eluding a strict control so as to take on any possible shapes – touched a string in us. We therefore saw ourselves in this figure of a gentle gardener who has nourished his dreams for his whole life, with time, aloof, with utmost care and perseverance. After all, we prepare the ground, we sow, we take care, we harvest, we listen, we accept to wait, we watch over, and often in difficult, sometimes hostile scenarios. In a word, we can say we are authentic gardeners!

This little book says everything there is to say about the direction that Teatro delle Moire has been following for years with its work and Danae Festival, reaching this year its 25^th edition.
It speaks about listening and taking care. About supporting what resists and exists, what works on the quiet. It speaks about centring what is considered peripheral and is such by its own choice. It says that power lies not in revolutions and armed wars, but in transformation, which is the way of the arts.

In Derek Jarman’s Garden, the last book by the famous film-maker, he tells how, in the most inhospitable of places, close to a nuclear power station in Dungeness, Kent, he accomplished a stunningly beautiful work: his paradise garden. An act of resistance, in a way, but also an act of meditation and a dream of beauty and hope in a bleak and brutal scenario.

While going through this year’s programme in particular, we realised that many of the projects involved are the result of a long process started with the artists even two-three years ago and made of encounters, exchanges and attention to needs and dispositions, in order for their wishes to sprout and take shape.
This brought to our eyes the clear image of a garden, where hands dig in the ground every day, farming tools are honed, trees and plants yet to grow and flowers yet to bloom are imagined. In this cultivation we try and highlight differences, propose a human and cultural biodiversity while constantly focusing on the bodies, the many possible bodies, and refraining from any attempt to give useless and senseless definitions.
We invite you to come and discover our bloomings.
Enjoy the gardens!
(Alessandra De Santis)