Gradus
Passages towards the new

The deadline for submitting the application for participation closed at 12pm on May 20th, 2024.

The Reggio Parma Festival, the two partner cities, Parma and Reggio Emilia and the three Theatre Institutions that compose it, Fondazione Teatro Due, Fondazione Teatro Regio di Parma and Fondazione i Teatri di Reggio Emilia, present "Gradus. Passaggi per il nuovo” (Gradus. Passages towards the new), a project aimed at promoting and stimulating an intergenerational exchange of knowledge that serves as a catalyst for the creative awareness of emerging artists in live performance.

The project is open to creative teams or individual professionals of any nationality who have not exceeded 35 years of age.

The final objective is the production and staging, in autumn 2025, of a maximum of three shows selected during the process, which will be part of the programme of Festival Aperto, Festival Verdi and Teatro Festival. The shows, supported by the Reggio Parma Festival, will be produced in line with the production standards of the festivals in which they will be included.


The teachers

Here is a list of the teachers confirmed to date. Further names will be updated during the coming weeks.

Gabriela Carrizo - Director and choreographer

Director and choreographer, she founded the Peeping Tom Company with Franck Chartier in 2000. A characteristic element of their work is a hyperrealistic aesthetic combined with a concrete scene. Each creative process is a new step in the search for a harmonious interweaving of movement with what is theatrical and emotional, but also with text, sound and scene. Over the years, the company has developed a very strong relationship with theaters and audiences: the Peeping Toms’ performances attract a large and loyal audience of mostly young people, not only at home but also abroad.

Adriana Cavarero - Philosopher and historian of philosophy

She has taught Political Philosophy at the University of Verona, where she is currently honorary professor and chair of the scientific committee of the Hannah Arendt Center for Political Studies. She has been a visiting professor at New York University and the University of California Berkeley. Castelvecchi is republishing her works, including In Multiple Voices. Philosophy of Vocal Expression (2021), You Who Look at Me, You Who Tell Me. Philosophy of Narrative (2022), Horrorism. AKA of violence on the helpless (2022), Despite Plato. Female figures in ancient philosophy (2023). Her new book is Women Nursing Wolf Cubs. Icons of the hypermaternal.
Photo © Dede Leoncedis

 

Alfonso Cipolla - Professor of Theory and Technique of Scenic Interpretation

Lecturer of Theory and Technique of Scenic Interpretation at the Higher Institute of Musical Studies “Conservatorio G. Cantelli” in Novara, he taught Animation Theater at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Turin for ten years. In 2001 he founded with Giovanni Moretti the Institute for Puppetry and Popular Theater, of which he is director, curating numerous projects, exhibitions and publications. From 2020 he is President of the National Center UNIMA (Union Internationale de la Marionnette).
As a playwright, he is the author of some 50 plays and opera librettos and his works have been produced by Teatro Regio di Torino, Teatro Stabile di Torino, “Il Vittoriale degli Italiani” Foundation, Ravenna Festival, Mittelfest, among others.

Francesco Filidei - Composer

A composer, he graduated from the Luigi Cherubini Conservatory in Florence and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris. As an organist and composer, he has been invited to participate in major contemporary music festivals around the world. His works have been performed by numerous world-class orchestras, including WDR, SWR, RSO Wien, RAI, Tokyo Philharmonic, BRSO and the Philharmonic Orchestras of Monte Carlo, Nice, Picardie, Helsinki, Vilnius and Warsaw, to name a few.
He has received numerous awards, including the 2006 Salzburg Music Förderpreisträger, the 2007 Prix Takefu, the 2009 Siemens Förderpreis, the 2011 International Rostrum of Composers UNESCO Picasso-Miro Medal, and the 2015 Abbiati Prize, Les Grands Prix Internationaux du Disque of 2016 for his album Forse, an award from the Simone and Cino Del Duca Foundation in 2018, and the SWR Orchesterpreis in 2021 during the 100th Donaueschinger Musiktage for his Oratorio The red death from a novel by Edgar Allan Poe. He has taught composition in the Voix Nouvelles program of the Royaumont Foundation, at the University of Iowa, Takefu (Tokyo), at the International Academy of Tchaikovsky City (Russia), at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse (Germany), and at numerous institutions and universities around the world (Ircam, Cnsmdp, Esmuc, Musikene, Strasbourg and Moscow Conservatories, the University of Berlin UDK, the universities of Hannover, Stuttgart, Graz, San Diego, Tokyo, Hong Kong among many others).
In 2016 he was appointed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
In 2018 Filidei joined Fondazione I Teatri in Reggio Emilia, Italy, as music consultant and Villa Medici in Rome as artistic director of the contemporary music festival Controtempo. In 2022, he is appointed composer-in-residence at the Genoa Opera House (Teatro Carlo Felice) for three years. Filidei’s first opera, Giordano Bruno, had its world premiere in 2015 in Porto, Portugal, and has since been performed in theaters throughout Europe. His latest opera, L’inondation, to a libretto by Joel Pommerat, was composed for the 2019 season of the Opéra Comique in Paris, Rennes, and Nantes and was revived in Paris and Luxembourg in 2023. His new opera, The Name of the Rose, is commissioned by La Scala and the Opéra de Paris, in co-production with Genoa’s Teatro Carlo Felice. The first performance will be in Milan in 2025, followed by the premiere of the French version in Paris.
Filidei’s operas have been published by Casa Ricordi since 2018. Previous works are published by RaiCom.

Heiner Goebbels - composer

A composer, conductor and professor at Justus-Liebig University in Gießen, he is among the most significant exponents of musical theater. A multifaceted figure in innovative performance, his output combines musical experience with theatrical performance. Since the 1990s he has devoted himself to commissioned works for Ensemble Modern, L’Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Junge Deutschen Philarmonie. He has composed and directed a number of stage concerts, including The Man in the Elevator (1987), The Liberation of Prometheus (1991), The Tears of the Fatherland (1986), Repetition (1995), and Black on White (1996). Plays include Max Black (1998) and Eraritjaritjaka (2004).
Photo © Harald-Hoffmann

Francesco Izzo - Musicologist, pianist, coach

Musicologist, pianist and coach, he is a full professor at the University of Southampton, UK, where he teaches courses in music history and theory and supervises dissertations and PhDs in music history and theory, nineteenth-century performance practices and text criticism. As Scientific Director of the Verdi Festival since 2017, he has collaborated on programming and assisted the work of Roberto Abbado, Daniele Callegari, Michele Mariotti, Francesco Pasqualetti, Hugo de Ana, Leo Muscato, Graham Vick, and many other Verdi performers.
Photo © Roberto Ricci

Clara E. Mattei - Associate professor

Associate professor in the Department of Economics at the New School of Social Research, New York.
He works on the History of Capitalism, exploring the critical relationship between economic ideas and technocratic policies. She recently published The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (2022), praised by the Financial Times as one of the ten best economics publications of 2022. The text has been translated into more than 10 languages and won the American Historical Association’s Herbert Adams Baxter Prize 2023. Her current research project critically reviews the Golden Age of Capitalism (1945-1975) and its Keynesianism through the lens of austerity capitalism. Her writings have appeared in The Guardian, Jacobin, The Nation and Il Fatto Quotidiano, to which she is a regular contributor.

 

Andrea Molino - Composer and conductor

Composer and conductor studied in Turin, Milan, Venice, Paris and Freiburg.
Artistic director of Fabrica Musica from 2000 to 2006, he produced CREDO at Staatstheater Karlsruhe, Stazione Termini in Rome and the Queensland Music Festival in Brisbane, among others. WINNERS premiered at the Brisbane Festival and was then presented in Paris at the Centre Pompidou.
In 2009 at the Basilica dei Frari in Venice he conducted Of Flowers And Flames with the Orchestra della Fenice; in 2012 he presented Three Mile Island at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. The opera – there is no why here – was staged in 2014 at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna and in 2015 at deSingel in Antwerp. In 2021, The Garden of Forking Paths, the first public use of the SWARMS platform, developed with the RAI Research Center in Turin, was staged at Palazzo Madama in Turin; the installation The Sense of Place – Montepulciano accompanied the 2022 edition of Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte di Montepulciano. The premiere of La vérité, pas toute, for 32 voices, 8 percussion, electronics and live video took place in July 2023 at the Chigiana International Festival in Siena.

Margherita Palli - Set designer and costume designer

Set and costume designer. Winner of numerous awards, including the UBU prize, the Abbiati prize, the Gassman prize, the ETI gli Olimpici del Teatro prize, the National Association of Theatre Critics prize, the Swiss Theatre Prize 2015, in 2007 she was included in the Guinness world records for the largest TV screen set design in the world. Since 1991, she has devoted herself to teaching as advisory leader of Scenography at the New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, also teaching at the IUAV University of Venice and the Academy of Architecture of the University of Italian Switzerland in Mendrisio.

Lucia Ronchetti - Composer and Artistic Director of the Biennale Musica

Born in Rome in 1963, Lucia Ronchetti studied Composition and Computer Music at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia, graduated in Philosophy from the University of Rome and received her doctorate in musicology from the École Pratique des Hautes Études en Sorbonne. She has been composer-in-residence at: Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; Yaddo, New York; Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, Berlin; Fulbright scholar program, Columbia U., New York; Experimentalstudio des SWR, Freiburg; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Cité internationale des arts, Paris. In 2024 his new opera Der Doppelgänger premiered at the SWR Schwetzingen Festspiele, in co-production with Luzerner Theater, directed by David Hermann, and his new chamber opera Searching for Zenobia premiered at the Munich Biennale in co-production with Staatstheater Braunschweig, directed by Isabel Ostermann. His musical theater projects have recently been produced by: Deutsche Oper am Rhein (Das Fliegende Klassenzimmer, 2023); Kölner Philharmonie (Chronicles of lonelines, 2023); Staatsoper Hannover (Pinocchios Abenteuer, 2023); Nouvelle Philharmonie, Paris (Les paroles gelées, 2022); Staatsoper Unter der Linden, Berlin (Pinocchios Abenteuer, 2022); Oper Frankfurt (Inferno, 2021). From 2021 to 2024, she was appointed artistic director of the Venice Music Biennale.
Photo © Andrea Avezzù courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Volker Schlöndorff - Film director

German film director, one of the leading names of the Junger Deutscher Film and one of the most significant directors of the renewal of German filmmaking, linked to civic engagement and a realistic style, for achievements, continuity and international recognition. Over the course of his career he won, among other things, the Fipresci prize for his 1966 debut feature Der junge Törless (The Disturbances of the Young Törless); the Palme d’Or ex aequo at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979, while his 1979 Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) won the Oscar for best foreign film the following year.

Peter Stein - Theatre director

A German theater director, he is counted among the most important creators of German and European theater in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in the great creative rush of the 1970s, for creating monumental projects and often in unusual spaces. Many significant works from that period, including Aeschylus’ Oresteia (1980), remounted in Russian in Moscow in 1994. The latter is the masterpiece in which the director abolishes the stage, replaced by the palace wall, placing the chorus in the midst of the spectators seated on steps.
In his “encounter” with Anton Chekhov, Stein reveals an unexplored comedy in the Russian author’s tragedy.
He has been the recipient of numerous international awards, including the French honor of Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres and Chevalier de la Légion D’Honneur. In 2011, he won the Europe Theatre Prize.

Raffaele Alberto Ventura - Essayist

Essayist. After studies in philosophy and cultural activities management, he moved to Paris, where he worked for a decade dealing with marketing and digital marketing for the Gallimard group.
In 2017 he published with Minimum Fax the essay Theory of the Disadvantaged Class (from which a play was adapted); in 2019 he published La guerra di tutti. Populism, Terror, and the Crisis of Liberal Society (Minimum Fax); in 2020 the book Radical Choc. Rise and Fall of the Competent (Einaudi); in 2022 he participates in UTET’s anthology Can’t You Say Anything Anymore? on the topic of cancel culture; and in 2023 he publishes for Einaudi the essay The Rule of the Game. Communicating without doing harm. Among the topics covered in his books and speeches are the history of ideas (philosophy) and cultural history (cinema, comics, pop), marketing and sociology (cultural construction of needs), generational issue (millennials), civilizational crisis (economics, populism, discomfort, ecology), sociology of organizations (dysfunctions, distortions, irrationality, etc.), philosophy of risk and security, and contemporary languages.
Over the years he has collaborated with various newspapers; today he writes regularly in the daily newspaper Domani and the French magazine Esprit.