DIRECTORS

Valeria Raimondi and Enrico Castellani are the founders, directors and performers of the Babilonia Theatre. The name of the Theatre was inspired by the founders’ time spent in Iraq, where they worked on a project named entitled Cabaret Babilonia. Their motto is: For a pop theatre. For a rock theatre. For a punk theatre. Their first joint production was the Panopticon Frankenstein, and which they also produced the following: Underwork,  Pop Star, Pornoboy…They have also received numerous awards for their work.

Made in Italy won the 2007 Premio Scenario, a decision that was justified a jury, chaired by the director Roberta Torre, as follows: “The Italian North East is depicted as the factory of injustice, vulgarity and hypocrisy, which extraordinarily produces stereotypes, recited like litanies, and family models inspired by the holy family, but filled with media idols, intolerance, fanaticism. […] Simple but effective verbal strategies that make one laugh, and a perception of nonsense, in a work that wisely conjugates interpretative stylization and gesture paroxysm. With an unforgiving description of “holy” football fanaticism, and of emphatic and patriotic play-by-play that are normally rendered imperceptible by our general addiction to them. It is a piece where taboos and restrictions are confronted with intelligence and lightness, and that produces a theatre that goes beyond ordinary schemata and conformism.

Theatre

The Babilonia Teatri was established in 2005 by Valeria Raimondi and Enrico Castellani. This artistic institution is an experimental, utterly contemporary theatre that stages multimedia-based plays that tread along all the thresholds of all the arts that can affect the contemporary theatregoer.

Babilonia Teatri is an example of new Italian Theatre, more alive than ever, more evolved than ever, and it comes from the provinces, in this case, from Isola Rizza, Verona. I could give thousands of examples of “new wave” revolutionary performance groups born in small towns, in abandoned churches, in utility rooms, or in village theatres, from where, between passion and competence, they go into conquest, not of Italy but of the world.

Babilonia Teatri is an integral part of this ‘new wave' or scenic post-vanguard, and their work is a mirror and soul of people, of life. It is a self-portrait of power and ideology par excellence.

Massimo Schiavoni