Incanti 2018

INCANTI celebrates its 25th anniversary this year! A silver wedding for the Puppet Theatre!
25 years of adventures, unforgettable encounters, shows on the Turin stages from the Castello di Rivoli to the Carignano, Gobetti, Cavallerizza, Juvarra and Vittoria theatres, and the Casa del Teatro which has been the home of the festival for 10 years.
The challenge of 25 years ago: to bring to Turin a Puppet Theatre for adults , a language containing magical and imaginative potential, able to tell great stories, powerful and profound, and at the same time to make people smile and to amaze . Some indelible memories: Prasanna Rao in one of her last appearances and the charm of his ombromanie; Hoichi Okamoto (Dondoro Theatre) and his overwhelmingly alive human-sized doubles; Neville Tranter and his scathing irony; Duda Paiva, Frank Sohnle, Joan Baixas, Richard Bradshaw, Amoros and Augustin, Agnes Limbos, Nori Sawa, Gioco Vita Theatre, the Colla Marionette Company and many others. A marvellous adventure that made it possible to work side by side with Guido Ceronetti or to bring to Turin characters like Bread and Puppet’s Peter Schumann, the Iranian director Behrouz Gharibpour, the “dalang” Wayan Wija from Bali with his Gamelan orchestra…
Over the years the festival has changed opening new fields and paths linked above all to training, inventing spaces for young Puppet Theatre companies, and becoming a place for comparison, meeting and growth together.
This is why this edition is dedicated to the theme of travel, from the mythical one of Ulysses to the contemporary journey of migrants arriving on our shores, to reiterating once again how shadows, puppets, objects and visual theatre can tell about the present.
All this is thanks to the entities that believed in Incanti: the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, the Piedmont Region, the City of Turin, the Compagnia di San Paolo, the CRT Foundation and the Municipality of Grugliasco but also all the institutions that have accompanied and helped us in these 25 years, from the Education Department of the Castello di Rivoli – Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Cinema Museum to the Youth Theatre Foundation and to the Goethe-Institut Turin.