The “guide” for the 33rd edition features illustrations by Gianluca Costantini
For those who leaf through it, for those who read it from cover to back, for those who draw inspiration from it, for those who use it to take notes, for those who collect it, for those who take it with them to every performance: the Ravenna Festival’s general programme is finally available to discover all the events of this 33rd edition – over one hundred and twenty performances scheduled from 1 June to 21 July, not counting the return to the stage with the Autumn Trilogy. A true “book”, a guide that is also an invitation to travel to explore the landscapes of music, dance, theatre and much more, following the routes traced by the dedication to Pier Paolo Pasolini or drawing other and more unpredictable ones. And revealing, page after page, an itinerary that is intertwined with that of the Festival: it is the poetic constellation put together by Gianluca Costantini, a gallery of icons, heroes – some even maudits – of the verse that urges courage, passion, resistance. Their names? Pier Paolo Pasolini, Albert Camus, Allen Ginsberg, Amelia Rosselli, Anna Achmatova, Anne Sexton, Arthur Rimbaud, Bertolt Brecht, Christa Wolf, Elsa Morante, Emily Dickinson, William S. Burroughs, Ezra Pound, Federico García Lorca, Marina Cvetaeva, Osip Mandel’stam, Vladimir Mayakovsky.
The programme is available at the Ticket Office of the Alighieri Theatre (which from 30 May will observe summer opening hours: Mon-Sat 10am-1pm and 4pm-6pm, Sundays and public holidays 10am-1pm), the Tourist Info Point of Ravenna and Cervia and all venues during the events. Twenty thousand copies are also reaching recipients across Italy, part of the Festival’s extensive mailing list.
An artist-activist from Ravenna who has been fighting through drawing for years and to whom Amnesty International awarded the ‘Art and Human Rights’ prize, Gianluca Costantini had already enriched the 2016 Festival’s general programme with his creations, starting from the dedication to Nelson Mandela of that edition. After a few years in which the Festival has chosen the language of photography to accompany the calendar of events, this year the omnivorous and visionary Costantini is back. Pasolini is ideally at the centre – and in practice on the cover but also between the pages – of this array of portraits: “The emotional and literary atlas of the artist, who gives us his Decalogue, his personal ball of thread to guide us through the thick forest of poetry without getting lost,” writes Elettra Stamboulis in the note accompanying the iconographic apparatus. Authors are also graphically connected with each other by swirls of smoke, the “smoke of poetry” – because poetry can inflame and those who practice it are also a bit of wizards and witches. Each portrait is a synthesis, a neat and agile line that finds its counterpoint in a handful of verses, no more than a snapshot but capable of opening the eyes and mind to other horizons, other books, other lives.
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