| Open Program |
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The Workcenter’s Open Program commenced in 2007 under the guidance of Mario Biagini. The team is composed of actors, singers, dramaturges and scholars from all over the world. The program functions as an open doorway to the outside world, meaning that in its daily practice the team facilitates a kind of shuttling between the inner aspects of the Workcenter's research and greater society. Currently the team's work aims to rediscover the living aspect of the poetic word as a tool for contact and personal transformation within a specific social context. In this sense, Open Program aims to re-discover the very nucleus of theatre: the moment of meaningful contact between human beings. The research is multi-faceted and involves the creation and exploration of structured sequences of actions, as well as experimentation with modern North American texts, including musical compositions based on these texts. Another fundamental line of Open Program's research focuses on songs from the Southern United States and on their position as a bridge between African cultural heritage and contemporary Western music (blues, jazz, rock, pop).
Throughout Horizons Part III, the Open Program team will rehearse, continue the elaboration of its opuses, and hold preview-presentations of several performing structures and events. I AM AMERICA, a performance created during the past two years, will be presented in Grobla. The team of the Open Program will also hold evenings of poetry, action and music in a variety of circumstances – usually in non-theatrical settings – with an emphasis on engaging spaces that are typically used as gathering sites such as bars, social organizations, or private residences.
Open Program’s work presents a living synthesis of poetry, music and action, unloosing the plurality of meanings, perceptions, and intuitions carried by the poetic word. The actors give voice and body to the human experiences that have been distilled into poetry. They follow the human traces that were left on the page, in a process that rewinds to the source of poetic creation: the moment in which, thanks to specific intersections between the flow of history and individual adventure, a streak of light illuminated the present, and the sense of self and of reality became vivid.
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