Romaeuropa Festival 2018 Bridges Worlds Through Performance

The 2018 Romaeuropa Festival, under the theme 'Between World', aimed to build bridges across cultures through a dense program of performances, dance, and installations. Directed by Fabrizio Grifasi and presided over by Monique Veaute, the festival featured artists from 24 countries across four continents. Opening with Serge-Aimé Coulibaly's 'Kirina', a dance celebrating the movement of peoples and the dissolution of the foreigner concept, the festival also presented Motus's 'Panorama', which depicted the struggle for a Green Card in Trump's America through the lens of the Great Jones Company at La MaMa Theatre. Milo Rau's 'The Repetition – Histoire(s) du Théâtre' explored the ethics of representing violence, recounting the homophobic murder of Ihsane Jarfi in Liège. Other highlights included Robert Henke's site-specific installation 'Linee e Punti No. 1' at Sala Santa Rita, Ryoji Ikeda's 'A/V datamatics [ver. 2.0]', Fabiana Iacozzilli's 'La Classe', Chiara Bersani's 'Gentle Unicorn', and Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne's 'The Prisoner', which closed the festival with the line: 'There was no prison, and no prisoner.' The festival addressed questions of identity, representation, and alternative readings of reality, though it acknowledged ongoing work on the representation of women.