With Piazza della vita we celebrate Paul Röttger’s thirty year anniversary as artistic director of Theater Babel Rotterdam / rotterdamscentrumvoortheater.
Piazza della vita
a theatre-choreography by Paul Röttger
“An unabashed look at life.
Birth, love, rejection, acceptation, death.
Without words, but with singing,
live music, acrobatics and dance.
A square filled with visitors, two
enormous art objects and nothing less
than 35 actors.”
– E.W. Geerling
“An inclusive feast of recognition”, Theaterkrant, Jeroen van Wijhe
Paul Röttger on Piazza
“As a child i was fascinated with town squares. Almost every village has a square. Centered around are a church, a newsstand, the municipality. You meet each other on that square, everyone has to cross it. To the municipality to get married, to the church to bury someone, to the store to eat. All aspect of life come together on that square.
For Piazza della vita we asked ourselves: what happens on a town square? Writer Erik-Ward Geerlings and myself fantasized and dreamt and that was our base for a script for 36 actors. Themes that we used are loving, waiting, rejection, exclusion, death. In short, life.
The square in Piazza della vita is filled with our visitors and our actors. Together. They can look unabashedly at each other. Without lyrics, because there’s no dialogue. There’s a lot of singing. In many different languages: Japanese, Icelandic, Keltic.
We work with a huge group of actors whom are very divers. A community with elderly and young people, big and small, with impairment and without. This is the community i dream of. A community where you can and are allowed to see and meet everyone. A community where you can be who you want to be. In which you can be.”
Piazza della vita’s themes are connected to the city. That’s why we play on location, in a building on the Eendrachtstraat 81 (a sidestreet of the Witte de Withstreet). Actually, the building is a 19th century gym. In the city centre.
Piazza della vita will be an intense, sensory, disruptive, humoresque, esthetical, and sometimes harsh theatre experience.
tickets
€ 20,- incl. a vegetarian meal after the performance
download the brochure of Piazza della vita (pdf)
calendar & reservations
Friday 30th of November 19:30 – extra performance, tickets available
calendar 2019 (starts at 17:00 every day)
2nd of February
9th of February
9th of March
16th of March
6th of April
13th of April
The inclusive work and the research for a transferable methodology are supported by Gemeente Rotterdam, stichting Neyenburg, Pameijer, stichting Volkskracht, the NSGK and HandicapNL.
