The Button Room
The Teatro Alla Misericordia, our home in Sansepolcro, is a crossroads of the community for us.
Audiences come here to see performances all year round. The Visionaries meet during the winter to choose a few artists to invite to the festival. A passionate group of children comes every week to do the theatre workshop. A crowd of young pupils from the city’s primary schools come to spy on the work of the artists in residence like secret agents. Creatives from all over Italy and Europe come for long rehearsals involving the citizens of Sansepolcro in every possible variation: from teenagers to grandmothers, from confectioners to new parents, from the football team to recipients of love letters.
With this new project, we wanted to invite to this harbour that is always open to all, other creative people who, although they are not involved in the performing arts, are artists.
It is to them that Shakespeare, in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. entrusts a central role in his play: they are the craftsmen! In Shakespeare, Bottom and his companions, whose names allude to the trades of tailors and carpenters, are called upon to create a real show, passing through dreams, magic, transformations.
So we, we host Bottom’s fellow Valtiberian colleagues at the Misericordia: we invite them to spend an evening with us and our audience, to tell their stories as people and to show the results of their wisdom and imagination. To give them a public space, because they often work in their homes or outside the city and it is a shame not to know they are there.
A button room, where we cut, engrave, draw, tie, knot, to give back to what we build with our hands and our imagination, whether as theatre makers or as craftsmen, the power it has.