Mapping Festivals: significant signposts and stations of exchange
by Roberto Frabetti, Project Manager and Artistic Director of "Visioni di futuro, visioni di teatro"

Visioni 2019 launches on February 22nd and is the first of 19 new ‘Mapping’ festivals. The activities of each festival will create the pathways for a new European project: ‘Mapping. A Map on the aesthetics of performing arts for early years’, running until 2022.

This is an artistic research project focused on creating a sensory-based relationship with very young children, aged 0 to 6 years. Over the next four years, established European festivals of theatre and dance will host nineteen ‘Mapping’ performing arts festivals, for early years audiences. In 2019, we will travel from Bologna to Salzburg and then Ljubljana, passing through Limoges and Breda, and in the following years we will meet in Charleroi, Poznan, Stockholm and Vitoria, and then Hamm, Galway, London, Budapest, Bucharest, returning again to Salzburg, Limoges and Bologna.

Every year, in five different cities and five different countries, the Mapping Festivals will host many international productions as well as the project’s meetings and development activities. Each festival will create the open squares of Mapping, the crossroads where the paths of research will meet and where the Map will start to take shape. Mapping the ‘aesthetics’, a word originally intended to mean “to perceive through the senses”, allows us to investigate the sensory-based relationships that develop between artists and very young children during a performance of music, theatre, dance or circus. This condition of mutual connection, so difficult to imagine but exciting to witness, takes place again and again in countless instances. This sense-based relationship between performer and spectator twists and turns during a performance; a fleeting contact can dissolve as fast as it appeared but this momentary connection, shared in a fragment of time can allow child-spectators to freely capture images, sounds, words and meanings to nourish their imagination, while the artist carefully collects the child’s deep silences, the intense glances, the changing postures, and the thoughtful sighs. These are sensitive, vital moments that together, create a profound and ever-changing rhythmic score, in a one-off composition.

The sensory-based relationship is a borderland where the experiences and the emotions of children and artists can coexist in an ephemeral and touching weave. The moments creating this bond are difficult to describe and impossible to objectively define. We will not be searching for certainties whilst Mapping, but seeking fragments of emotional and tacit knowledge, preserved by those artists who keep creating theatre for early years with passion and awareness.

For this reason, the central pillars of Mapping are the Festivals, the open squares; because they can help us collect those fragments, by fostering the opportunities for artists to meet, share and exchange experiences. I believe festivals hold in their very core the spirit of meeting and exchange, which can take different shapes throughout each individual event: some festivals may highlight competition, some may focus more on knowledge sharing, others on training opportunities.

Mapping Festivals continue along the path drawn by Small Size: connecting intuition with knowledge, and thoughts with experiences, always preserving artistic and cultural identities, and the freedom and independence of all artists.

Nineteen festivals: a network of exchange stations, places to stop, pause, set down or pick up pieces of experience and consider new projects. Important stations, where it’s possible to feel part of this scattered community of people who consider that much of the adult world is still so ignorant about early childhood, and as yet unaware of such incredible complexity in the thoughts and emotions of the young child.

Festival Visioni di futuro, visioni di teatro...
Teatro Testoni Ragazzi, Bologna (IT) | February 22nd - March 3rd 2019

The Children-Spectators Exhibition
Teatro Testoni Ragazzi, Bologna (IT) | February 22nd - April 4th 2019

BIM BAM Festival is ready to start!
Many venues, Salzburg and Northern Austria (AT) | March 9th - March 31st 2019