PROJECT
Recipients: young people aged between 18 and 30 from the city of Naples and the province

“In every city we work in – tell Jonas Tertelis and Andrius Jevsejevas –, we are curious about contemporary being in the context of history, culture and relationship between different social groups. Naples for us seems like a city full of contradictions and social action, which we will try to grasp through storytelling workshops and discoveries together with young generation of neopolitans. We believe that nowadays it is crucial to find balance between classical theatre stage and the one that manifests itself on the narrow streets of a city, breathes and lives between religious paintings, street art and real (usually not represented) everyday life”.

JONAS TERTELIS AND ANDRIUS JEVSEJEVAS
Lithuania

Jonas Tertelis is a film and theatre director, while Andrius Jevsejevas is a theatre critic. Both have been involved in various civil theatre productions in numerous cities of Lithuania, in order to provide a modern representation of the daily difficulties that the population is forced to tackle. Tertelis is probably the most experienced Lithuanian creator of documentary theatre, as his latest works show. Jevsejevas has taken part in several theatrical projects on migratory phenomena and the tendency to suicide in Lithuania. This team has the ability to come up with extreme and very courageous concepts.

MARIO GELARDI
Napoli

Mario Gelardi, a leading figure of the Italian civil theatre, is a theatre author and director; since 2013 he has directed the Nuovo Teatro Sanità. He has received numerous awards: in 2002 the Flaiano Prize with the text Malamadre; in 2005 the Ustica Award for the pièce Quattro, inspired by the story of Annalisa Durante. In 2007, together with Roberto Saviano he wrote the theatre adaptation of Gomorra, obtaining the Gli Olimpici Prize of the theatre. In 2017, he returned to work with Saviano, for the staging of La paranza dei bambini; in the same year, he received the Giuseppe Fava Prize for his theatre and civil commitment. Since 2018 he has been conducting Dramma Lab, the only drama laboratory recognized by the Italian Ministry of Culture.

THE CONTEXT
Nuovo Teatro Sanità

The Nuovo Teatro Sanità was born in 2013 from the encounter of a group of theatre professionals, led by the artistic director Mario Gelardi, with the young people of the Sanità district, who built a theatre in an 18th century church, creating a real theatre community. A cultural presidium in one of the areas most tormented by organized crime, NTS, in its nine years of activity, has hosted great names on the national scene; created free workshops for children and young people in the neighborhood; produced shows that have toured Italy; and in recent years has been involved in training and international exchange projects.