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15^th ACT Shanghai Contemporary Theatre Festival (ACT Shanghai)

ACT Shanghai Contemporary Theatre Festival (ACT Shanghai) is an annual international festival for performing arts, held in Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre and other partner venues since 2005. It focuses on presenting new and cutting-edge works of theatre, dance and performances from all over the world. In almost two decades, ACT Shanghai has cultivated a young, curious audience unique to Shanghai and become an important connecting platform for local and international artists with the Chinese audience.

The Angel of History

 by Sotterraneo (Italy)

In his latest work, philosopher Walter Benjamin describes an angel who flies with his gaze turned to the past and his back to the future: buildings and ideologies rubbles accumulate before his eyes and the angel would like to stop and mend those rubbles, but a storm swells his wings and drags him relentlessly forward: we call this storm progress. THE ANGEL OF HISTORY is a new production by Sotterraneo, the Italian theatre collective who won the heart of Shanghai audience with Overload in ACT Shanghai 2019.

Sotterraneo theatre company began working as a research collective in Florence in 2005. The group is comprised of long-term members as well as a cluster of collaborators whose numbers vary according to the project at hand. The resulting working group aims to investigate the linguistic possibilities of theater – a place characterized by a physical and intellectual time, both old and hopelessly contemporary. Sotterraneo like to experiment with different formats, producing cross-cutting and stratified pieces in search of form and content. Sotterraneo’ s avant-pop approach seeks to narrate our times whilst striking a balance between the collective imagination and the most unconventional thinking. The audience is the company’ s main interlocutor and at the heart of all their projects.

Sotterraneo have received some of the most important national and international theatre awards. Lastly, in 2016 they received the Best of Be Tour Award at Birmingham’ s BE festival. Overload wins the Ubu Award as Best Italian Theatre Show 2018, Scenari Pagani Prize in 2019, L’Angelo della Storia wins the Ubu Award as Best Italian Theatre Show 2022.

‘clever, ironic, sulphurous, thus becoming above all a drill in paradox, a training in doubt.’

‘It' s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past, rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.’

Ubu Award Best Italian Theatre Show 2022