EDITION XVI

At the end of February this year, the health emergency caught us, like everyone else, unprepared and in the midst of the organization of the Festival. We immediately decided, within the limits and uncertainty of the conditions that would be created, to confirm the event anyway. We felt that the Festival could be an important occasion to return to sharing collectively art and culture, respecting the safety and health of citizens, without giving up however to create a moment of celebration, of community, of meeting between artists and spectators in the here and now of the event.
Opera Prima is back again this year to propose itself as a place of exploration and research of the new languages of the scene. Dedicated to the new creativity of young people, the Festival is also a place for meeting, confrontation, dialogue, clash of ideas, thoughts, practices, generations.
Opera Prima wants to be a bridge between generations. In a world that also reduces art to a pure moment unrelated, without history or memory, we feel the need to build a space in which artists of different generations, masters and students, established artists and new talents, meet, reflect, In the balance between inheritance and betrayal.
This year we have invited artists from different generations to be present with their own show. Some of them were asked to identify a young group for invitation. In this way some historical groups are responsible for the invitation to the Festival of a young group. The Festival then issued a call for proposals, from which we received almost 500 proposals, addressed to young Italian and European groups: through this call were identified five other young groups.

We had to forego for this year the presence of international artists, an important figure of the Festival, without prejudice to the presence of Italian artists who also live and work abroad. On the other hand, the current situation has pushed us to strengthen and forge new collaborations with different subjects in the city, and to imagine new and unpublished projects.
The health emergency has finally led us to double the days of the Festival by diluting the daily amount of events, without giving up, despite the uncertainty of the situation, the quality of the proposals of which we are particularly proud this year.

FESTIVAL OPERA PRIMA ETS

The Festival is, as always, dedicated to Martino Ferrari and Roberto Domeneghetti.
Martino Ferrari was one of the founders of the Lemming Theatre. He died in a plane crash in October 1993 while flying over an archaeological site at Isernia as a researcher at the University of Ferrara.
Roberto Domeneghetti was, until his untimely death in January 2003, one of the protagonists of the activity of Lemming and of the very conception and birth of this Festival.