PRESENTATION

At the ninth edition of the Europe Prize the theatre is expanding, moving beyond its own boundaries, reasserting itself by interweaving with film, dance and music.
In presenting an award to Michel Piccoli, the Jury is happy to celebrate a great, uniquely European artist, and an approach to the craft of acting that, through its genres (theatre, cinema) goes beyond those genres to reveal a fundamental grounding in a style that is inseparable from the man and from his civil commitment.
As is customary for the Europe Prize, a wide-ranging monographic is dedicated to the prize-winning artist and to his work with theatre directors such as Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, Luc Bondy, Patrique Chereau and Klaus Michael Grüber.
A two-day conference, to be attended by theatre and cinema directors and actors, and including a meeting with the prize-winner, focuses on the theatre and cinema of Michel Piccoli.
Michel Piccoli is also presenting an exclusive drama event conceived specially for the Europe Theatre Prize: Piccoli-Pirandello, à partir des Géants de la montagne. Developed with Klaus Michael Grüber, this event is at one and the same time a homage to the Island, to legend, to theatre and to its "locations". Indeed, Piccoli and Grüber's choice of the Massimo Bellini Theatre as a stage space for the Giants of the Mountain was so influential that it determined the shape of the drama's conception and production.
A season of films and theatre videos rounds off our homage to Michel Piccoli. The selection offers an opportunity to revisit some of the finest European films of recent years, along with videos of memorable drama productions; it also provides an opportunity for further reflection, in parallel to the conference, on the relationship between film and the theatre as explored through the work of Michel Piccoli.
Heiner Goebbles, winner of the 7th New Theatrical Realities Prize, is a radical innovator of contemporary musical theatre. The giving of this prize provides an opportunity to become acquainted with the breadth of his research, and with his approach to music and the theatre. The first of the two performances he is bringing to Taormina, Max Black, is a highly enjoyable compendium of epistemology, art, music and philosophy, developed as a score that is musical, visual, verbal, gestural and "inflammatory" -- presented through the voice and body of André Wilms, an actor and instrumentalist of exceptional abilities. The second show, The Left Hand of Glenn Gould, is a performance developed during the course of a workshop that Goebbles conducted in Germany at the Justus Liebig Universität of Giessen, with the contribution of scholarship students from the Treviso multimedia fabrica workshop. This musical performance attempts to map out a territory that does not belong to the classic topos of drama, exploring a space that is as familiar as it is difficult to mark out: the human face.
The award of the New Realities prize to Alain Platel acknowledges the intense activity of a dancer-director who has demolished the barriers between different disciplines (dance, theatre, music, circus). The prize recognises the commitment of an artist capable of putting together and performing, together with his collective "Les Ballets C. de la B.", shows of great precision, even when working with non-professionals, disadvantaged people and children.
Alain Platel presents a demonstration of his work, I Plateliani, and a show Iets op Bach, with an ensemble of nine musicians and nine dancers from his collective. To the strains of Bach -- in a selection made after a year and a half of listening -- performed live using period instruments, dancers from around the world tell the stories of their lives and who they are.
As part of the retrospective dedicated to Michel Piccoli, this year's event features many films and videos for viewing. The season therefore offers a further opportunity -- far from offbeat during a Theatre Prize -- of consideration and in-depth study of European cinema and its relationship to the other performing arts.