✨ Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley special guests of Kilowatt Festival 2026 ✨
For the 24th edition of Kilowatt Festival, taking place from 17 to 25 July in Sansepolcro (AR), we are delighted to announce that Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley will be the Festival’s padrino and madrina . The heart and mind of Odin Teatret, masters of the international stage, they will accompany this edition with their vision and experience.
From 17 to 19 July, the Festival dedicates three intense and unique days to them, featuring public talks, performances, screenings, a lecture-performance, and three exhibitions.
In a continuous grafting of past, present, and future, Barba and Varley will engage, across several events, with leading artists and observers of contemporary theatre: Nicola Borghesi, Marco De Marinis, Liv Ferracchiati, Piergiorgio Giacché, Davide Iodice, Licia Lanera, Marco Martinelli, Ermanna Montanari, and Armando Punzo. These encounters reveal how theatre history germinates into diverse, autonomous, and original paths.
These three days will also be an opportunity to celebrate two important anniversaries: Eugenio Barba’s 90th birthday and the 20th anniversary of I Visionari, the active citizenship project that has made Sansepolcro a European laboratory of cultural democracy. For the occasion, on 17 and 18 July, two special moments of sharing and exchange (“barter”) of experiences are planned between Barba, Varley, and the Visionari group.
Among the other events on the programme:
- Friday 17: Theatre, Solitude, Craft, Revolt — a unique event in the form of an intergenerational on-stage dialogue between Barba and Varley, with directors, authors, and actors Liv Ferracchiati, Nicola Borghesi, and Licia Lanera;
- Two meetings, both coordinated by Marco De Marinis and preceded by film screenings:
Saturday 18, The Art of the Impossible by Elsa Kvamme, followed by a conference with Armando Punzo and Piergiorgio Giacché; and Sunday 19, Zona limite by Stefano Di Buduo, followed by a discussion with Teatro delle Albe (Ermanna Montanari and Marco Martinelli) and Davide Iodice;
Saturday 18 also features Compassion, with Julia Varley directed by Eugenio Barba: a performance that brings to the stage three grotesque, painful, and emblematic stories drawn from everyday contemporary life and from the darkness of myth, with strong connections to the wars currently inflaming the Middle East.
Throughout the Festival, three exhibitions will also be open to the public:
- stage images from Compassion and The Clouds of Hamlet, reworked and printed on fabric by Annalisa Gonnella;
- Odin Teatret posters, from 1964 to the present;
- photographs from the last six editions of ISTA, by Francesco Galli.