From 5 to 14 September 2025, Short Theatre – the international festival dedicated to contemporary creation and performing arts – returns for its 20th edition, marking both a symbolical and substantial milestone in the history of the festival and in the artistic landscape of the city of Rome. Ten days of programming, more than 35 artistic projects, companies and individuals blending art, critical thinking and politics, in a programme with over 70 events that charts underrepresented geographies of the Global South and East, gathering artists from Italy, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, the Philippines, Iran, Lebanon, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and more.
This edition sees, for the first time, the new curatorial team at work: Silvia Bottiroli, Silvia Calderoni, Ilenia Caleo, and Michele Di Stefano, experimenting with a plural approach to artistic curatorship. This shift aims to rethink the festival form through the generation of innovative formats and attitudes, opening up space for invention, radical imagination, and the unexpected.
Resident projects within the festival, dramaturgical chambers that unfold the creative processes behind performances, and meteorological events that blend matter and imagination like films, coexist with classes where pedagogy becomes collective practice and directly engages with artistic processes.
A physical and imaginative space that embodies this trajectory is opened through the collaboration with Noura Tafeche, visual artist, onomatologist, and independent researcher exploring online visual cultures, speculative imaginaries, and the aestheticisation of violence on digital platforms. The outcome is an “iconosphere” that the festival adopts as its own visual language, a sign of this twentieth edition – a densely populated table of presences, sourced from the digital and material world, retrieved from the web and drawn by hand.
Starting from a series of questions about the relationship between the festival and the city of Rome – looking at the geographies and movements created over these twenty years – and paying particular attention to the atmospheric dimension of artistic practices and the dramaturgical structure of the programme, Short Theatre 2025 explores new artistic and urban territories, redefining the spatio-temporal coordinates of the performative experience. It aims to create densities, temperatures, and atmospheres that embrace and highlight the nature of each work presented.
The festival’s core remains anchored to the Mattatoio spaces in Testaccio, and particularly in La Pelanda – where Short Theatre has been hosted by the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo since 2010 – while also expanding in targeted and intensive ways across the city. Among these, Teatro India – the festival’s birthplace twenty years ago and still a key venue – where, thanks to the partnership with Fondazione Teatro di Roma, this year it will host a performance and a cycle of artistic residencies intersecting with the festival’s programme.
For the first time, Teatro Vittoria will also be one of the venues, alongside the major new entry of this edition: the closing weekend of Short Theatre 2025 will take place at the Palazzo dei Congressi, thanks to the collaboration with EUR S.p.A. – the first step in a new trajectory that, over the next three years, will seek out exceptional or unusual spaces in the city to re-inhabit through the performing arts.
This special edition will be marked by synergies and alliances. Some are debut collaborations, such as with Urban Vision, the festival’s Main Sponsor and a key partner in supporting its production as well as its storytelling and transformation of urban spaces; or with Magliano, one of Italy’s most creative and extravagant fashion brands, which this year joins the festival to merge their respective imaginaries and co-create iconic merchandising items. Also new is the partnership with EUR S.p.A., which for the first time takes the festival to a new quadrant of the city, the EUR district, and into the Palazzo dei Congressi, whose vast and monumental architecture will be reimagined through the languages of contemporary performing arts. Similarly, the collaboration with film production company Grøenlandia Group will give life to a somewhat “magic” event that transforms the festival’s atmosphere into an assemblage between cinema crafts and live art practices.
Other valuable partnerships return, such as the one with Romaeuropa Festival, which helps open the Roman September with the co-production of one of the most anticipated shows of the edition – the creation by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Rabih Mroué. Or the collaboration with the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, which opens its historic costume archive to lend items that will appear on the scenes of the Palazzo dei Congressi, in addition to hosting a free workshop led by Nadia Beugré in the spaces of the Laboratorio dei Cerchi.
By embracing the collective dimension as a vital force capable of stirring atmospheric currents and motion, the 20th edition of Short Theatre is a call – a gesture that reaches outward and populates spaces with presences, bodies, and overflowing subjectivities. It disturbs, recomposes, traverses, unsettles, and collects fantastic anatomies, adopting lightness to move toward unforeseen futures.