FC Bergman, the collective composed by the actors/directors/artists Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Thomas Verstraeten and Marie Vinck, comes to Biennale Teatro for the first time. On Saturday June 17th FC Bergman will present the Italian premiere of Het Land Nod (The Land of Nod), an “out-of-scale” production, which defies the traditional space of theatre inspired by the Royal Fine Arts Museum of Antwerp: on stage, it reproduces the entire room known as the Rubens Gallery, with the majestic paintings by the Flemish painter, to tell the thrilling story of this space, of the works it contains and above all the people who seek comfort and shelter there.

In their motivation for the award to FC Bergman artistic directors Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte write:

“With their creations the Flemish artists of FC Bergman, drawing inspiration from cinema, literature and art history, and blending a painterly aesthetic and the use of highly advanced technology with the great allegorical-Medieval-biblical stories, shape an original language of site-specific-theatre-dance, poetic yet at the same time irreverent, which arouses a feeling of disconcerting apprehension in the viewer. Using references, symbols and images that are deeply rooted in western culture and civilisation, eluding the dictatorship of the vanishing point in Italian-style theatres with perspectives organised as a whirlwind of tableaux vivants and allowing themselves a margin of unpredictability and improvisation, FC Bergman flirts with the limits of feasibility, creating modern apocalyptic tales, often without words but with surprising plastic potency and evocative power, thus focusing on Man – torn between the existential desire to transcend his perimeters and the fear of change – following him in his moving odysseys that metamorphose into tragicomic misadventures.”