Venice, Fondazione Giorgio Cini
31 May 2017 – 18.30

STORMING UTOPIA – a theatre performance by Oxford University and Pegasus Theatre

On May 31, 2017 at 18.30 Storming Utopia, a theatre performance by Oxford University and Pegasus Theatre, will take place at Fondazione Giorgio Cini, to mark the collaboration with Oxford University / TORCH (The Oxford Research Center in the Humanities).
Italo Calvino, in Le città invisibili (1974), suggested that Venice and Utopia were different versions of the same ideal, unrealizable, city. He had history on his side: the first complete European vernacular translation of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) appeared in Venice in 1548; and the Utopian commonwealth, described by More, was a Venetian-style republic with an elected head. Thomas More’s ground-breaking island fantasy continues, 500 years after its first publication, to ask us all what brave new world we are to wish for. Members of Oxford University and the East Oxford community are taking part in a unique collaboration supported by three institutions – Oxford University, Pegasus Theatre (East Oxford), and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice – to develop a new theatrical show, Storming Utopia, which they are performing on San Giorgio Maggiore on May 31, 2017 at 18.30.
The show brings Utopia into dialogue with Shakespeare’s Tempest,  Montaigne’s essay ‘On Cannibals’, and More’s speech about refugees in a play part-authored by Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More, to ask of Venice – and Oxford – today: What are the laws and customs of this place? How might these be improved? What are the risks? Who may have access to the drama, and on what terms? These are More’s questions in Utopia, and they have never mattered more than today, as Venice’s fragile ecology poses an increasingly formidable political challenge to its citizens and their elected representations; and as responses to Brexit across Europe focus on the insularity of the UK’s current sense of political identity and invite all European citizens to imagine what a better European society might look like in our shared future.

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The performance will be in English.
Free admission until seats last.

Information: centrobranca@cini.it