Nicola Borghesi and Enrico Baraldi

Country: Italy

Biography

Nicola Borghesi, Enrico Baraldi and Paola Aiello founded the Kepler – 452 theatre company in 2015 as directors, authors and actors, sharing an ambition, a desire, an urgency: to open the doors of theatres, to go out, to observe, through the lens of the stage, what is outside, in reality.

The theatrical formats created by Kepler-452 move in the field of documentary theater and range from the involvement of non-professionals (or world-actors, as we prefer to call them) on stage, to theatrical « reportage », to the creation of audio-guided paths and other devices of interaction with urban space.

Since 2018 the Kepler – 452 company has been produced by ERT / Teatro Nazionale, with which in 2018 it made The Cherry Orchard – Thirty Years of Happiness on loan for use, in which Chekhov’s text meets the story of a housing eviction that really happened. In 2019 he made F. – Perder le cose, which debuted at Vie Festival, in which the story of an undocumented migrant who, according to Italian law, cannot enter the stage is addressed; in 2022 debuts Capital – A book we have not yet read, in which Marx’s fundamental text is told through the voice and bodies of a group of workers at GKN in Florence, a company whose workers were fired en bloc by email in July 2019.

Capital – A book we have not yet read has been staged at major international festivals such as the Kunstenfestival in Brussels (2023) and the FIND Festival (2024) at the Schaubühne theater in Berlin.

A Place of Safety

conceived by Kepler-452
directed and dramaturged by Nicola Borghesi and Enrico Baraldi
with the words of Flavio Catalano, Miguel Duarte, Giorgia Linardi, Floriana Pati, José Ricardo Peña
with Nicola Borghesi
and Flavio Catalano, Miguel Duarte, Giorgia Linardi, Floriana Pati, José Ricardo Peña
assistant director Roberta Gabriele
sets and costumes Alberto Favretto
lighting design Maria Domènech
sound and music Massimo Carozzi
movement consultant Marta Ciappina
video project Enrico Baraldi
dramaturgy consultant Dario Salvetti
stage manager Alessia Camera
assistant stagehand and prop maker Aura Chiaravalle
chief electrician Lorenzo Maugeri
audio technician Andrea Melega
video technician Salvatore Pupù Pulpit
seamstress Elena Dal Pozzo
assistant director volunteer and video editor Alberto Camanni
scenes built in the Scenotechnic Laboratory of ERT
production Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT / Teatro Nazionale, Teatro Metastasio di Prato, CSS Teatro stabile di innovazione del Friuli Venezia Giulia, Théâtre des 13 vents CDN Montpellier (France)
in collaboration with Sea-Watch and EMERGENCY

video of the show Vladimir Bertozzi
stage photos Luca Del Pia

thanks to Giovanni Zanotti for its fundamental contribution to dramaturgy

The project enjoys the support of the Culture Moves Europe call, funded by the European Union and the Goethe-Institut

photo by Dario Bosio / EMERGENCY NGO Onlus

This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.

A theater company, Kepler-452, boards a search and rescue vessel in the central Mediterranean, the Sea-Watch 5. They don’t know exactly what they’re looking for; they only know that they’ve heard about what’s happening just a few kilometers off the Italian coast for a long time, and perhaps the time has come to go, in person, to see what is happening along the deadliest migration route in the world.

During this mission, they rescue 156 people, who will be disembarked in a place of safety in Italy. From this journey, a series of thoughts, questions, and anxieties arise, as well as encounters with rescuers from various NGOs operating in the Mediterranean – in addition to Sea-Watch itself, there are also operators from Life Support, EMERGENCY’s search and rescue vessel – some of whom will tell on stage what they have seen happen, in recent years, just a few kilometers from our coasts.

A place of safety is the story of the encounter between a theater company and a group of people who have decided to dedicate part of their lives to sea rescue, but it is also and above all a spark of attention on the collective repression of our continent, on what is happening in the central Mediterranean.

Ultimately, it is an intimate discussion about what Europe would like to be, about what it is not, about what it could be.