We publish in full the editorial of Caliban #0, the new magazine of the Rome Opera House
Why does a theatre feel the need to issue a magazine that is not a publication that promotes its forthcoming performances, but rather an occasion for reflection, insight, confrontation and debate that takes its cue from the performances it programmes and focuses on the major issues we all come to terms with in our daily lives and experiences? Because that is precisely what theatres are for. They are places of discussion, where ideas are exchanged. They are places that welcome questioning, places where the anxieties of the times we live in are explored, and where the deepest and most complex instances of our being citizens, take the priority even before being spectators.
This is why Calibano, the magazine of the Teatro dell’Opera of Rome, was conceived. We live in a time where too often there is a tendency to trivialise or simplify complex phenomena. Instead, complexity must be addressed without hesitation in its multifaceted and sometimes even ambiguous complexity. The choice of an opera or the choice of a play , today more than ever, has the significance of a challenge and has to take into account the need and the responsibility of an open and attentive observation of all contemporary feelings. We must dare, we must have the courage to face the problems of our time rather than avoiding them or eluding them in the neutral silence of more comfortable choices, and the audience has to question itself along with us. The theatre is the place where many questions arise and where we may try to find (preferably together) possible answers.
Magazines are the most exciting forums for thinking and exchanging ideas, for observing the world around us and for building a community of thought. This is why Calibano was conceived: to create a new community within the big home that an opera house ideally represents. A community that writes, that reads, that meets to watch a performance in a public space. Until yesterday there was (only) an author speaking from a stage to an audience sitting in the stalls listening to that ‘word’. From today there is (also) Calibano: a way to bring home with us a thought that always starts from that ‘word’ that our programming will offer to the audience and that Calibano will enrich with a deep, critical, open, secular, and free thinking.
This is a forum for democracy in a public space that by definition, by origin and by tradition, is a place for democratic participation.
Francesco Giambrone
Sovrintendente of the Teatro dell’Opera of Rome
