ROVERETO, Trentino Alto Adige — Office for a Human Theatre, the Rovereto studio founded by director Filippo Andreatta in 2008, has announced an autumn 2026 programme that recasts it as a platform for other artists. The season opens on September 24 in Potenza, Basilicata, with a performance built around clouds.
Known as OHT and based at Palazzo Adami in this Trentino town, the studio has spent 18 years making theatre about landscape and what it calls personal politics. It will now produce and host artists whose work overlaps with its research into bodies, landscape, and ecology.
The first are Laura Pante, a dancer and teacher, Carolina Cappelli, a performer and filmmaker, Maria Isidora Vincentelli, a dancer, and Giacomo Lorandi, a chef and food researcher. Pante’s project, Abbandoneremo le nostre case (We will leave our homes), trains six artists under 35 with backing from Italy’s culture ministry and SIAE, the country’s authors’ and publishers’ society. It ends in October with a public day at Palazzo Adami during the Giornata del Contemporaneo (the annual free open day run by AMACI, Italy’s contemporary art museums association).
“It’s a project capable of crossing the boundaries between languages, body, landscape and ecology. Clouds thus become a powerful metaphor. Without borders, in continuous transformation, capable of changing our gaze on the world,” artist and sociologist Francesca Chialà told Italy Now.
“It is precisely in the encounter between the arts that new possibilities of imagining the future are born,” added Chialà, founder of the 7 Arts Artistic Movement.
Chasing clouds
The backbone of the season is nuvolario (a coinage from nuvola, cloud), Andreatta’s ongoing research into clouds as instruments of imagination and perception. Since its premiere in October 2024 at Festival Aperto, Reggio Emilia’s contemporary arts festival, set to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, it has changed shape at every outing.
Its Elena chapter, performed by Vincentelli, draws on the Greek tragedian Euripides and the Canadian poet Anne Carson, who both tell of a phantom Helen sent to Troy. Previewed in Castrovillari, Calabria, in May, it plays Potenza’s Città delle 100 Scale dance and performance festival on September 24 and returns on October 18, 2026, to Periferico, Modena’s site specific performance festival, staged in the architect Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo cemetery and watched from above.
Four cities
On October 9, 2026, an installation titled A Cloud in a Room opens at Palazzo delle Albere in Trento, programmed by MUSE, the city’s science museum, and stays until spring 2027. On October 10 and 11, a chamber version at Festival Aperto shrinks the inside of the Teatro Municipale Valli to a model filled with miniature weather.
The wider test is whether a studio built around one director’s eye can become a shared house without losing that eye. This autumn is its first public answer.
