The Deep Festival comes to Pisa.
From September 29 to October 3, 2026, the festival will bring three performances to the Teatro Nuovo and Ballast Officine Creative that explore our relationship with the world, with others, and with ourselves.
These three events, through different artistic languages and perspectives, focus on some of the questions shaping our present: What does it mean to view the world from its margins? How do we live when every attempt to achieve something seems doomed to fail? And how do we cope with the feeling of being small, fragile, and inadequate in the face of the complexity of the times we live in?
Tuesday, September 29 | Teatro Nuovo
La Zona Blu – A Reading of Notes from the Borders of Europe
9:15 p.m.
Kicking off the Pisa events is *La Zona Blu* by Kepler-452, featuring Nicola Borghesi and video by Enrico Baraldi, in collaboration with Sea-Watch.
In July 2024, the Kepler-452 theater company boarded the Sea-Watch 5, a search-and-rescue vessel operating in the central Mediterranean, to gather material for a new production. During the month-long mission, 156 people were rescued and subsequently disembarked in La Spezia.
Borghesi wrote a column for a daily newspaper, *La Zona Blu*, while Baraldi documented those days with a camera. From those notes emerged a narrative in the form of a ship’s log, accompanied by original documentary footage.
It is the story of a man who cannot swim and does not like the sea, suddenly finding himself in the middle of the Mediterranean alongside a group of rescuers. But above all, it is the perspective of someone observing Europe from its border and grappling with a sense of bewilderment in the face of the absurdity of what is happening.
The same material gave rise to *A Place of Safety*, a theatrical production featuring five rescue workers on stage, which premiered in Bologna in February 2025. *La Zona Blu* represents a solitary interpretation of that work, conceived before rehearsals began: a direct view from the deck of a ship onto the borders of Europe.
Thursday, October 1 | Ballast Officine Creative
K – Conversations on Kafka
9:15 p.m.
We shift perspectives with *K – Conversations on Kafka*, by Alessandro Brucioni, featuring Andrea Console and Andrea Fiorentini, produced by Binario Vivo in collaboration with mowan teatro.
The performance is the second installment in a research project dedicated to the poetic world of Franz Kafka, his grotesque figures, characters suspended between reality and nightmare, and that profoundly contemporary condition of the individual who feels like a stranger, alone, and unable to communicate with the world.
At the heart of this second episode is *The Castle*, on the centennial of its publication in 1926. A dark and unreachable place, toward which the protagonist continues to move without ever truly arriving.
The attempt to reach it becomes discourse, a verdict, a story: a condition that pertains to modern man and his relationship with what he desires to understand but which continues to elude him.
Two actors on stage. Or perhaps a father and a son. Two adversaries on the same path. Or Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Two human beings grappling with the often futile need to understand one another.
Saturday, October 3 | Ballast Officine Creative
We Are All in Danger
9:15 p.m.
Closing out the Pisa events is *We Are All in Danger*, written and performed by Claudia Caldarano and Sandro Pivotti, with dramaturgical guidance by Antonio Tagliarini and artistic collaboration by Alessandro Brucioni. Produced by La Corte Ospitale, in collaboration with mowan teatro.
Claudia and Sandro have been friends for twenty years. They know each other well; they are very different, yet they share a feeling that is hard to shake off: that of living in a state of constant danger.
Outside, there is a world made up of conflicts, environmental disasters, alienation, and ever-accelerating technological development. Faced with this complexity, the two feel irrelevant, immobilized, unable to truly make a difference in reality.
Protected yet simultaneously trapped within a trench of books, they bring to life an hour of conflicts, teasing, heated arguments, and declarations of love. A sort of open-door shock therapy, in an attempt to free themselves—at least for a moment—from the weight of judgment and find a space for beauty.
The title refers to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final interview, conducted just a few hours before his death. Pasolini is not the direct subject of the performance, but his voice, his work, and his death permeate the scene like a mirror through which to reflect on the present and, above all, on what it means today to be human and fragile.
Three Performances, One Journey
With these three events in Pisa, the DEEP Festival continues its journey through theater, research, and contemporary culture, bringing to the stage stories and perspectives that are different yet united by the need to engage with the world around us.
From the shores of the Mediterranean to a Kafkaesque labyrinth, and on to the fear of a present perceived as increasingly complex and uncontrollable, the performances traverse diverse territories to return to a common question: How can we exist in the world, alongside others, when we have no simple answers?
