Last Sunday, September 22, the Elfo Puccini Theater in Milan hosted the award ceremony for the 2024 Hystrio Prize, now in its XXXIII edition. As we had predicted, Carmelo Rifici, artistic director of the performing arts of the LAC of Lugano, received the Hystrio Award for direction, thanks to the fact that “There is an intellectual breath – the reasons for the award explain – that marks Carmelo Rifici’s theatre with ever greater force. A restless curiosity, that challenges the stage to rethink its traditional matrix, without betraying it. A design framework from which a refined and extensively studied authorial trait emerges. Grown in parallel with a solid curatorial profile, which led him to direct the LAC in Lugano and the Scuola del Piccolo Teatro. But the Hystrio Award to Carmelo Rifici wants above all to underline his directorial value and artistic vision. Which, alongside works dedicated to lyric poetry, in prose has materialized in much-loved titles in the last decade of theatre: from Gabbiano to Iphigenia, liberata; from Macbeth, le cose nascosto to the excellent Le relazioni libere libere; from Processo Galileo to De Gasperi: l’Europa brucia, up to the amusing La pulce nell’orecchio by Feydeau. Not to mention the Lingua Madre project conceived with Paola Tripoli, one of the most intelligent proposals born during the pandemic period”.
“Creative glances – continues the jury’s note – with feet planted in contemporaneity. But with thoughts that move in branched bookcase shelves in strenuous confrontation with the unconscious, the Lacanian theoretical horizon, the second half of the twentieth century in France. All within imaginaries often marked by a geometric beauty, where the edges welcome reflection on language. In order not to be satisfied with the first answer, precious restlessness of a theatre founded on elegance and intellectual dialectic”.