VIE – ways in italian – explores a number of approaches to present-day issues. The Festival stands at the crossways of contemporary theatre, intercepting messages about who we are, where we are going, where we come from. New ways of looking at the world. New ways of reading the future. Eleven days of world and national premières, productions, performances and installations which examine various facets of today’s theatre. The word "contemporary" goes hand in glove with that of complexity, a force that can’t stand still, quick to embrace change and espouse uncertainty. Avant-garde art digs deep. It doesn’t offer solutions; if anything it adds to the confusion. It opens our ears to uncertainty. It is in search of the words, images and sounds we need to stop the flow of words, images and sounds that comes at us daily like a flood. The productions on the bill resist easy pigeon-holing, glib categorisations. If you absolutely must look for a guiding principle in the planned events, you could say that the recurrent theme is the experience of conflict, often a conflict that nobody was expecting and was therefore not ready to deal with. But you’ll also find the tricks of consensus creation and the lies of war: war not just in the military but also in the cultural sense. VIE intends to create the conditions in which the audience is cut adrift on the open sea: contemporary theatre as a space-time continuum, open to an experience in which the audience is invited to run the risk of having their preconceptions challenged, depending on tastes and backgrounds.