Teatro Era - CSRT

From the second half of the seventies, Pontedera has become one of those paradoxical capital theater that dot the late twentieth century, located in the suburbs yet central. A story that comes from a small group of amateur, stubborn and brave, inspired by the Living Theatre of Julian Beck and Judith Malina. A theater must at first a few, homemade, poor and megalomaniac, but thinking big; isolated, at first, in the same city, but enterprising for ties to distant theaters (first of all Odin Teatret Eugenio Barba and later the Teatr Laboratorium of Jerzy Grotowski). The Centre for Theatre Research and Experimentation (today Pontedera Theatre Foundation) is the tool that a young group of the province has been given for the meeting opened with the theater world and with the teachers, to create artistic training opportunities for themselves and for other young directors and actors who did not have an academic background; It was an imaginative structure, before organizational, which has become a reference point at international level. Born in the Seventies as a youthful utopia, it is today one of the most important centers of production in Italy for the "research." The Pontedera Center was, and still is, a crossroads where theatrical generations and traditions meet and fertilize each other. Have worked here artists and theaters from all over the mondo.Della lack of a theater (as a building) has made the starting point for a fascinating space research: street theater, the festival designed as a theater in the city, the shows such as routes for spectators. There is probably no place in Pontedera, outdoors or indoors, it's not even a show site: squares, streets, gardens, courtyards, banks, windows, apartments, warehouses, gyms, parks, restaurants, garage ... Ten years after the founding of the Centre, in 1985, Roberto Bacci and Carla Pollastrelli proposed to Jerzy Grotowski to create an institute where lead and systematic research. Thus was born in Pontedera, in August 1986, the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski. With this decision the Pontedera Center welcomed a great wealth and has assumed a great responsibility: to ensure the necessary conditions in search of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards. Not the building of a museum, but the creation of a bridge to the future. A point of departure and a port space: this is the theater of Pontedera crossroads. Experience the history of Pontedera (until 1995) and the men who built it is told and relived critically in a book written by Mirella Schino entitled published by Bulzoni in 1996.

The Center for Research and Experimentation Theatre was born in Pontedera in 1974 as a prototype of a new cultural and artistic institution, with the following objectives:

• Become a place of production and cultural and theater training
• Develop the artistic productivity of theater groups
• Create a common workplace for scholars, artists and theater workers
• Create innovative training projects
• Make art of the theater (in all its aspects) one man's tool of knowledge on itself
• Experience and realize social interventions through theater
• Develop, through extensive relationships with theaters and artists from around the world, the contacts between the culture and the Italian theatrical tradition and foreign ones.

Since 1999 the Center has become Pontedera Theatre Foundation.