Synopsis
Rural Theatre is a show born from the wide-ranging project of the same name (learn more here) which focuses on body, memory, and landscape in the countryside of Recanati. Here, the countryside is not a backdrop but a dramaturgical matrix: a place that preserves stories, gestures, rhythms, imaginaries, and atmospheres that pass through generations.
Rural Theatre is a living bridge between those who spoke yesterday and those who listen today, between the land that holds and the body that returns. It is an archive of the present—emotional and cultural—that, through an exploration of community memory, restores dignity to those who had no voice in official documents.
Within a countryside that is changing and slowly, little by little, silently disappearing, Rural Theatre is an act of care: a way not to trample that very long root beneath everyone’s feet, resistant and constantly evolving.
Artistic research
The Rural Theatre project unfolded over twelve months in the former farmhouse of the Bocchi/Scarrocchia company, which hosted twelve intensive days of theatre workshop. In the time between one session and the next, the actresses participating in the workshop personally conducted more than thirty interviews with elderly residents of the area, following the thematic lines identified by director Agnese Bocchi: the funeral, childbirth, farmyard animals, femininity, daily rituals.
This gesture of going, listening, gathering is already a performative act in itself: it creates relationship, responsibility, and presence. It activates memory like a rhizome that continues to bloom, protecting it from oblivion.
Starting from the interviews, the participants created more than seventy improvisations, scenes, and choreographies, through the languages the company has cultivated for years: contemporary dance, poetic writing, and theatre.
Community memory transformed into living intangible cultural heritage, an emotional and cultural archive constantly poised between the depth of a personal story and its collective implications.
The final dramaturgy is a deeply participatory theatrical and choreographic composition: Agnese Bocchi wove together the materials, gestures, and words of the interviews and improvisations into a single body, a cohesive voice where rurality emerges as a genealogy. A line of origins, transformations, and wounds that still speaks in the present, questioning it.
Credits
2026
Concept: Agnese Bocchi e Tobia Scarrocchia
Direction: Agnese Bocchi
Choreographies: Agnese Bocchi e Tobia Scarrocchia
Natural sculpture: Francesco Penci
With: Cristina Andreoni, Bianca Basconi, Laura Bonicalzi, Silvia Brugiamolini, Claudia Bugari, Sabina Cingolani, Iris Pesenti, Alice Petrelli, Tobia Scarrocchia, Azzurra Zampini
Production: Bocchi/Scarrocchia Compagnia Teatrale
