Silvia Costa

Silvia Costa is an Italian director and per­former. She was born in Treviso and studied the visual arts and theatre at Venice’s IUAV University. Since graduating in 2006 she has developed a visual and poetic theatre that is nourished by a deep reflection on images. In her personal exploration of the medium of theatre she assumes alternating roles of writer, director, interpreter and set designer, in the process working in different aesthetic fields. Her work includes perform­ance art (La quiescenza del seme, A sangue freddo, Alla Traccia and Midnight Snack), theatre works (Figure, Stato di Grazia and Quello che di più grande l’uomo ha realiz­zato sulla terra) and installations and video works (Musica da Camera, Tabula, Emotion­al Intelligence and Descrizione di un quadro). Since 2012 she has also created perform­ances and installations for children, most recently Jules Renard’s Poil de carotte for Paris’s Festival d’Automne and the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers.

Silvia Costa has worked with Romeo Castellucci on a regular basis: among their collaborations in the spoken theatre and in opera are Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher at the Opéra de Lyon (2017), Tannhäuser at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich (2017), Das Floß der Medusa at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam (2018), Salome at the Salzburg Festival (2018), Die Zauberflöte at La Monnaie in Brussels (2018), Il primo omicidio at the Paris Opéra (2019) and Mozart’s Requiem at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (2019).

Among her latest creations are Nel paese dell’inverno inspired by Cesare Pavese’s Dialoghi con Leucò at the 2018 Festival d’Automne and Wry Smile Dry Sob, a musico-­choreographic installation based on Beckett’s Play and mounted at the Vorarlberg Landestheater in Bregenz. She is associate artist of the Teatro dell’Arte of the Milan Triennale for the triennium 2017–19 and associate artist of the Centre Dramatique National (CDN) at Le Quai in Angers for 2019. She will join the artistic team of the Comédie de Valence in 2020.

Silvia Costa’s future projects include a semi-staged production of Claude Vivier’s Hiérophanie with the Ensemble inter­contemporain and a new production for the LOD muziektheater in Ghent with composer Jamie Man and writer Peter Stamm.