Campsirago Residenza is a national center for research and production of performing arts in the landscape and for children. Since 2008 our home has been the fifteenth-century Palazzo Gambassi in the ancient village of Campsirago, immersed in the Monte di Brianza woods, in the province of Lecco, which has recently been restored in its entirety to create a new residence with new spaces for theatrical projects and performing art, for training seminars and live entertainment all year round.
The connection with nature has always been an essential element of our artistic work and is the heart of the Il Giardino delle Esperidi Festival which has reached its 19th edition this year. Doing theater in Campsirago, since its inception 20 years ago, has meant establishing a strong relationship with a unique land, nature, audience and history. Producing in an ancient palace, with two outdoor stages overlooking a forest and ancient Romanesque paths, in a village inhabited by 37 inhabitants who become 300 during festivals and live entertainment events, has profoundly marked our idea of theater and art.
Our research, which has always been shaped by the relationship with nature and attentive to an unconventional staging, to contamination with dance, music and poetry and, in recent years, also to the use of digital in its various forms, has become over time increasingly radically directed towards the experimentation of new languages, capable of restoring to the theater that ethical and transformative necessity which is historically its gravitational center.
We hold training courses aimed at professionals and schools and work by promoting the performing arts in strong dialogue with our territory. We design in a glocal dimension, creating synergies between local subjects and instances and national and international networks of artists dealing with cultural policies, creative residencies and theatrical productions. It is precisely in the international context that some of the most important projects were born, including IETM pre-meeting 2015 and, in 2016, Meeting the Odyssey project with 23 other European partners. We are promoters of international research projects, including the European RADIUS project.
These last two years have been of great transformation and growth for us. With the complete restoration of Palazzo Gambassi and the availability of new indoor spaces, from autumn 2022 we are set to inaugurate a continuous year-round program of live performances, seminars, workshops, artistic residencies, cultural and theatrical projects. In January 2022, together with the Municipality of Colle Brianza we signed a Special Public Private Partnership agreement (the second in Lombardy and among the first 15 in Italy) lasting 25 years renewable for another 25, at the center of which is the project Campsirago Place of Art with the shared objective of enhancing and redeveloping the village of Campsirago into a place dedicated to art and theater at 360 degrees. The regeneration project won, in June 2022, the call for the redevelopment of villages under the PNRR promoted by the Ministry of Culture and will bring cultural and restoration actions to our ancient village by 2026.
Our residency is made up of artists, actors, directors, sound designers, playwrights, trainers, technicians and the staff who deal with organisation, administration, distribution, communication and hospitality.
Campsirago Residenza is recognized by the Ministry of Culture as an innovation theater production company in the field of experimentation and has a three-year agreement with the Lombardy Region.
