Pagliacce Festival 2026

The next edition of Pagliacce will deepen the dialogue between performing arts, community, and social transformation, focusing on the intergenerational exchange between women clown artists from different countries and local contexts. The festival will become a meeting place between established masters and emerging generations, where practices, knowledge, and poetic visions will be shared through workshops, residencies, and public discussions.The training workshops will explore the relationship between clowning and gender equality, inviting participants to reflect on the comic body as a space of freedom, empowerment, and awareness. The clown’s language will serve as a tool for dialogue, capable of overturning stereotypes, valuing difference, and generating new imaginaries of equality and participation.The festival will engage with the local community through performances for schools, offering students opportunities to encounter international artists and the universal language of clowning. Performances and educational activities will foster curiosity, empathy, and creativity, strengthening the connection between art, education, and community life.Pagliacce will also strengthen a network of strategic collaborations with international partners and local organizations working in the social field — including those supporting people with cognitive disabilities, deaf communities, and migrant families. Together, they will develop projects of accessibility, training, and shared participation, turning art into an opportunity for encounter, inclusion, and collective growth.The thematic focus of this edition will explore the relationship between clowning, spirituality, religion, and the elsewhere. The artists will intertwine these themes with reflections on gender equality, identity, and human connection, investigating how the clown can act as a bridge between matter and spirit, the human and the divine, the visible and the invisible. Through performances, talks, and moments of collective research, the festival will offer audiences a poetic and profound journey through the sacred and the profane, irony and contemplation.With this new edition, Pagliacce will continue to promote the presence and visibility of women clowns and to advance gender equality in the performing arts. It will be a festival that looks to the future with openness and courage — building bridges between generations, cultures, and sensibilities — celebrating laughter as an act of freedom, spirituality, and connection.