L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora, Mondaino is a place that welcomes and nurtures the creative processes of the contemporary scene: creative residencies, meetings, workshops, performances, publishing.
Since 1998, L’arboreto has been a theatre centre recognised nationally and internationally for the quality and complexity of its activities. Among other initiatives, it has two fundamental objectives for enhancing the culture of theatre and the performing arts: creative residencies and training | transmission of knowledge.
Mondaino (a small town of 1,471 inhabitants) and the Conca Valley, on the border between Romagna and Marche, are their stopping and starting point for gathering strength and reflecting on tradition and contemporaneity, ongoing processes and new research paths. A residential workshop to understand different expressions interpreted not only as a creative and artistic form, but also as a way of being and reacting, highlighting inspiration and processes, theories and practices, even before results.
The Theatre House and the two guest houses, in a nine-hectare park with approximately 6,000 plants, make L’arboreto a unique structure in Italy particularly suitable for research, rehearsals and the production of new works. Our projects aim to act on the differences of the performing arts, of the many possible theatres, favouring the entry of young people – new generations of artists and audiences – into the visions of theatre-making and the experimentation of new contemporary creative languages.
In 2016 we were awarded the Ubu Special Prize, a prestigious recognition that affirms the quality and rigour of our twenty years of activity, with the following motivation: Situated in Mondaino, near Rimini, L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora is one of the most active and dynamic theatrical research centres in Italy, which since its foundation in 1998 has reflected on the concept of residency, which in the last twenty years has become increasingly central to the process of artistic creation. Aimed at young people, it is a permanent workshop that establishes a direct link between creativity and territory, set as it is in a nine-hectare wood, where in 2004 the Teatro Dimora was also built, now the main venue for the centre’s many activities. After twenty-three years of activity, today L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora di Mondaino fully represents our first objective, to build a common home for contemporary art: a place to live for study and communication with the public, but above all to define new possibilities for meeting and relations between people and artists, recognising in particular to young people the need to interpret the “right to error” as an indispensable factor for their own artistic and human growth.
In 2016, our Association promoted the construction of a new project that enhances the individual experiences of historical and modern theatres of the Unione Valconca, and at the same time the entire community of citizens and artists: La Valle dei Teatri – Rete Teatrale Valconca. L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora di Mondaino, together with La Corte Ospitale di Rubiera, since 2018 has been recognised by the Emilia-Romagna Region and MiC as a Centre of Residence of the Emilia-Romagna Region. Teatro Dimora Inaugurated in the spring of 2004, it is an essential, simple and functional work, inserted in the landscape of the Conca Valley like a large leaf lying on the lawn. Greenery, wood, bricks and glass are the eco-compatible elements of which the structure is composed, conceived in harmony with the environment because of the ethical need to create a balance between the physical and cultural environment. The Teatro Dimora, the theatre in the Arboretum forest, is equipped with the most modern technologies and modular structures (decomposable platform, telescopic grandstand) that make it adaptable to the different needs of artists and contemporary arts, for training activities, creative residencies, rehearsals for the production of new works, meetings and performances.