Our Story
Pezzolo, photo by Placido Carbone
Pezzolo. A rural village on the periphery of Messina on the north east coast of Sicily. A region that has survived economic stagnation, population decline, high unemployment rates, and natural disaster - and lives to tell the tale. A place like no other, visitors to Pezzolo have always been sure to find three things: a beautiful and peaceful landscape, an enchanting mythological history waiting to be mined—and a severe shortage of regular arts and culture programming.
Well. Until 2016, that is.
Driven by an urgency to preserve and share Pezzolo’s rich cultural identity, Sicilian-American director Mariagrazia La Fauci held auditions in Boston and New York City in the spring of 2016. Her mission? To form a company of actor-devisors to take to Pezzolo: theatre makers who were not just strong performers but also had a passion for being active creators and serving the local community. She warned those selected that, far from a vacation, the trip would be hard work. The hours would be long, the heat intense and they would be undertaking volunteer community work wherever they could. Everyone said yes. And so, our first Sicilian Residency was underway and Trinacria was formed.
We’ve come a long way since 2016. Our Sicilian Residency program is still in full swing, we’ve staged three productions through Trinacria Theatre Company and have begun working towards an international Arts Festival. We work regularly between Sicily and the US, not only helping to build a cultural movement in Sicilian villages like Pezzolo, but also providing global communities an opportunity to connect.
For three years now, we’ve been using the arts to help build communities. We’ve seen that it works. The response we’ve had from local people has been overwhelming. So far we’ve been based in Sicily and the USA, but we want to look further. The impact we’ve seen our work having on the communities we’ve engaged with reaffirms our belief that that the arts are essential to a healthy, happy society. Our hope is that, in the years to come, we will be able to take our work to more and more places, playing our part in a worldwide movement to re-establish the arts as a key part of the foundations on which our societies are built.
Over the past three years, we’ve developed a few key programs…
our aims
Communities are driven by the arts. We think so, anyway, and this belief is at the heart of what we do. Creative expression is unique in the way it brings people together - it provides us with shared experiences, allowing us to hear stories and to have our stories heard.
We feel it is our duty to help the arts take on this role within the communities we work in. We like to break our mission down into three core aims:
Community-building
We work locally, and understanding the everyday lives of the people within communities we work with is crucial to our work. All of our projects, programs and events aim to bring people together. We want to create spaces for people to be creative and to be inspired by the creativity of others. These spaces can become a real community hub for people, strengthening bonds and helping to build a sense of local identity.
Placemaking
When people talk about placemaking, they’re usually referring to the urban development of public spaces from a planning or a design perspective. Even in this context, placemaking is always about drawing on an area’s strengths to create spaces that can make people happy and help their community thrive. We believe that the arts are just as important as bricks and mortar when it comes to building a healthy and happy community and we strive to create spaces that celebrate and nurture this relationship.
Intercultural exchange
Communities with the arts at their heart have a common language. Connections can be made across cultures, languages and continents. As things stand, we usually see this happening in areas with denser populations. Denser populations mean more artists, and suddenly we see wonderful global connections flourishing across artistic communities worldwide. In big cities.
Trinacria passionately believes that local communities deserve to take part in this kind of intercultural exchange and will always strive to create opportunities for diverse groups of artists to work in less well-served locations around the globe.
…we’ve developed a deep connection to the places we work and the communities we serve…
Past Productions
The Hades & Persephone Project
Colapesce: An Audio Adventure
La Storia di Colapesce
A Ghost Story
and we have an amazing international team of artists & collaborators
