Speech by Ursina Lardi on receiving the Silver Lion for Performing Arts at the 53rd Biennale Teatro 2025 in Venice on June 14, 2025

I would like to thank the President of the Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the entire team at the Biennale Teatro, and especially the artistic director, William Dafoe, for this extraordinary award.

I would also like to welcome my guests who have traveled from Switzerland, Germany, and Ireland to celebrate this day with me, my family, and my friends.

I would like to thank the artists who have accompanied me on my journey, encouraged me, challenged me, criticized me, and inspired me. Special thanks to Milo Rau, Thorsten Lensing, and all the staff at the Schaubühne, where I have been a member of the ensemble for many years.

All my life, I have struggled to take awards too seriously, sometimes even when I received them myself. Why is it different today? Perhaps it is because you only understand the value of something when it is threatened. I am not under threat, but the thing this award stands for is: the appreciation of art.

In times when not only the extreme and libertarian right, but also moderate conservative forces are increasingly dismantling and destroying the financing, facilitation, and infrastructure of art, performing theater has become a political act in itself. The theater shows, by its very existence, how free we can be. It prevents people from forgetting what people know about people.

Last week, a journalist said to me during an interview: Si parla sempre meno e con difficoltà del teatro. (People are talking less and less about theater, and when they do, it's with difficulty.) A terrible, significant sentence. Theater and art are currently experiencing a major loss of significance. And it's not just about cuts; it's not just money that is being taken away from culture and cultural workers, but respect and esteem. We are being ridiculed, declared useless, superfluous, and harmless. Personally, this hurts me more than censorship and pressure ever could.

There is a coarse, aggressive tone everywhere. What a fuss, what a noise! The political elite presents itself with a broad stance, brutally, emphatically masculine, even primitive and contemptuous of humanity. With great effect. Every day, fear and terror and saber rattling, wherever you look. Everywhere there are simple answers to complicated questions. In this climate, every nuanced thought, every sensitive face, every tender touch, every soft, quiet tone is an event. It is disturbing and acts as a contrast. Yes, there is a logic to why it is currently politically fashionable to trivialize us and try to drain us dry. Of course, we artists must organize ourselves, show solidarity, and take a stand against attempts to pit us against each other in the upcoming battles over distribution. We must grapple with all the questions that our contemporaries pose us, both on and off the stage, but we must not become a mere reflex to political decisions; we must not give them this power over us. And that is why we must return to art as quickly as possible: I would like to read a passage from a poem by Walt Whitman:

Who knows?
One hardly dares to say it
After all the legends, poems, songs, dramas,
The Greeks, the Indians... Homer... Shakespeare...
The passage of time, streets, landscapes,
Star clusters, the Milky Way...
The heartbeat of nature has been harvested, seen through...
All eras explored to the core
Memories of passions, heroes, war, love, worship...
All human lives, voices, desires, thoughts...
All experiences have been named...
And yet
After countless songs, long or short
In all languages, all countries...
There is still so much that has not been told
Not expressed in poetry, not spoken or written
Something is missing
Who knows... Perhaps the best...

Friends, as you can see, there is still much to be done, because the complexity of the world eludes the grasp of ideologies; it takes art to comprehend it.

So we must continue, and even if we sometimes feel defenseless in these times, it doesn't matter, because art may be defenseless, but it is indestructible.

In his statement on the Silver Lion, William Dafoe writes about radicalism and empathy in my acting style. Exactly: Let's be radical and empathetic.

Let's celebrate the human ability to step aside and move freely on a stage, despite everything, despite all the entanglements of our everyday lives and our political present. Without fear, without restraint, powerful and fragile, with a cool head and a warm heart, because that is resistance.