Founded in 1974 in Buenos Aires by Cora Herrendorf and Horacio Czertok with the first name of Comuna Nucleo and definitively established in Ferrara in 1978, it is today a composite reality where different artistic projects operating in national and international territory. A theatrical cooperative where founders and new generation of actors and directors work in synergy with other associations and Institutions. Teatro Nucleo sees theater as an important instrument of evolution for spectator and for actors, and this transversal view permeates productions, training and the artistic direction. We don’t see a preferential audience, we try to identify a possible interlocutor in the human being of any gender, ethnicity, age or social class. From an imperative of elementary justice and from the idea that it is possible to find new life and new meaning in art, it is urgent to pay great attention to all those excluded from fruition and artistic production. On this route we direct our constant search for a language that is more universal and oriented by the idea: now and here!
Since 1981 Teatro Nucleo created a number of plays for open spaces and also became a permanent workshop school for this kind of theatre, which, as from 2013, opened new projects in Argentina, under the direction of Cora Herrendorf.
The main current activities conceived and developed by the theatre group are as follows:
the Prison Theatre project directed by Horacio Czertok, leading to the establishment of a theatre company formed by detainees in Ferrara prison, which won the 2012 Entertainment Medal of the President of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, together with the Art and mental Health project – drama activity with psychiatric patients from the Ferrara Mental Health Service, and the Atlas Workshop – research into the actor’s art
the Theatre/Dance project directed by Natasha Czertok;
The Training School for Drama Workers in Social Care, directed by Cora Herrendorf
the Community Lab. Paths of participatory planning on various issues of common interest : women welfare, disability.
The Ferrara project, aimed at building new contexts of debate participated, arises within a wider scenario of regional experimentation on the participation of citizens in the most diverse forms of “local programming” policies. Teatro Nucleo has played – with a mandate to the Office for Social Services in collaboration with: Health Agency of the Emilia Romagna Region, AUSL Ferrara, Province of Ferrara – theater workshops, video documentation work, organization of the Future Lab “Which faces of precariousness?”
the Community Theatre project, which led to the formation of two training and creativity groups made up of over 70 people and actors from all the different generations: the Pontelagoscuro Community Theatre Group coordinated by Antonio Tassinari and Community Women directed by Cora Herrendorf, the new Children Community Theater , in cooperation with the Primary School of Pontelagoscuro and with the Facluty of Pedagogy and Education, Department of Special Education Sciences “Giovanni Maria Bertin” University of Bologna.
For ten years, Teatro Nucleo was based in what used to be a ward of the former Ferrara Psychiatric Hospital, renovated by the actors themselves. It became a permanent theatre, recognised by the Emilia-Romagna Region and, in 2005, Ferrara City Council gave the group a theatre building more suited to the needs of contemporary drama, the Julio Cortázar Theatre, situated on the banks of the river Po in the Pontelagoscuro district.
