Call for Applications Open for PROGETTO YOUNG 2025/2026: Training Workshop for Young Actors

In September, it’s traditionally back to school, and for young aspiring actresses and actors, it’s time to join Progetto Young, the established training workshop promoted by the Fondazione Teatro Donizetti, strongly supported by Maria Grazia Panigada, Artistic Director of the Prose and Other Paths Season, and curated by director Fabio Comana. The workshop is aimed, as usual, at young people aged between 18 and 26, with at least 2 years of basic theatrical training and a propensity for group work. To participate, candidates must fill out the appropriate form, attaching their resume from September 8 until September 22 at 12:00 PM: https://forms.gle/GC5TeFW7urHvLQuSA.

The following week, specifically on October 8 and 9 from 5 PM to 8 PM, those who have passed the selection based on their resume will be invited to participate in a second selection consisting of a collective practical test, in seminar form. The workshop, which will be conducted by Fabio Comana himself and will take place at the “Benvenuto Cuminetti” rehearsal room of the Teatro Donizetti, will allow, through a series of exercises, improvisations, and text interpretations, a more direct and in-depth understanding of the technical and human characteristics of the participants.
From this second selection, the group of actors and actresses for the Young 2025-2026 project will be formed, which will include some of the outgoing students from the previous year and the newly selected students.
Participation in the workshop, which will take place from October 2025 to June 2026, requires a registration fee of 300 Euros, which can be paid in a single installment before the start or in two installments (first installment in October 2025 and second installment in January 2026). Attendance is mandatory.

The goal of Progetto Young is to contribute to guiding young people towards an advanced acting career, but also and above all to encourage a vision as open as possible to the future of theatrical art, to provide a series of elements for each person to invent and experiment with their own idea of theater: an essential condition for the renewal of languages and the evolution of a theater capable of speaking to this ever-changing society. The training of actors and actresses has from the beginning aimed to give back to the city the fruit of their creativity, actively and recognizably participating in some significant events of the city’s cultural life. An indispensable element for the training of young students will be the shared viewing of scheduled shows and participation in meetings with guest artists of the Prose and Other Paths season of the Teatro Donizetti and with other theater professionals.

“For the Fondazione Teatro Donizetti, Progetto Young represents a concrete way to bring young people closer to theatrical life, beyond the viewing of the shows offered during our Seasons,” comments Massimo Boffelli, General Director of the Foundation, “The Teatro Donizetti, and with it the Sociale of Città Alta, is the home of the people of Bergamo and even more so it must be for the new generations, also through qualified training initiatives such as Progetto Young.”

Maria Grazia Panigada emphasizes the value of the initiative: “We are approaching a new edition of Progetto Young, strengthened by past experiences and the success of the shows that have resulted from it, but above all thanks to the many former students for whom Progetto Young has been a springboard towards specialization and, now in several cases, the start of an acting career. I am therefore certain that the next edition will also bear fruit, confirming the proactive and formative vitality of our theater.”

A brief history of Progetto Young

Progetto Young was born in 2013 from an idea by director Fabio Comana, to offer a higher-level training space for young aspiring actors/actresses with a solid basic theater experience. Thus, training paths were created leading to the realization of the shows Smart Green City inspired by Calvino’s Invisible Cities, The Sound of the Shell from Golding’s Lord of the Flies, performed at the Teatro Sociale in 2013 and 2014, Dining with Harlequin, an original itinerant show in the cloister of San Francesco, on the occasion of Expo 2015. In 2016, Maria Grazia Panigada chose to strengthen and expand the project, bringing it inside the Teatro Donizetti, considered the most appropriate venue for various training paths that include multiple disciplines of theatrical art. Thus, a workshop for playwrights was added to the actors’ workshop, and the idea was born to integrate basic training, conducted by Comana, with a series of monographic meetings with actors and directors guests of the prose season of the Teatro Donizetti, such as Cesar Brie, Marco Baliani, Maria Maglietta, Marco Martinelli. From this phase, the shows The Point of View (2016, Auditorium of Piazza della Libertà), Carnival Trial (in the spaces of the Teatro Donizetti for Carnival 2017), Labyrinths, performed in the summer of 2017 in an itinerant mode inside the former Monastery of Astino, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an adaptation of the Shakespearean text for an itinerant performance in the woods of the Parco dei Colli di Bergamo, in September 2018, were born.
The students of the 2023-2024 biennium produced two shows: Wanderers, staged among the spaces, even “secret”, of the Teatro Donizetti, and I Wish It Were Love, directed by Argentine Cèsar Brie and performed at the Teatro Sociale in June 2024. The students of the 2024-2025 biennium were instead protagonists last June of If We Shadows, performed among the halls of the Teatro Sociale.
As proof of the success of the project’s intentions, it is enough to say that several actors and actresses trained in Young have passed the admission exams to prestigious national academies such as the Piccolo Teatro School of Milan, Teatro Stabile of Turin, Nico Pepe Academy of Udine, and upon graduation have started their respective professional careers.