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 two-year period 2023-2024 have produced two shows: Vaganti, staged among the spaces, also “secret,” of the Donizetti Theater, and Vorrei che fosse amore, directed by Argentine Cèsar Brie and performed at the Teatro Sociale in June 2024.

As proof of the success of the project’s intentions, suffice it to say that as many as four actresses trained in Young have passed entrance exams to three prestigious national academies (Piccolo Teatro School and Scuola Paolo Grassi in Milan, Teatro Stabile in Turin, and Accademia Nico Pepe in Udine, ) and – by now graduates – have begun their professional careers. But that’s not all: several Project Young alumni have continued their involvement in provincial and regional theater, finding space in professional structures or creating new ensembles to open up spaces for artistic and organizational autonomy.