Grass in Mouth: Tales from the Fields of Ireland"

On the occasion of the new edition of Tocatì, International Festival of Street Games, Bam!Bam! Teatro presents a new site-specific production. Grass in Mouth (Erba in bocca) is a short, roving show for families, designed to guide audiences into the world of traditional Irish games through storytelling. The project stems from Ireland’s presence at the festival and a desire to pair the games with narrative, uncovering their symbolic and legendary origins.

The uniqueness of this format lies in its mobile nature: a Piaggio Ape converted into a small traveling theater wanders through the city and pauses in festival spaces, creating an intimate moment of listening with every stop. It is not a stage detached from street life, but a physical presence that emerges in the urban landscape, performs for the public, and moves on.

The goal is not a textbook reconstruction of the history of these disciplines, but rather to momentarily return them to the soil from which they arose. From this perspective, hurling and Gaelic football appear not merely as sports, but as forms preserving distinct traces of a shared memory: on one side, heroic feats; on the other, ancestral celebration. The playing field thus becomes a place where myth leaves its mark on the present, and athletic gestures continue to carry an epic, popular, and ritual echo.

With the support of the San Zeno Foundation.