Dafoe was named Artistic Director of the Theatre Department of La Biennale di Venezia on 8 July, 2024, for the 2025–2026 term.

His second Biennale Teatro program begins with a useful contradiction: a major international festival arguing for the value of the unpolished. The 54th International Theatre Festival, titled ALTER NATIVE, runs in Venice from June 7 to 21, 2026, with Dafoe using the program to push against theatre that has become too smooth, too professionalized, too easily absorbed into cultural sameness. He calls for an “amateur spirit.”

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Dafoe frames this as a response to a “truth-challenged” moment, where images, social media, AI, and algorithmic culture blur the line between contact and simulation. Theatre, in this reading, matters because it refuses that distance. It is bodies, rooms, uncertainty, and the possibility that something not fully explained can still be more truthful than something perfectly finished.

La Biennale quotes Dafoe directly: “we chose the title ALTERNATIVE, or more precisely ALTER NATIVE,” explaining it as a split phrase: “ALTER” as change or otherness, and “NATIVE” as personal nature or culture of origin. The idea fits his larger 2026 program: move beyond familiar Western theatre circuits, return to the “essential contact between artist and spectator,” and find theatrical force in artists whose work grows from specific places, rituals, bodies, and inherited forms rather than from a standardized international style.

Included in the ALTER NATIVE program is Emma Dante’s I fantasmi di Basile, a new 60-minute work written and directed by Dante. The piece draws on Giambattista Basile’s old Neapolitan fairy-tale world, Lo cunto de li cunti. Dante’s title, “The Ghosts of Basile,” gives this article a visual center. La Biennale lists Carmine Maringola, Davide Mazzella, and Simone Mazzella as performers, with Cesare Inzerillo credited for sculpture. The work also follows Dante’s earlier returns to Basile’s imaginative world, including La scortecata, Pupo di zucchero, and Re Chicchinella, making this less an isolated adaptation than a continued excavation of Baroque, southern, oral, grotesque theatrical memory.

The wider ALTER NATIVE program expands that logic beyond Italy. La Biennale describes the 2026 festival as including more than 200 artists across 55 events, with 11 productions and co-productions, 10 world premieres, two European premieres, and four Italian premieres. Its geography is central: Dafoe has assembled work from India, China, Indonesia, New Zealand, Rwanda, Greece, Italy, Japan, Samoa, and elsewhere, favoring artists whose theatrical languages are shaped by local histories rather than flattened by a single international style.