PHILOSOPHY

 Another art festival?  Is that really needed?  What does that mean anyway?  Art Festival?  Should a festival be a platform for artists to inspire one another or is it about winning prizes or winning a competition?  Should a city or a region be culturally upgraded by it or rather should a wide variety of programs be offered to a broad public?  To what extent should sponsors make a festival possible in the first place and how commercial should art be allowed to be?

 We do not know it.  That's how we initialed sometime in November 2012.  But we knew what was bothering us.

 Everyone is on their own at most festivals.  The artists, the spectators, the students.  Of course this should not be a blanket judgment, but a real exchange or networking rarely takes place in these moments.

 You rush from one performance to the next.  There is no time to reflect;  to exchange ideas, processes the experience of the seen.  Naturally, a festival wants to offer a diverse, dense program in just a few days - but how much can be really absorbed by 5 productions per day?  At a certain point your head is full, your eyes are tired and in your mind you find yourself checking the productions you've already seen on your todo list.

 Our art.  

Our Festival is placed in a rural area.  Away from the hustle and bustle and overstimulation of the city, we want to bring together artists from the region with internationally known artists.  Music festivals are mostly in remote corners of the country - why not a arts festival?  A large yard, a disused factory, a dilapidated villa … a place with a lot of space tiger perform, where the artists and spectators can be accommodated together in one place and which offers space for imagination and experimentation and offers to try out new forms, aside from popular stage models.  Our goal is the networking of artists and spectators.  We want to create a common cultural event.  Artists and spectators meet on one level to inspire each other and find new forms of existence.  Maybe the viewer will spontaneously become an artist and the artist a spectator, a redistribution of roles can take place through it.  This does not mean that the traveling artist loses his status as an artist and disappears in the crowd of viewers, but he should not be backstage and  surface only for interviews and audience discussions appearances.

 So far the utopia.

 This entry was reprinted in the Yearbook 2014 of the ITI (International Theater Institute).