East European Performing Arts Platform (EEPAP) supports the
development of contemporary performing arts (dance and theatre)
in 18 countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Lublin Theatre Confrontations

MP

From the organisers:

Since its inception, Theatre Confrontations Festival has undermined and exploded the limits of theatre, plotting out new ways of thinking about its role, meaning, and primary objectives. Established 20 years ago by the founders of the Lublin theatre avant-garde: Janusz Opryński, Włodzimierz Staniewski, and Leszek Mądzik, the festival has from its outset sought solutions and ideas distinct from those which prevail in mainstream theatre, in this way proving that the dramatic theatre model is not the only conceivable one. Confrontations is a festival rooted in the tradition of independent, avant-garde, political theatre, and it continues to seek out such theatre to this day. Assuming as it does that what happens at the intersections of limits, divides, genres, domains, and disciplines is the most interesting, the festival persists in its attempts to broaden the formula of theatre, highlighting the non-obvious spaces between various arts. At the same time, Confrontations poses questions on the responsibility of artists, taking up the topical issue of the working conditions of artists and art workers and the system of production of art, which determines these conditions.

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What is the impact of the understanding of the festival as situating it in the space of public institutions of art? How does it affect its tasks, role, and duties, given in particular the on-going debate on the situation and mission of public theatre?

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The programme of the 20th edition of the Festival focuses on three themes that overlap in a diverse, often surprising, ways.

1. The political dimension of art. Also of the censored one. We will present distinctly political, critical artists that force to think and open new contexts but at the same time we will reveal the social and economic context of their work.

2. Performing arts. For yet another time we will invite Lublin’s audience to performances that broaden the theatre formula in a fascinating, surprising way, offer a new way of thinking about theatre language, thus questioning the model of dramatic, repertoir theatre as the only one possible.

3. Independence. Theatre Confrontations were founded 20 years ago as a festival of independent, avant-garde, searching theatre. What is independence today? Independence from what, whom? An alternative to what we want to create today?

Organisers: 
Centre for Culture in Lublin
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