Practising the impossible

In the words of Croatian dramaturge Goran Sergej Pristaš, we feel like regaining our role as “artists practising the impossible, at a time when utopia seems to be more a matter of memory than of imagination”.

HERE:2021. International Performing Arts Festival, as a rhizome, assembles works as a nomadic playlist of events. An array of attractions that can excite, evoke empathy, be poetic and unusual and yet twist expectations, co-opting the spectators as imaginative authors. It’s like charting a cartography of poetic visions through performances that can generate emotions, sensitively empowering aesthetics; projects that avoid predetermined outcomes and escape strict definitions of genre.

Collaboration between artists is one of the central cores of the programme. It includes dance performances, conversations, experimental films and silent movie projections, with live concerts of well known composers and musicians. Alongside the festival, the exciting project by visual artist Luciano Goizueta (CR) will define hybrid territories, archiving events and constantly collecting metadata.

A 16-month long pandemic has kept the artistic field stranded in a (semi) state of pause, suspended between things, like a prolonged ‘intermezzo’: an intense flux of uncertainty. We sometimes found ourselves alternating between incredulity and nostalgia, mixed with apocalyptic thoughts or just the desire for simple things. It felt like a party where everybody left at the same time.

We now feel a renewed need for renaissance, engendering knowledges and physically embodied discourses. There is a desire for ‘getting together’ in the theatres (or anywhere else), in an embrace with the community. This years programme resonates with both the state of suspension: the feeling of waiting for something to happen (or rather the longing for something that will never arrive) and the laps into the unknown, as well as the joy and excitement of being able to perform again.

Viltycke – CPA’s relaxed country side landscape will be the backdrop for reflexion and hanging out, poetic experience and participation: Utopia starts from very small things!