A festival of international theatre with social outreach
Pilot year
Archa Theatre, 4 – 7 October 2010

www.akcentfestival.eu

The Akcent Festival was born from the urgent need to create a platform for art that breaks the barriers between artistic creation, social problems and politics.
The organizers of the festival see art as a unique means of communication that is not limited only to traditional consumers of art, such as visitors to theatres, galleries and concert halls. The Festival wants to present activities where art is performed as part of socially beneficial or socially critical activities. The Festival wants to give space for the confrontation of theatre and other types of art, which work in the form of community art, documentary theatre, social intervention and art in public spaces, or which focus on specific social themes. The Akcent Festival wants to put forward a new perspective on the function of art in the social context.

The Akcent Festival was founded on the basis of a social initiative by Prague’s Archa Theatre and the Theatre from the Passage in Bánská Bystrica. The Theatre from the Passage is an internationally renowned community theatre that works with mentally disabled artists. The Festival will have both a Czech and a Slovak part.
The programme director of the Prague part of the Festival is Jana Svobodová.
The programme director of the Festival in Bánská Bystrica is Viera Dubačová.
The dramaturgical advisor of the Prague part of the Festival is Henk Keizer, the director of the Dutch organization Friesland – Culturele Hofdstad 2018.
The artistic director of the Prague part of the Festival, Jana Svobodová, had this to say about the foreign participation in the Festival: “It would be hard to find a country where community art or social specific art are as widespread and at such a high level as in the Netherlands. That’s why we decided when building the foundation of the new festival to closely cooperate with Dutch artists, producers and theatre specialists. These people will also make up a large part of the foreign participation not only in the pilot year, but we hope also in future years of the Festival.”

The Slovak part of the Festival will take place from September 30 to October 2 and the Prague part from October 4 to 7, 2010.

The goal of the pilot year of the Festival is to establish a firm basis for the following first year, which should take place in a much broader form in 2011.

The Akcent Festival is aimed at the wider public and representatives of marginalized groups of citizens, but also equally to specialists, art theorists, journalists, students of art schools, artists and members of artistic groups and associations.
The pilot year of the Akcent Festival is the first step towards the creation of a European communication platform for theatre creators and groups in this area of art.



Festival programme:

The pilot year of the Festival will include seminars, symposia, presentations, workshops, events in public spaces, screenings of documentary films, theatre performances and concerts.

The centre of the Akcent Festival 2010 will be all the spaces of the Archa Theatre. The Festival at the same time wants to create awareness of spaces which directly neighbour the Archa Theatre or in the larger vicinity and that embody the marks of social and economic transformation and hidden social conflicts. The Festival venues will include, for example, the train depot at the Masaryk Station (part of the National Technical Museum), the passage and courtyard of the reconstructed building of the former Legiobank (today the Palác Archa), the Holešovice market and other locations.

Seminars, symposia, presentation and workshops will be led by:
Titia Bouwmeester and Ted van Leeuwen – artistic directors of the 5ekwartier project in Haarlem, the Netherlands; Titia was the artistic director of the former theatre group Dogtroep.
Hungarian director Arpád Schilling, who dissolved his legendary company Krétakör and decided to focus on projects of “socially engaged theatre.”
Stephan Kaegi – director of the Berlin theatre group Rimini Protokoll, which creates theatre productions with representatives of various social groups.
Michael Romanyshyn – American musician and theatre director, a long time member of the Bread and Puppet Theatre.
Bagryana Popov – Australian theatre director who creates theatre projects with immigrants.
Riet Mellink – director of the Peer GrouP, an arts organization that works in the farming regions of the northern Netherlands.
Eugen van Erven and Riet Sprenger from the university in Utrecht, who focus on the theory of community art.

Czech and Slovak participants:
VerTeDance (dance project with children of immigrants), Jaro Cossiga (street hip-hop event), Radka Dohnalová (creative work with children from refugee camps), Toy_Box (street stencil comics workshop), Jana Svobodová (Allstar Refjúdží Company), Viera Dubačová (Theatre from the Passage, Bánská Bystrica), Ondřej Hrab (Archa Theatre)

These productions will be presented during the Prague part of the Festival:
Dance Through the Fence (director: Jana Svobodová), 3 x A (director: Jaro Viňarský), Proroci písma (director: mamapapa o. s.), Emigrantes (director: VerTe Dance), Kde je domov můj? (director: Michael Romanyshyn)

The patron of the Prague part of the Festival is sociologist Jiřina Šiklová.

Partners of the Akcent Festival 2010:
Czech Centre in Bratislava
Embassy of the Netherlands in Prague
Bulgarian Cultural Centre
Centre for Contemporary Art
and others..