Performative Festival Divers and Female Astronauts

How should we live everyday life? What awaits our planet, our world, our towns and cities, neighbourhoods, courtyards, our schools and workplaces, our bank accounts, our health? Do we need art? And if we do, what can it be useful for? 

Two theme sessions took place within the Festival Divers and Female Astronauts (between June and October). They were both an invitation to take part in creative actions focusing on the theme of the present and the future. 

Our great challenge is the present and its unexpected form. We experience it during the pandemy in various and often very different ways. On the other hand we are drawn by the visions of the future. We can treat it either as a wild card or an opportunity, an area to use, a new continent awaiting to be discovered by our imagination. The old and the known are losing meaning, we should – whether we want it or nor – create the new. 

Festival is aimed at everyone rooted in the theatre: to artists, theatre pedagogues, actresses, female directors, practitioners of different art genres, to female and male animators, to the whole community of small towns and big cities in Poland. 

We want to dive in the present, which means both diving deep in ourselves and having a cautious meeting with other people. We believe that theatrical action can lead to DIVING, letting us discover the depths of everyday experiencing in its whole difficult and non-obvious spectrum. We want to take you on a space cruise towards the future, change our ideas and methods of acting into a place of fantasizing about the way our world could alternatively be like, the way we would like to see it. We will become FEMALE ASTRONAUTS travelling towards new galaxies. 

Within the DIVERS division we invited people to participate in OXYGEN BOTTLE workshop, where we could watch together theatre productions offered by the main Polish theatres and subsequently discuss them within Theatre Production Discussion Club called IN SEARCH OF CORAL REEF – that is in search of something rare, hidden but breathtaking and inspiring in the modern theatre. 

Within the FEMALE ASTRONAUTS project we invited people to participate in four sessions. We took the participants to DIFFERENT PLANETS together with inspiring female and male artists who specialize in virtual technologies. During A TRIP TO A MOON we, as theatre pedagogues, talked with female and male experts in all sorts of fields about the possible solutions for specific systems and areas of social life such as education, natural environment, art and science. Anyone interested in audio work had a chance to create a sound story within a SPACE PROBE session. 

Cofinanced with means obtained from Ministry of Culture and National Heritage 

Detailed programme available in the FESTIVAL bookmark.