Tune Yourself to URB

The URB Festival is now in its tenth year, and is yet again set to conquer new areas. With its focus on dance, visual and text art and theatre, the festival will now extend its repertoire to concert performances.

The album of the Brooklyn cabaret punk band The World/ Inferno Friendship Society was transformed into a concert performance, a perfect fit for the URB Festival. Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre’s Twentieth Century is a dive into the mysterious life of the Jewish actor Peter Lorre.

In the 1920s, Peter Lorre settled in Berlin where one of the people he worked with was the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Nevertheless, Lorre is perhaps best remembered as the psychopathic murderer in Fritz Lang’s classic movie M (1931). Addicted to Bad Ideas follows Lorre’s life from his career during the two World Wars to his grim downfall in the drug-infested jungle of Hollywood.

The World/Inferno Friendship Society collective has over 30 members. The URB Festival will bring about a dozen of them to Helsinki. The performance is directed by Jay Scheib, one of the greatest young visionaries of New York theatre. The performance has already toured several major performance art festivals. The Helsinki venue will be the Savoy Theatre.

CUTTING NEW GROOVES

The URB slogans from past festivals reveal the festival as an evolving, topical event that presents and comments on urban phenomena. The perspectives of the URB Festivals on urban art are demonstrated by their slogans: From Jazz to Hip-Hop – New Moves – Text, Rhythm, Rhyme – Urban Arts, Free Style – Urban Adaptations.

”In terms of its location and its internationality, Kiasma is a natural host for the URB Festival,” says producer Mikael Aaltonen, who is in charge of the festival programme. ”The diversity of the Kiasma Theatre and of the presentation forms of contemporary art in Kiasma is exceptionally well suited to the idea of an urban festival. The programme gives us an opportunity to always surprise our audiences.”