/theatre.now Goes International

Kiasma’s annual /theatre.now festival has offered new visions and perspectives on performance art already for six years.

Held in October, this year’s festival features Finnish and international performances as well as interactive resentations, installations, demos, artist talks and discussions, stretching the boundaries between visual and performing arts to unprecedented degree. Presented in the exhibition galleries of Kiasma, the /theatre.now performance installations are part of the museum’s It’s a Set-Up collection exhibition.

INTIMICY AND SPECTACLE WITH /THEATRE.NOW

The programme of the festival in 2010 and 2011 will feature events from Intersection: Intimacy and Spectacle, an EU-funded project that explores the relationships between performance art and other artistic and cultural disciplines, visual arts included. Thirty artists from all over the world have been selected to participate in the project, six of whom are featured in this year’s /theatre.now festival. Iona Popovici from Romania presents her solo piece, Work in Regression, inspired by George Orwell’sAnimal Farm.

A work by the British visual artist Nathaniel Mellors will be presented in Studio K. Entitled The 7 Ages of Britain Teaser, the work is a video piece commissioned by the BBC, in which Mellors takes a Monty Pythonesque look at language as a form of control. Just as Mellors’ earlier work, this video too presents an absurd combination of film and theatre.

Bohdan Holomícek and Eva Hrubà from the Czech Republic will be taking photographs during the first week of the festival. The resulting piece will be screened in the foyer of the Kiasma Theatre prior to the festival club on Sunday, 10 October. The club will be hosted by TJ Tape Head, who invites everyone to bring along their old mixtapes. The man behind the TJ Tape Head pseudonym is Paul Divjak, an Austrian multitalented artist and do-it-yourself enthusiast who promises there won’t be a dull moment at the club.

The Finnish voice in the Intersection project is Terike Haapoja, whose artist’s statement, Should Trees Have Theatre, will be presented together with an introduction to the project by the artistic director of Intersection, Sodja Lotker.

INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

The Intersection project is coordinated by the Arts and Theatre Institute from Prague. The Finnish organiser is Kiasma Theatre, the others are from Hungary, Serbia, Great Britain, Latvia and Italy. In addition to a host of performance encounters, Intersection also includes symposia that aim at establishing a foundation for a research process which uses theory and discussion to explore contemporary performing arts, crossdisciplinarity as well as new ways for creating performing art. The project will culminate next June in the main event of the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. Intersection has selected 30 artists to appear in Prague, some of whom will be seen at the /theatre.now festival in October next year.

Jonna Strandberg

/theatre.now 6 - 17 Oct
www.intersection.cz