The Berlin University of the Arts (Universität der Künste Berlin) invites the audience waiting in the foyer of the basement stage at Divadlo Husa na provázku into the intimate space of its production, Co-radical Togetherness.
This production by the Latvian Academy of Culture offers the festival a distinctive take on the poetics of commedia dell’arte, where traditional character types, masks, and physical acting meet ironic distance and contemporary elements. This grotesque family story, oscillating between comedy and tragedy, demonstrates how a historical form can be approached freely without striving for reconstruction, but with respect for its core principles.
What you see when you watch The Dreamers
“Imagine your spine as a lighthouse,” says Bibiana Krausková, a performer of movement and expressive arts from Bristol. How can one deepen a relationship with their own body? How can spirals be found in all of their forms? These questions were the topic of the workshop The Body as a Living Instrument: Stories of Spiral.
On Friday morning, a semicircle of participants gradually forms in one of the festival rooms for a workshop led by theatre critic and academic Noémi Herczog. In her brief opening lecture, she outlines how theatre can function as a manifestation of democracy. To make her point, she draws on the Hungarian protests of 2020 staged by the FreeSZFE movement.
Eyes, look for the last time. Arms, take your last embrace. And, lips, O, you doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain with engrossing death.Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide! Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on the dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark!Here’s to my love. O true apothecary, thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.
SETKÁNÍ/ENCOUNTER 2026 is already successfully in full swing; hotel beds are slowly becoming familiar, breakfasts are still hearty, and faces that were once unknown are now at the very least... recognizable. Individual experience is gradually transforming into collective co-experience – have you stopped to realize that there are more of us here, that we aren't alone at the festival? While the lecture Better Safe Than Sorry: How Crowds Really Work at Live Events didn’t focus specifically on this view of togetherness and the co-presence of visitors or, by extension, the audience, it did at least point out several remarkable phenomena that I, as a theatre scholar, seek out and encounter in various forms nearly every day.
