The 34th edition of the International Festival of Theatre Schools SETKÁNÍ/ENCOUNTER 2024 came to an end on Saturday at the theatre Husa na provázku. The closing ceremony featured an awards ceremony, a dance-off, and videos about the past week.
Home is the place one returns to. Our birthplace holds memories, emotions, opinions, and important milestones of our lives. We return there because we long for safety, isolation, and understanding. We stay because we feel a rush of euphoria, love, and nostalgic sounds. At some point, these qualities go into negation and begin to itch. Whether our departure from home is motivated by curiosity or is a form of defection from the toxic influences of our family, perhaps there always comes a time to take that one step further, that one step where we go out across the threshold of home and look around more than we look behind us.
The last festival activity that took place before the closing ceremony was a discussion, the main topic of which was safety at universities in the V4 countries. While last year’s meeting focused on the issues of sexual violence against students, the rise of extremism, and the poor state of mental health, the main line of this year’s debate was precisely the sharing of experiences that would help in building the most non-threatening creative environment.
Everyone has experienced the atmosphere of public toilets at some point. After we pay, we smile at the toilet attendant and go about our business. None of us think about how many people pass through here daily, how many toilets get cleaned, or where all these people come from. However, the main protagonist will do everything to find out. Or will she? How far will her own conscience allow her to go?
When we move to the right, something falls on us from the left, and when we work on one part of our life, we suddenly get entangled in something else even more challenging for our spirit. But who caused the mess? After all, I wasn’t even here, this isn’t my mess... Oh, what a shame.
Songs to the Gods of the World, a musical performance by Polish students from the AST National Theatre Arts Centre in Krakow, captivated us with its vocal narrative.
We come into the hall, there is singing in it. We leave the theatre, we sing. This is how one could briefly describe the Polish production of Songs to the Gods of the World by the students of the fourth year from the National Theatre Arts Centre AST in Krakow.
