Transitions 3. Central Europe

"The alternative theatre beside the old railway station in Zilina, Slovakia, built by volunteers in 2009, with beercrates and an overpass for a ceiling; the post-industrial space of Łaźnia Nowa a few kilometres outside Krakow, squeezed between monolithic blocks of Socialist housing in Nowa Huta, which was once the industrial heart of Communist Poland; the Komuna Warszawa, a dynamic activist scene in the depressed suburb of Praga on the right bank of the Vistula, where the Soviet Army watched on in 1944 as the Nazis turned Warsaw into rubble…

On my research trips to Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia –the four Central European nations that came together in 1991 to form the Visegrad Group– History dogged my every step. Apart from the often ambiguous memorial spaces created in the post-Communist period in an attempt to deal nationally with past traumas –the Warsaw Uprising Museum, for instance, or the House of Terror Museum at 60 Andrássy street in Budapest, just metres from Heroes’ Square, historical narratives always lie at the heart of the independent Central European scene. Alongside them, we find issues like nationalism, freedom of expression, human rights, unemployment, racism, the demythification of national symbols, the weakening of taboos, guilt and victimisation.

Invited to Athens for the 3d Transitions festival, Central Europe’s new generation of artists balance between the classic texts of their formidable literary traditions and mixed, experimental forms which inhabit the grey zone between film, theatrical installation, performance, dance and documentary theatre. For the artists taking part in Transitions 3 the theatre is above all else a political act. They have experienced the abrupt shift to ‘unfettered capitalism’ and the free market at first hand, and their theatre plays an active role in –and adopts a clear stance on– the public discourse on social, ideological and economic issues.

The Onassis Stegi geopolitical festival starts on 11 November with the world premiere of the new play from Árpád Schilling and the renowned Krétakör theatre company from Budapest. The play is entitled "Day of Fury" and it is a radical ‘comedy with musical and catharsis’ for the citizens abandoned to their fate in today’s Europe. This third and final cycle of Transitions includes performances, seminars, discussions, readings, screenings and a pair of important invitees from the two previous cycles: Dan Perjovschi, a leading figure in Rumanian activism and politicized art whom we met at the first –Balkan– Transitions, is returning to the Onassis Stegi with a new visual intervention, while Lola Arias from Buenos Aires, who opened last year’s festival dedicated to Latin America, will be returning on 17 November with a show in the form of an audience centring on collective memory and political participation."

—Katia Arfara, Artistic Director of the Transitions Festival