Festival visions in Europe

Festivals – the large festivals of the theatre. Once a year, theatre goes in search of the alternative. This may be representative festival weeks, an intoxication of images or irritating mentalities. Festivals break taboos, smash bridges, and dedicate themselves to the white flecks of our knowledge of cultures.

How does the function of a festival become a world where internet visitors and city residents become spectators and actors in permanent movement with the foreign, with trusted strangers and with disconcerting similarities? Why do festival organisers invite artists? Is that also part of »Elective Affinities«? Perhaps an individual complicity …

And which visionary forces have festivals in a society, in a city? Festival organisers with widely differing concepts, the director of an opera house discusses with an artist whose works have been shown at the widest variety of festivals around the world – on »orchid and grass root« on the stage.