„Festival has to listen...“*
Following up on 2010, theatre festival FAVORITEN will weave itself even deeper into the city's fabric in this year's edition: as an event series for as well as with the audience.
So it is no coincidence that this year's festival centre is situated right behind the main station in Dortmund's Nordstadt, within the Dietrich-Keuning-Haus. The DKH stands exemplary for a vivid intercultural work and it is, to us, the ideal venue for exchange and for the shaping of new city alliances.
Exemplary, too, is the festival's opening, which is also taking place right there with a showing of Richard Siegal's "©oPirates Dortmund". This will be an evening when the city's inhabitants turn into the main performers and the boundaries between acting and watching gradually dissolve.
FAVORITEN – at many Dortmund venues with twelve outstanding competition productions from North Rhine-Westphalia, with interventions in urban spaces, performances, workshops, and discursive events - meets Dortmund: The city as host, as stage, as a concrete space. A relationship must be established and the perception of compliance must be reassessed anew. Not as a prerequisite, but rather, as Vinciane Despret puts it, as the "outcome of a long, chaotic, interested, not innocent, process."
Tim Etchells, artistic director of the British performance collective Forced Entertainment, puts it this way:
„Festival has to listen
To the city / neighbourhood / place it’s in
Could be a country or a street corner or a countryside
Trying to hear, sensitise, trying to listen or divine somehow,
Trying to take account or take stock of that place, its particularities.
But at the same time as deeply listening and listening deeply
Festival speaks out loud and into the city
Should speak strongly
And in speaking changing it
And in speaking re-seeing it
As in another function of art
Re-versioning or
When you festival you dream / re-dream the city
Rewrite
Remix remake
And you have to have guts for that
I mean a sharp tongue for festival speaking as well as keen ears for festival listening
Brain for processing.“
We are looking forward to opening up a number of future perspectives with you and all the artists and to catapulting the festival into the heart of the city in a good way! We hope to see you soon in Dortmund in this spirit!
Aenne Quiñones and the Team von FAVORITEN 2012
(*In: Tim Etchells, An Alphabet of Festivals, Sheffield, February, 2012. Commissioned by LIFT and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation for The Future of Festivals Symposium)
