The first meeting to open the EEPAP - East European Performing Arts Platform's activities took place in Kraków during the Reminiscences theatre festival
EEPAP is a platform for international exchange of performing artists and curators from Central and Eastern Europe. The project aims to create a network of performing artists who work in countries to the East of the EU. At present, members of the EEPAP come from Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarussia, Kosovo, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Macedonia, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Czech Republic.
The platform is to offer new possibilities of cooperation between young specialists of the region and to facilitate contact between them as well as the chances for instigating international projects. The network thus constructed will become a plaform able to apply for funding from the EU and create its own projects.
The meeting in Kraków brought together EEPAP participants and all those interested to take part in a debate on the results of the first EEPAP project: a report on the issues of structure and financing methods of performing arts in 16 Eastern European countries.
East European Performing Arts Platform from Culture.pl on Vimeo.
Participants presented their work and gave audiovisual demonstrations of their areas of activity, followed by workshops and debates on the politics and communication methods within the arts. On the 6th of October, the conference launched the book "Theatre After the Change, and What Was There Before the After" published by Creative Media. The book is a collection of papers from two international conferences organised by the Contemporary Drama Festival in Budapest and a presentation of the results following Look Back in Anger, a conference about political theatre in post-soviet countries organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
Look Back in Anger On Invention, Interpretation and Criticism of the Sources for Theatre History in Central Europe After 1945 features a number of theatre experts and historians examining the formal and informal history of performance across the region of Central and Eastern Europe. Presentations were held at the Gallery of Contemporary Art Bunkier Sztuki 3a Szczepański Square (with the final segment joining together with EEPAP at the Palace under the Rams on the 15th of October at 15:00.
Look Back in Anger Participants included:
Anna Czékmány (presented by Attila Szabó)
The Doomsday of the Reliable Museum - examines how the museum can be considered a storage facility for meanings and values, while faced with new contemporary expectations for the museum in terms of interactivity, social responsibility and an artistic "crisis". The presentation is based on the case study of the Gizi Bajor Theatre Museum – then and now.
Ildikó Ungvári Zrínyi
Body and image in the '70s : archiving photography - uses everyday spaces and various different cultural/subcultural situations to look at the way the body is presented and the way it behaves in performance and theatre, as well as observe how the character of theatrical bodies is preserved through photography.
Attila Szabó
Theatre and Dictatorship: Attempts to Summarize the Unspoken - as memory fades, archives preserve that which can only be shared by live witnesses, whose mortality erases those stories. There is a need for writing down a history of theatre in the time of dictatorship through the writings of György Lengyel and a research project conducted by the Theatre Studies Department of the Gáspár Károli University in Budapest.
Jan Jiřik
Personal History - also explores a more subjective history of theatre through the work of Petra Tejnorová, based on the testimonies of interviews with oral historians involved in performance and the way their memory relates to the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution.
Joanna Krakowska
Theatre as Archive of Narrations - a presentation of the main trends in the historical discourse of contemporary Polish theatre, asking how historical narratives constitute and undermine national identity.
The conference concludes with a discussion of Contemporary Theatre and its Past Inspirations - Can we consider theatre and drama historical sources, and to what extent? How do the historical subjects taken up by contemporary theatre contribute to contemporary political discourse? What means do performing arts have in the process of coming to terms with the past? What elements of theatrical tradition of the past are interesting and inspiring for contemporary theatre? Further research on possibilities for cooperation and comparative analysis are a focus of the discussion.
More on the EEPAP platform:
EEPAP is based on two main areas of activity:
- The platform's official website www.eepap.org serves as a tool for directors, actors, playwrights, stage designers and curators. The site enables those interested to publish their profiles and information about events as well as audio and video material and link up their own websites. www.eepap.org becomes a network of contacts which facilitates the integration of performing arts specialists and their search for partnership and cooperations
- An artist-in-residence programme for performing arts in EEPAP countries and an educational programme for curators and producers. The programme is carried out in cooperation with EEPAP partners.
Excerpt from an interview by Paweł Soszyński with Marta Keil,Joanna Wichowska and Goran Injac for Dwutygodnik)
In post-soviet countries, theatre is still just an aesthetic and formal category, very distant to contemporary issues
Paweł Soszyński: What is the task of EEPAP?
Marta Keil: To this day no medium or tool has been set up which could facilitate cooperation and contact between theatre and dance artists from Eastern Europe. We don't really know each other, we don't travel there often enough and artists who work in Eastern Europe do not have a strong presence at festivals in Western Europe. And this is not at all due to a lack of interesting work!
The European Commission has conducted research on the mobility of artists, but this research concentrated on EU member states. A grant for research on mobility and several test-projects was given to a number of foundations, and many expert groups have been formed. Yet what we do here at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of EEPAP and especially during the period of the Polish Presidency is an attempt at creating a platform and immediately testing it in practice. While others are still conducting their research, we are already working and checking what needs to be done.
Paweł Soszyński: What projects has the platform realised up to now?
Marta Keil: We have collected reports from fifteen countries on the structure and financing methods of performing arts. It must be noted that we took into consideration only theatre and dance, we didn't consider music or the opera. The author of the questionnaire which served as a base for these reports and the editor is Paweł Płoski. After we collected the materials it turned out that the facts can serve as a base for further research, and first and foremost as a base for EEPAP projects. This was the first time that research in this field was conducted on such a large scale. We collected information on the situation of performing arts in Eastern Europe in order to know what needs require answering. These reports will be a significant element in future negotiations and talks with the EU Council, which clearly lacks ideas for this region of Europe.
Source: www.dwutygodnik.com
Date: 5th-6th of October, 2011
Venue: Kraków, Pałac pod Baranami (Palace under the Rams)
Organised by: Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Project cofinanced by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.
Source: Adam Mickiewicz Institute
See more on the EEPAP platform at eepap.org
See more on the Kraków Reminiscences Festival at krt-festival.pl