The Eastern European Performing Arts Platform was founded during a conference held in Kraków on the 5th and 6th of October, 2011, as part of the Cultural Programme of the Polish EU Council Presidency. The initiative, authored by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute is coordinated together with the partnering city of Lublin, which hosts the EEPAP headquarters.
The project's curator and coordinator, Marta Keil explains:
The basic aim of the Platform is the support of development of theatre and dance in countries from the Central and Eastern European region, with special emphasis placed on the Eastern Partership countries. The programme of our activities is the result of many years of travelling and numerous meetings and discussions that we have conducted. We have created it in cooperation with independent theatre and dance artits, theoreticians and critics from the EEPAP countries.
The EEPAP pursues all of the basic paradigms of the Eastern Partnership mission through its various initiatives in the field of performing arts. The network has launched its website which enables theatre groups and individual artists to present their work, exchange information and search for various possibilities of cooperation. As part of research, the Platform has also compiled a special report with substantial information about the means of financing performing arts in over a dozen countries of the Central and Eastern European region.
The residencies form yet another initiative of the network. The open call for aplications has closed on the 31st of July, 2012, with selected artists, managers and curators to be announced in early August. The partnering organisations are five international theatre festivals: The BITEF in Belgrade, the MESS in Sarajevo, the Slovakian DIVADELNÁ Nitra festival and two Polish festivals: Kraków's Reminiscencje Teatralne and Konfrontacje Teatralne in Lublin. Also joining in the residency programme are two theatres from Slovenia, Mladinsko and Glej.
Each residency begins a week prior to the launch a festival, and the creative stay enables the resident-participant to take part in either the final preparations of the event, to work during the festival, or to create on the festival's coproductions. The residency programme is addressed to cultural managers, producers of theatre and dance festivals as well as playwrights from Belarus, Ukraine, Moldavia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbeijan and Poland. Good knowledge of English is required and Russian is an asset. There are no age restrictions for the applicants.
Goran Injac curates the first series of EEPAP residencies. Injac is a university lecturer and researcher (Department of Cultural Studies, Department of Slavonic Studies). He is an author of numerous articles, research papers and reviews published in Polish, Serbian and international journals. As an independent curator, he cooperates with several international performing arts festivals, theatre and art institutes, and different independent artist/artistic groups.
The residency dates in 2012 are:
• BITEF 1 - 10th-23rd of September, 2012.
• BITEF 2 - 22nd October - 8th of November, 2012.
• MESS 1 - 24th of September - 7th of October, 2012.
• MESS 2 - 2nd-10th of October, 2012.
• NITRA 1/2 - 13th-27th of September, 2012.
• SLOV 1 - 1st-16th of November, 2012.
• KTR 1 - 28th of September - 11th of October, 2012.
• TC 1 - 6th-21st of October, 2012.
For more information on the application requirements and the application form visit the project's official website: www.eepap.org
Editor: SRS
Source: press release