Rethinking Europe’s independent festival landscape
A year into the Covid-19 pandemic, Imagining Futures brought together twelve innovative performing arts festivals for a pan-European experiment: a future-focused and predominantly female peer network that offered its participating festival directors and artists a deep listening space and a moment to be together, think together, and dream different futures.
Care, well-being and sustainability became prominent topics across the series of digital and in-person residencies. Together the participants considered how to share power, how to leave behind the inherited structures and ideologies that so many cultural institutions adhere to, above all how to rip up the rule book and work instead with radical new ideas and provocations that might transform ‘what is’ into ‘what if’.
In this panel discussion we’ll hear from some of the
Imagining Futures festival directors and artists as they share insight into the conversations that took place. You can explore the Imagining Futures themes, ideas and provocations and find out more in the online publication:
Listen to the audio version:
to take part in the panel discussion. The livestream will be available via the
website.
Speakers:
Angela Alves, Berlin
Claire Lefèvre, Vienna
Amy Letman, Transform, Leeds
Anna Mülter, Festival Theaterformen, Braunschweig
Moderator: Bochra Triki, co-founder of the Choufthounna Feminist Art Festival
Format: Panel discussion
Language: English
Speaker biographies
© Angela Alves
Angela Alves
Angela Alves lives as a choreographer in Berlin and identifies as a crip artist. Her artistic practice focuses on political dimensions of the unavailable body and explores its transformative potency in classist and ableist pre-structured spaces. Alves shows her work in cooperation with Sophiensæle Berlin, where she most recently explored accessible working methods as part of the NEW TECHNIQUES fellowship program. She is co-founder of "IHMAR. Institute for Medical & Health Humanities and Artistic Research" and is engaged in various collectives such as AG Work Culture, Backbone Berlin, Saša Astentić & Collaborators for a more sustainable, resilient and accessible future.
© Claudia Lomoschitz
Claire Lefèvre
Claire is a feminist choreographer, insomniac writer, and reality TV enthusiast currently based in Vienna, Austria. In her performances, she likes to think of herself as a hostess, welcoming collaborators and audience members into kitsch landscapes where politics and poetics are gently interwoven. For the past 3 years she has been researching the concept of radical softness as choreographic strategy, embracing hypersensitivity as a method, a topic, and a portal through which to imagine (the) work.
© Transform
Amy Letman
Amy is an independent producer and curator based in Leeds and Creative Director of Transform, an engine room for new theatre and creators of the biennial Transform festivals, citywide takeovers of vivid, international performance. Amy was previously Associate Producer at Leeds Playhouse, one of the largest producing theatres in the North of England, where she established the artist development programme, produced special projects and shows, and led on Transform as a venue based festival. Amy has curated and produced eight festival editions, alongside curating Spirit of Change for the Barbican, London and a guest programme for Battersea Arts Centre.
© Katrin Ribbe
Anna Mülter
Anna Mülter is a theatre curator and the artistic director of the international Festival Theaterformen in Hanover and Braunschweig since summer 2020. From 2014 to 2020 she curated the Tanztage Berlin and worked on the regular dance program and the thematical festivals at Sophiensæle. From 2016 to 2019 Anna Mülter was also dramaturge at tanzhaus nrw. Prior to this, she was a member of the artistic direction of international performing arts festival Theater der Welt in Mannheim and worked at Hebbel am Ufer Berlin from 2003 to 2012.
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