CREATING NEW PROTOTYPES OF CULTURE PROGRAMMING TO REDISCOVER UNIQUE PUBLIC SPACES AND CREATE NEW FORMS OF VIBRANT SHORT PERFORMANCE BITES
2023 – 2024
Three partners working with challenging urban localities in Prague, Berlin and Skopje as well as the fourth partner located in Ukraine will design innovative audience development activities, attracting to urban stage performances and interventions.
The Active City(ZENS) project gathers four partnered organisations to convey various performative interventions to the public space. The aim is to develop prototypes of situations in varied time spans and initiate thoughts and conversations about the position of culture in everyday life, in unexpected locations with a potential to approach new audiences. The partners created a system of 10 days, 10 minutes, 10 seconds. The individual interventions are better explained under each institution.
The PQ team, Czech Republic, is using the 10-day model within the duration of the 15th edition of the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, while interconnecting interventions in the public space by creative teams from 30 universities, providing exposure for both the young designers and the festival, with each intervention including a QR link leading to the PQ website and introducing each project.
The 10-minute format was used by the Association For Art And Science, Faculty Of Things That Can’t Be Learned, North Macedonia. Their performative situations are focused on the preservation of brutalist architectural gem Domce, by placing “simple periodically changing banners and signs on its facade, attracting the attention of the surrounding community including everyday passersby, using time to develop expectations and produce an hour-long live event putting both community and the building into central focus.”
The Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in Berlin, Germany, uses the swift 10-second format of performance bites: Focusing the attention on the roof of a building to create extra short performance installations accessible to a large number of daily train commuters as well as pedestrians, park visitors or members of the community surrounding the building. Reaching out to new audiences, the performances aim to “create a simple cultural intervention into everyday commute.”
The fourth partner, the Ukrainian platform Izolyatsia, will work alongside other partners in their locations to learn from environments outside of the mainstream and exchange knowledge and skills that could eventually lead to the development of a long-term plan for cultural programming, suitable for future restart and cultural restoration of locations seized or affected by the Russian aggression.
/// PROJECT PATNERS
ARTS AND THEATRE INSTITUTE / PRAGUE QUADRENNIAL, Czech Republic
ASSOCIATION FOR ART AND SCIENCE FACULTY OF THINGS THAT CAN’T BE LEARNED, North Macedonia
THE INTERNATIONAL CHARITABLE FOUNDATION “IZOLYATSIA. PLATFORM FOR CULTURAL INITIATIVES“, Ukraine
The project is supported by the Creative Europe Programme.
Photo credit: Leni Geleva, project City as a Stage II – the Story of the Flaneuse, performative installation in three acts, collaborative project by Filip Jovanovski