INFANT 2010

In the year dominated by economic issues and social crises with a great impact on artistic production, when a kind of division is becoming increasingly pronounced among festivals into ‘rich and poor’ (the latter threatened by extinction), the appearing gap is diminishing the space for new discoveries and threatening to seriously jeopardise the emergence, visibility and activity of troupes and theatres which present vital productions and researches, rendering the contemporary theatre an active part of the society.

The Infant 2010 programme opens an arena for the contemporary living theatres and troupes superior in research and characterised by original – unique theatrical languages. The selection of plays from Bulgaria, Great Britain, Italy, Israel, Hungary, the USA, Serbia, the Czech Republic, and Spain includes several groups who choose open space for their productions with a clear dramaturgical structure and topics.

In the selection of domestic plays Infant 2010 focuses on dance theatre in a desire to affirm and draw attention to the ongoing production and trends in the contemporary dance in Serbia. This programme recognises the fact that Serbian dance scene has been developing in a constant dialogue with the contemporary trends in theatre in the recent years (where the line between theatre and dance has almost totally disappeared), revealing new authors, choreographers, performers, dramaturges – new research efforts in the fields of contemporary dance and dance theatre.

The dialogue between theatre and dance and the disappearing division between genres and styles is a process in the development of contemporary theatre which became particularly apparent at the turn of the 21st century. The adopted techniques of avant-garde and modernism in the field of acting and dancing skills have gradually become ‘classics’ among expressive means in contemporary theatre, and today we can see productions with an undoubted authorial stamp where the language and text, movement and dance, visual installations, new technologies, film, pop culture, dance-musical genres and dramatic literature are freely merged into a montage which expresses a unique poetics of an author; into a kaleidoscope whose logic is not an imposition of theatrical tradition, genre or style but an expression of the internal urge and motivation of an artist who engages into a dialogue with his times. Where we expect a story, we find a movement and a look; where we expect dance, we find an uninterrupted flow of text; where myth is, we find a video projection; where drama is, we find Parkour; where relationship is, we find silence; where silence is, we find music; where maturity is, we find childhood; where poetry is, we find gesture. 

The contemporary theatre as affirmed by Infant 2010 is a free movement through the spheres of a new artistic expression and depths of artistic curiosity gaining a new expression in unrestrained and provocative solutions.

Jadranka Anđelić, Selector
June 2010