XI Józef Szajna International Festival ZDARZENIA will take place from 3rd to 5th  September 2010.

This year’s 11th edition of ZDARZENIA consists of forty-five diverse artistic events –  theatrical shows, performances, installations, workshop etudes, film projections, panel discussions, night talks and also an exhibition devoted to Josef Szajna’s work. Spanning three days, all of the events will take place at the Culture and Art Centre of Tczew, in the modern building of the Regional Showground Centre of the Lower Vistula River Valley as well as in small rooms and industrial areas (railway and fire brigade’s grounds) or town’s atmospheric sites – the marina by the Vistula River, city’s main square and its alleys.

Ten theatrical performances and nine plastic installations in the urban space will take part in the contest. All of them are original projects of young, coming out artists from Wrocław, Białystok, Gdańsk, Warsaw, Poznań, Łódź as well as from Brno, Banská Bystrica, Prague and Rome. Apart from that, ZDARZENIA will host seven foreign professional theatrical groups from Hungary, Spain, Iran, Italy, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Switzerland, who will put on eight performances. The spanish one will make you laugh till you cry with the story of Cuttlas, a popular spanish cowboy, based on a comic book by Calpurino, a spanish artist, and kept to a similar convention. The Symptoms, a Hungarian dance theatre founded by Réka Szabó, will present Nylon Revue, an eccentric fashion show humorously and ironically portraying today’s consumer society, as well as another performance, entitled From Scratch. Mehdi Farajpour from Iran is going to give his own version of Krapp’s Last Tape by Beckett, the Italians will present their Bad People in Guantanamo, the Czechs Tales for Naughty Children, whereas the Slovaks from Teatr Potôň will perform Terra Granus and the Swiss A Man and His Lookalike.

There will also be two special shows for the youngest of our audience – A Simple Story by The Magical Lighthouse Theatre and Czech Tales for Naughty Children.

Among the accompanying events there will be a cyclic projection of an hour-long film The Golden Age of Czech Puppet Animation by Miroslav Kačor and Břetislav Pojar. What is more, an exhibition entitled Traces of Josef Szajna’s Traces will be launched and it will cover the artist’s works illustrating his distinctive style and his vision of the world in which a human’s fate is marked with totalitarianism and annihilation.

The festival will be accompanied by the interdisciplinary Euro-Inter-Trans workshops devoted to therapeutic and social roles of theatre. The workshops aim to stimulate and inspire creative actions, develop expression and creativity as well as promote youth exchange as an efficient form of education.

A panel discussion with the participation of representatives of academies (Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica, Theatre Academy in Warsaw) as well as artistic institutions and festival organizers from the Visegrád Four countries will cover the theatre’s condition and development directions. This will enable the participants to exchange their experiences, present their activities and also become involved in new artistic initiatives.

The festival’s artistic impressions will be also accompanied by night talks, during which both beginning and accomplished artists from several countries will have the possibility to meet and share their thoughts and observations.