Future proof: Dresden's Fast Forward Festival
On an adventurous festival of new work by young European directors.
Hello from Berlin, where I have just been chilling (as much as one can in Berlin) after a packed weekend at Dresden’s Fast Forward festival for young directors. It’s a festival I really rate and this year I had the privilege of being on the international jury, a joyous and exhilarating experience only coloured by the fact the future of the festival is uncertain.
This newsletter is a pleasure to write, but it takes a good deal of time. Paid subscribers help to support my writing while helping keep this Substack largely paywall-free and receiving occasional paid subscriber bonus posts, like this one on in which I have a conversation with myself about the new West End production of Born With Teeth. If you’d like to join their number you can do so for £5 a month or £50 a year. Or just share this newsletter with someone you think might find it interesting. That helps too.
Eight productions from six different countries over the course of four days. Few festivals are as exhilarating as the Fast Forward festival in Dresden which provides audience to see new work by some of the most exciting young directors in Europe. I first went in 2023 and was completely smitten - I wrote about it here – so I was delighted to be invited back as a member of the international jury, to watch a programme of work from Germany, Slovenia, France, Finland, Italy and the Netherlands.
Over recent years the festival has been curated by Charlotte Orti, who has a boundless curiosity about young artists and a hunger for discovery, scouring Europe for new directors and often attending their graduate shows. The festival is not programmed along thematic lines, instead, it presents audiences with as wide a range of forms as possible, which this year included a glitzy game show which pitted atrocities against each other, an intimate installation piece and an anarchic dance piece.
The latter was Unruhe – a German word that doesn’t translate easily to English but means something like unrest or agitation – by the French director Nolwenn Peterschmitt, a member of the Crisis Group collective. The piece takes its inspiration from St. Vitus’ Dance, a dancing mania that gripped people in medieval Europe. The performance takes place in the Hellerau European Centre for the Arts, a barn-like space out in the Dresden suburbs.
We begin the show outdoors where we follow a pair of laughing girls as they sprint across the car park towards the rear of the building. They lead us, white rabbit-like, into the enormous main hall where folk music is playing. A group dance begins. People join hands and start to charge around the room. It’s hard to figure out who among the audience are part of the company, and whether the extended hand inviting you to dance belongs to one of the performers or another audience member. People shed their jackets and ditch their handbags so they can move more freely. Others watch from the sidelines. There is no obligation to move if you don’t want to, but some people really hurl themselves around the room (one woman even takes a tumble). This is the kind of dancing people have been doing for centuries. There’s much twirling of partners and linking of hands as the folk rhythm gives way to something more percussive. Eventually, a circle forms and people throw down in the centre as everyone claps along.
There’s a giddy energy to all of this. It’s fun if not exactly earth-shattering stuff, a group of people getting sweaty together. Then one of the dancers seems to be gripped by a strange spirit. Her moves become more jagged and frantic until she collapses in a panting heap. Her fellow company members gather around her in concern before tenderly undressing her and holding her naked body aloft. She is wrapped in fabric and draped in fur. A burning incense stick is placed in her hand. A circle of dirt is marked out on the floor, and the company embarks on a kind of twitchy, witchy bacchanal. Clothes are discarded and trousers peeled off. Faces are smeared with paint. A dude in a velour leotard vigorously waggles his hirsute butt, while another performer dons a glittery red balaclava. The dancers fug and pump and thrust. They crawl around on all fours, arse to face, human-centipede style. It’s an abandoned and exhilarating spectacle, which most people watch from a sitting position (though apparently this is unusual and didn’t happen on the second performance).
Peterschmitt is clearly interested in folklore and ritual. The piece made me think of Marina Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic and how clean that was in comparison. Here you can smell the performers’ sweat and feel the vibration of their feet on the floor. In terms of experience, this is the piece I probably enjoyed the most, though some I spoke to felt disconnected from it and I suspect your level of enjoyment depends on how invited it makes you feel. But I had an absolute blast,
The festival was full of striking formal contrasts. Živa Bizovičar’s Boško and Admira for Slovenia’s Mladinsko Theatre used documentary theatre techniques to explore one of the most famous images of the Bosnian war. On May 19, 1993, Boško Brkić, a Bosnian Serb, and his Bosniak girlfriend, Admira Ismić, were shot dead on a bridge in Sarajevo. The photo of them lying on the ground with their arms around each other was seen around the world. An article about the couple, written by war correspondent Kurt Schork, was headlined the ‘Romeo and Juliet of Sarajevo,’ which is how they have come to be remembered. They have been the subject of numerous songs and documentaries, their story – or a version of it – told and retold.
Živa Bizovičar, the most experienced director at the festival with four previous productions under her belt, is clearly interested in this, what it means to become part of a nation’s mythology. Her previous show, Assault, was about the Partisan poet Karel Destovnik, who wrote under the pen name Kajuh, and was killed during the Second World War. He is regarded as a national hero. Bizovičar questioned what that meant, while exploring who he was in life.
Here she explores not just who Boško and Admira were, showing us other photos of them young and in love, but how that photograph has led to their story has been endlessly picked over, revisited and reshaped. The stage is arranged like a photographer’s studio with white backcloths and bright lights. The cast, wearing bulky 1990s leather jackets, take turns re-enacting that image, laying on the floor, arms around one another. In one moving and tender moment they make out they are just waking from sleep.
The cast switch to playing a group of American podcasters struggling with the complicated Balkan names, their voices cracking with emotions as they tell this sad, sad story about these tragic young lovers in a long-ago war. Later they use investigative techniques to pinpoint exactly where they fell, how close they were to safety. (They were trying to flee to the Serbian side and it remains unclear who shot them). What is known is that Boško died first and Admira crawled over to him, before dying at his side. They re-enact this too, an agonisingly slow crawl across the floor.
The show was originally performed in the New Post Office space in Mladinsko which has a door that can be opened onto the car park outside. Here they play in the rehearsal space of Staatschauspiel Dresden, which also has a door which is opened allowing a camera to be taken outside and the photo to be recreated outside. Through this open door, they also show us a whole life playing out in mime, a young couple marrying, having kids, growing old together, the life denied to them. (There are few people who make it through this scene dry eyed).
Bizovičar is clearly interested in doing more than just unpacking their story in isolation. The production makes it clear that they are one of an endless line of couples slain in conflict, stretching all the way to the current war in Gaza. The second half of the show speaks about war photography more generally, including the famous Napalm Girl image, photos that have become iconic, part of our collective understanding of what war looks like.
The impulse to zoom out from Boško and Admira’s story is an understandable one, but, in doing so, the production’s power is diluted. It’s less clear what it wants to say about the ethics of war photography, and it muddies the waters by showing photos of American soldiers giving the thumbs up in front of Iraqi prisoners – stretching the definition of what war photography is, while never exploring what it is evolving into now we all have cameras in our pockets.
It remains a boldly directed piece. A placard with the words ‘Never Again’ is fed into a shredder. A van reverses into the performance space and a cargo of earth is unloaded onto the floor as an unsettling, slowed-down version of We Are the World fills the room. But for all its theatrical verve, and the excellence of the cast (the Mladinsko ensemble really is top-notch), this second half feels less focused. In fact it sometimes feels like a justification for returning to the story of Boško and Admira in the first place. However, you could sense in it a determination to say something more broadly about war and this show, alone among the programme, connected itself explicitly with the ongoing suffering of Palestinians today.
Fittingly, given its focus on the young and new, Fast Forward also has a youth jury who also get to present an award. They opted for the gently compelling Last Portrait by Dutch duo Ashley Ho and Domenik Naue, describing it – accurately – as the most tender show of the festival. This deeply intimate piece was as much an installation as it was a performance. The set consists of a collection of familial artefacts - pill bottles, letters, photos – a personal museum.
Ho’s father has Parkinson’s, while Naue’s elderly grandparents can no longer manage to tend their beloved garden. Gestures of care are central to the piece. A bed of earth fills the centre of the stage. At one point Ho lies down in the earth and Naue waters her like a plant (which makes her giggle in a very endearing way). Later Ho replicates the therapeutic exercises she does with her father on Naue. The pair have an easy familiarity with each other’s bodies. It’s a piece about ageing, illness and incremental loss that hums with life and love. (More than once, I was reminded of the work of UK company Emergency Chorus).
They describe the piece as an ongoing dialogue, a work that will evolve. In other hands this could have felt impenetrable and closed off, like two people speaking their own private language, but they managed to enfold us into their world, pairing moments of delicacy with more playful sequences including a joyous bop to Lady Gaga’s Shallow.
In the end, the jury awarded its prize to Pauli Patinen’s Steal This Performance. Like a number of pieces on the programme, this was made by artists still completing their education. Patinen created the show along with a team of fellow master’s students at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts, Helsinki. It was a performance of chutzpah and wit, the kind of work you could perhaps only make while still a student. Patinen’s piece basically states that all art is theft and originality is impossible. The piece stitches together images and scenes from other artists’ work, kicking off with Miet Warlop’s All of Us Springville, but also including imagery from Florentina Holzinger and Susanne Kennedy among with many others. As the piece repeatedly states, everything we see is stolen from somewhere.
The production is essentially one big joke but, as with all jokes, it’s the delivery that counts and Patinen more than pulls this off, weaving these scenes and images into a coherent whole, a performative essay on performance that interrogates the line between homage and theft.
It’s also a great opportunity for a creative team to show off all they can do. The set consists of an illuminated glass box within a frame onto which digital images are projected. This is already pretty fucking cool – seriously, this show looks better than a lot of professional work I see in the UK - but half-way through the piece, that set folds in on itself opening up the stage further. All of this would feel like a maddeningly inward act of theatrical masturbation were it not for the charisma of performer Juho Keränen who knits all this together and provides the human thread throughout this production, railing against the fact that his identity, his face, has also been stolen.
The piece manages to evoke fears about the rise of AI content-scraping, and the repackaging and repurposing of other people’s creative work, along with a reflection on the comfort and reassurance of the familiar. I can’t be the only one who spent lockdown watching favourite TV shows rather than seeking out something bracingly new. Sometimes we crave the known. The knowledge that even these ideas are probably nicked from somewhere else adds another layer of playfulness to the piece.
At one point, Keränen, wearing an eerie face-mask sings, a distorted version of Radiohead’s Creep, a song which famously was involved in not one but two plagiarism disputes. Firstly, Creep was accused of having similarities with The Hollies’ The Air That I Breathe, accusations the band later levied at Lana Del Rey’s song Get Free.
The fact that the discussion about Creep and plagiarism formed a key moment in Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ recent horror film Heretic, in the form of a long speech by Hugh Grant in his villain phase, somehow made thus moment even more deliciously meta. The whole piece was deeply cheeky and, as I said, I can’t imagine this piece being made outside an academic context, but the fact that it was and it was done with such commitment and skill, was the thing that swayed us in the end.
The opportunity to see all this work in a single weekend was kind of incredible and the reason why I love this festival. The fact that this is the last year it will take place, at least in its current form, is dismaying. Budget cuts in Saxony and a change of artistic directorship at the theatre mean the festival’s future is in question. That the theatre chose to cut this in an effort to save money is both a shame and short-sighted. The festival is an incubator for new talent. I’ve written before about its ability to kickstart careers. Its loss is a loss for Dresden and young theatre makers.
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
Meteor – Presented by BIT (Bergen Internasjionale Teater), this biennial festival of contemporary theatre features a programme of live performance, both Norwegian and international, including Mumiebrun by Norwegian horror specialists Suzie Wang and Jaha Koo’s Haribo Kimichi. The 10-day festival opened on the 13 November and runs to 22 November.
Desiré Central Station - This small festival in Subotica, a northern Serbian city near the border with Hungary, presents a reliably interesting mix of work from both countries and the wider region. This year’s programme includes Oliver Frljić’s Incubator and Jasna Žmak’s this is my truth, tell me yours. The festival runs until 23 November.
Oedipus - Following a run in London’s West End, Rob Icke’s Olivier Award-winning production opened last week on Broadway. Now Icke brings his reimagining of Sophocles’ tragedy to Athens, directing a Greek cast on the main stage of Onassis Stegi, in a production which premieres on 20 November.
Cold Sweat – The new pieces from Forced Entertainment blends original texts and sound from artistic director Tim Etchells with AI-generated voices, the performers deploying a similar lip-syncing technique to earlier show Signal to Noise. It plays Théâtre de la Commune in Aubervilliers, France on 21 and 22 November.
Thanks for reading!