Neu/Now Festival 2010: nomination is open now!

It’s been a while since we sent out the call for nominations for this year’s Neu/Now Festival. Now, at last, the module through which you can upload nominations is online and active (but first read the info page please).

Neu/Now Festival 2010

The 2010 NEU/NOW Festival will take place in Nantes, France, at the end of October. We want the best and most exciting graduating young artists from across Europe to be there. Therefore, we are pleased to invite ELIA members and members of partner networks to nominate their graduating talent. And since the live festival coincides with the ELIA Biennial Conference, drawing 400-500 participants, we also invite all Biennial participants to come and see !

The deadline is 1 June. You can also download the full call here.

See www.neunow.eu for projects at last year’s live and virtual festival, and click on the category NEU/NOW to read the live blogging from last year’s festival.

The Smashing of the Horse’s Head

Aftermaths from the Neu/Now Festival

At the last day of the Neu/Now Festival, when most people were gone and the official closing had already been, an ‘after-closing’ ceremony was organized at which the Karen Skog orchestra played and the horse mask of Livestock theatre company was smashed with a hammer. The horse’s head had been standing by the entrance as a mascotte, and was filled with gifts and suggestions for next year’s festival.

We’re closing, but the festival goes on

Live blogging from the Neu/Now festival (9)

And in the end it all drowns in blood. Robbe Vervaeke’s Erszebet is a phantasmagoric wet dream / nightmare in oil paint. It’s the only oil paint you will see in this festival really, and it’s oil paint that moves: Robbe painted out every still of his 5-minute film, from the red roof of Erszebet’s house to her bath duck floating in a tub full of blood. Frail in a white dress, she stands by the window with a glass of wine. The victim arrives, ties his dog to a tree, and comes in. He will not get out.

How to see everything

Live blogging from the Neu/Now Festival (8)

Everyone knows it’s impossible to see everything. Some things feature only once. Some always feature at the same time at different places. And if you go to see everything, you’ll be so over-exposed you won’t have anything sensible to say at the end of the day. Yes, we know all that. And still we tried.

Teaching for Now

Live blogging from the Neu/Now Festival (7)

The white horse head at the entrance where you can put your ideas is beginning to fill. While we are brewing ideas for next year’s festival already, there is another question to address: What should you do to get picked? Of course, the jury is not going to give you a recipe for how to make your degree work in a way that will get you into next year’s Neu/Now, but for them as teachers, the issue is rather what to ask from your students. A good deal of their adult life as artists will go into getting selected, attracting attention, making a difference. And for many of them, the degree work will be what launches them.

Do it yourself

Live blogging from the Neu/Now Festival (6)

Floor Plan

Last night Open Batch Theatre performed Floor Plan. They could only do one show because today they flew back for their graduation; Millie, who is doing the blog on neunow.eu, was there in time to have a short interview with them.

Live blogging from the Neu/Now Festival (5)

The Ten Commandments of the Arts Printing House

Linked to the Titanic building is the Arts Printing House, where we are having all dance & theatre performances. As a former newspaper printing house, it has a turbulent history as one of the places that was occupied during the fall of the communist regime and the short-lived Soviet army countercoup. After that, it lay vacant for a few years and then became a student/underground theatre venue – and it still has something of that athmosphere, particularly when you look at the pictures on the wall in the courtyard. With some underground nostalgia you could even say that the EU spoiled it with their regional support funds that pimped the building – though pimped with taste.

Live blogging from the Neu/Now festival (4)

Something about the opening, after all

So Europe’s got a new a president, and the Lithuanian president couldn’t be at the opening because she had to attend a certain long dinner in Stockholm – a dinner that started days before. Here, the festival goes on as before; I haven’t heard any cars hooting as when Obama won.

There hasn’t been anything so far on this blog about the opening. And rightly so, because openings are speeches and wine.

Live blogging from the Neu/Now festival (3)

Dance in the pocket hall

What a day. Where to begin? Let’s start at the end. We were packed together in the smaller hall of the Arts Printing house, appropriately called the ‘pocket hall’. People were sitting on the floor to see the dance. Well that’s nothing odd in informal settings, and I like the touch of underground or living-room performance it gives to our EU-logo-laden festival. (Anthony Dean tells me they also do it in the State Opera here in Vilnius, it’s part of the local folklore that people will use every aisle or step to sit on and “fully booked” is a malleable expression.) If the festival wasn’t free we’d be selling out.