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Malta Festival Poznań, Poland
September 2014
I have started my Arts Management experience in Poznań, a city in Poland, in September 2014 for 3 months. Upon arrival, I tried to adapt quickly to the lifestyle in Poznan since English, both written and spoken, is not common in this place. During my second visit to the supermarket, I managed to distinguish sugar (Cukier in Polish) and salt (Sól in Polish). Apart from daily life, English is also rarely found in art programme leaflets as well as the associated websites. In this country with so many unknowns, I am still very curious of the kind of cultural activities the Polish have been doing all along. What are the art activities in Polish community like?
Pic.1: Silent Disco for Children in Malta Festival Poznań 2014
To know more about the Malta Festival Poznań, I had to run through its past information and carry out promotional research for the next year’s festival. As most of the performances were shown around the artificial lake called Malta in Poznań, the festival took the same name. The scale of the festival expanded greatly from only 6 shows in 6 days in 1991 to over 150 performances and events in 3 weeks in June 2014. Programmes in theatre, music, dance, film and visual arts are included and they are chosen according to the cultural Idiom of each year. And there is another session called Generator Malta which brought high quality art to social activities for the need of different age groups. Among all the programmes, the idea of Silent Disco impressed me the most. People put on headphones to listen to music and dance at night in silence without disturbing others. Moreover, Silent Disco also allowed participation of the children this year.。
In the festival, apart from traditional concert hall and other indoor venues, a specially designed outdoor venue was purposely built for the programmes. This outdoor venue provided a free and comfortable area for local people and tourists to come for leisure, fun and enjoy the performance carrying out there.
Pic.2: Design of the 2014 Malta Festival Poznań outdoor area Pic.3: Real built in following to the design
Pic.4-7: Showing how the outdoor open area works for the public during the festival
In Poland, the atmosphere of arts existed in every corner of the community and I discovered Wielkopolska: Revolutions, a very meaningful art development programme for the community. It aims at provoking and supporting the local people of different age groups to integrate into the community through creative arts. The idea also acted as a breakthrough to the stereotyped mode of art production and wiped out the boundaries between teachers and students, youth and senior, city and village as well as professional or amateur. Along the line, the city artists and inhabitants from Wielkopolska villages worked together creatively to kick away the stereotyped performance and they believed that art existed everywhere, not just the cities. Their success had jumped over the limitations and impossibilities in the past.
In Malta Festival Poznan, a trilogy community show from a town called Zakrzewo had been shown. I was very lucky to see the premiere of the third part of this trilogy The Swan Lake during our research visit for 2015 Festival. Here is the theme of the third part:
Projekt Jezioro labedzie (Project of Swan Lake) ~
This is a story about dream. When we are old, what do we left behind? What are the remaining memories?
I was deeply impressed by the positive energy generated from this new version of Swan Lake which was performed by a group of seniors. In the show, they displayed the special choreography arranged by the artists with passion and confidence and brought happiness and surprise to the audience from city with a group of youth as well. What is community art? The word “impossible” seemed disappeared and everyone was performing in harmony.
Pic.8-9: Projekt Jezioro labedzie (Project of Swan Lake)