The 5th Edition of the Interferences International Theatre Festival will commence on Thursday, November 24. 20 guest performances from 14 countries are featured in this year’s program, including two by the Hungarian Theater of Cluj.
The press conference preceding the Festival began - as it did in previous years - with a scene conceived by actor Enikő Györgyjakab and performed by the theater students of Babeș-Bolyai University, on the theme of The Stranger’s Odyssey, the topic of this year’s edition.
Gábor Tompa, the artistic director of the festival, as well as the person who selected the plays that are included within the event, has stated that the notion of strangeness bears contemporary relevance not merely due to the largest migratory phenomenon of the last fifty years that is currently taking place, for this is a theme that has preoccupied mankind for centuries.
What does the word “stranger” mean? What is an “I” and what is an “Other”? How does one become a stranger? Is there such a thing as one’s own strangeness? Or the stranger that appears within us? These and similar questions will be raised by the performances of this year’s festival.
At the 2016 edition of the Festival, the Cluj audience will have the opportunity to attend performances of such outstanding creators as: Tomaž Pandur (with Faust, the homage performance that will open the festival), Armin Petras, Andriy Zholdak, Declan Donnellan, Michal Dočekal, Gábor Tompa, Helmut Stürmer, Jaram Lee, Andrei Șerban, Yuri Kordonsky, Viktor Bodó, Szabolcs Hajdu, Margarita Mladenova and Ivan Dobchev, as well as Jarosław Fret. The festival will welcome for the first time to Cluj ensembles from Russia, Ireland, Macedonia, Luxembourg and Slovenia, while returning ensembles and artists will also be delighting theatre audiences.
Cluj city council member, Botond Csoma, emphasized the role of culture whithin the bridge-building process taking place between the communities living in the city, a process to which the Interferences Festival is a crucial contributor.
The festival’s main institutional partners are: the Ministry of Culture, Romania; the Mayor's Office and City Council of Cluj; main sponsor: MOL Romania. The event is supported by the European Theatre Union, the Romanian Cultural Institute, UNITER, the Department for Interethnic Relations, the Bethlen Gábor Fund, and the Communitas Foundation. Partners: Casa Tiff, the National Theater of Cluj, Casa Tranzit, The Transylvanian Museum of Ethnography, REACTOR de creaţia și experiment, Remarul - 16 febriarie Factory, Cluj County Council, Goethe Zentrum | Deutsches Kulturzentrum Klausenburg, British Council, IATC - AICT International Association of Theatre Critics, Toyota, FestivApp, biletmaster.ro.
The Interferences Grand 2016 discount ticket packages can be purchased for 200 lei, which will include access to the ten Main Stage performances of the festival; tickets can be purchased in advance online at www.biletmaster.ro or at the theater’s ticket office. The full program is available on the festival’s website, and, for the first time in its history, it can be accessed also via the FestivApp smartphone application.
