This and next week, the international contemporary theatre festival Homo Novus is taking place in Riga, Ķemeri, Valmiera, and Daugavpils, offering a diverse and inclusive programme. Celebrating its 30th anniversary, the festival is on the move this year — between performance halls, cultural venues, outdoor spaces, railway stations, and cities. In the Nice Touch section, Santa Remere, the programme curator of Homo Novus, recommends something useful for travelling — both for the festival and into the festival programme.
«In recent years, we have reduced the number and size of our catalogues in order to reduce waste, but this year, for our anniversary, we decided to go all out and publish the Homo Novus newspaper. Preparing it is a good way to gradually get to know the artists and learn something beyond the standard annotations. We still believe that the festival is based on encounters, interest in each other, and dialogue. The interviews you can read in the newspaper help to bring together the different contexts and people who work together at this festival.
We also published the newspaper for purely practical reasons — none of our team has anything to clean the windows and mirrors with anymore, and there are no more newspapers to stuff into wet shoes. In Japan, where people have to be prepared for earthquakes, everyone has their own «earthquake bag» that must always contain essential items — water, medicine, food, and a newspaper. It can be spread out to sit on, used as a blanket, made into a hat to protect against the sun, used as a blanket, and finally — you can also read it.
The Homo Novus newspaper not only introduces the festival programme but also allows you to address the «random passerby» — the person Homo Novus has always wanted to meet. And, of course, the newspaper can be useful for viewers to put on the seats of trains travelling to Valmiera, Daugavpils, and Ķemeri for the festival.»
Santa Remere is the artistic director of the New Theatre Institute of Latvia (NTIL) and the curator of the International Contemporary Theatre Festival Homo Novus. With a background in visual communications, she has worked extensively as a publicist and art and literary critic. She has also been the editor of the online magazine Satori. Santa has been working on individual NTIL projects since 2015, mainly creating artistic participation projects for young people and other culturally under-represented groups. In her role at NTIL, Santa focuses on innovative contemporary performing arts, promoting the visibility, representation, and inclusion of marginalised social groups, as well as improving and strengthening cultural accessibility for diverse audiences.
This year, the Homo Novus festival celebrates its 30th anniversary by travelling to various places and cities. Visitors are invited to join scientists on an excursion to the bogs and travel together to Daugavpils, where the festival began in 1995 and where it is still welcome, as well as to Valmiera, where it has not yet been, but where the art space Kurtuve will temporarily become the new home of contemporary dance. For more information about the programme, visit the Homo Novus website.
Viedokļi