Co-production
Over its past years, the TWB Festival has become a co-producer of numerous performances, providing financial support to Czechia’s independent theatres. Since the COVID pandemic, the independent theatre sector has been facing funding difficulties. It is therefore of growing importance to support it, whether by producing new performances or by programming the already existing ones at our festival. This year’s programme abounds with performances co-produced by the festival; the audience will be offered five such co-productions (three from Prague and two from Brno).
The first performance of the main 2025 programme is The Last One Goes Out by a team of young authors associated within a two-year workshop held under the patronage of the Fabulamundi – Playwriting Europe network. Both the script and staging were created with the aim to let the young generation express their views on issues that matter to them: at the heart of the play are coming to terms with the looming end of the world and examining life strategies to face the unavoidable doom. The immersive production about visions of the future, composed of shards rather than fragments, will lead you through the entire premises of the former jailhouse Káznice.
The Brno-based theatre Aldente is an important community and art institution, even though its scope of activities is non-midstream. Aldente’s productions involve actors and actresses with Down syndrome. The company’s manager Jitka Vrbková, together with renowned dancer and choreographer Martina Hajdyla Lacova, has created a performance about examining one’s identity, or rather one’s identities which depend on whether I’m observing or being observed, whether I make part of a group or feel excluded from it. (ID)ENTITY, which can be seen at the Goose on a String Theatre on May 27th, is what we call a ‘work-in-progress’ staging – a look into the creative process of a specific theatre.
Leading personality of the Prague theatre Ufftenživot Jiří Šimek has created an authorial performance about parenthood which is inspired by his personal experience and that he collected. He approaches common parenting problems from the less common perspective of a tending father. Through a play intended for both children and their parents he deals with the issue of parental burnout, the moment when exhausted parents become alienated from their child as well as from themselves, and then they try to find their way back, together with their offspring. Daddy Can’t Go On! looks into the important yet often neglected issue in a playful manner on the edge between a fairy tale, an adventure story and – every now and then – a family horror.
The production titled Mountains, Valleys, Episodes by the independent theatre D’epog explores the limits of change and inviolableness. Can something be promised for eternity? How big is the space between stubbornness and cowardice? Designed for the Brno market hall, the show works with the most natural and inviolable of all changes – it can be performed only at sunrise or sunset.
In his production A World Round the Corner stage director Jiří Adámek Austerlitz examines the relationship of humans with the environment they inhabit, scrutinizes the interdependencies, and explores the limits between responsibility and vulnerability. Have humans eventually found themselves dominated by things? Studio Hrdinů is a leading independent theatre and Adámek Austerlitz an eminent independent stage director.