Fast Forward Forum

The 2024 Fast Forward Festival Forum (14 - 17 November 2024) is part of the European Theatre Convention (ETC)’s European Theatre: BREAK THE MOULD programme, which is co-funded by the European Union.

The Fast Forward Festival Forum offers ETC member theatres a special chance to meet Europe’s next generation of theatre-makers.

For four days of the festival, the Forum forms a working group made up of students, young artists and experienced theatre professionals, who discuss as equals current and prospective questions about working in theatre in Europe. They watch the festival productions together and meet their teams to find out more about the motivations, backgrounds, working and production methods in various different European countries. At the end, the participants explore what possibilities they see for continuing their “temporary” European theatre laboratory beyond the framework of the festival.

► The participants for this year’s Forum brought together from a total of 11 ETC Member Theatres.

What’s the goal?

Being part of a diverse and productive network is an important resource in the cultural sector: as a professional and as a social anchor. How can we learn to initiate and maintain sustainable partnerships? Facilitating quality in artistic creation, forging new alliances, a heightened awareness for the situation we’re living in and acknowledging the issues that are important to the next generation are all aspects of the cornerstones of fostering emerging artists today. What does it take to really promote young talent, not just paying lip service to it, but making a sustainable commitment to help the theatre sector to move forward into the future? Learning about each other’s needs and benefitting from each other’s perspectives and capabilities in view of the pending changes all around us is a vital dialogue. We need structures and spaces for this to happen – the Fast ­Forward Festival Forum can be one of those spaces. The potential of theatre to reach out to communities and to enable social accessibility and inclusion across cultural barriers and differences lies in its artistic ingenuity; by sharing experiences, creating visibility, facing catastrophes and inspiring utopias that we probably no longer dare to dream of in our everyday lives.

Theatre is a social art form. Wherever it takes place, it creates a community or a “temporary” society. It’s a privilege and our mission to help that make sparks.

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