With: Drew Klein, Olga Drygas, Piny 

Moderated by: Cristina Planas Leitão 

Artistic provocation: Idylla Silmarovi

Second online talk of the cycle of encounters promoted by DDD and Panorama festivals regarding the future of festivals. After two digital talks (on April 4th and 13th), this reflection will continue in person, on April 28th and 29th, in Porto, during the Festival DDD 2022.

At the end of the "provocation" with which she opened this talk, the performer Idylla Silmarovi set a challenge: place a sheet of paper with the world map printed on it in the mouth, chew it and then look at the image again. "Perhaps with the borders blurred, wet with our saliva, we can represent the sustainability theme in a much more incisive and accurate way", she pointed out.

The Brazilian performer and researcher began by reflecting on the colonial heritage - "The arts produced a border", she said - to place the border question at the centre of the discussion of this second encounter promoted by DDD and Panorama festivals.

The path to think about sustainable festivals involves "breaking down borders", not only those that "separate the self from the other", but also those that prevent "the connection of peoples with the earth", proposes Silmarovi.

We heard more than once during this meeting that "borders have blurred". First of all, the world's geographical borders themselves. In this regard, the co-director of DDD, Cristina Planas Leitão, pointed out that in this year's edition of the festival she cannot "truly say what is local and what is international", while Olga Drygas noted that one of the main concerns of Nowy Teatr, which she directs in Warsaw, Poland, is to "break the rules" about what it is to be Western or Eastern European, in a country still strongly marked by these categories.

The performer Piny has emphasised other borders: those that are established within the same society, within the same city. And which are, above all, the result of economic and social inequalities.

"Talking about local and international" is a talk, right from the start, reserved "for an elite", she said, noting how in cities there are people, especially in their peripheries, "who don't leave their place", in the same way that "there are many artists who don't travel" - "I am super local because I don't have the money to travel or to go to the city centre regularly", she summarised.

Piny will help bring voguing and also urban and oriental dances to the DDD 2022 programme. From this experience, one also reflected on what it means to blur the borders between the different dances that can fit in a contemporary dance festival.

It is another border that is broken, as it can be, in a time more or less close to ours, the border of technology, reminded Nayse López and Marlon Barrios Solano, who also took part in the talk, mentioning technologies such as Blockchain or the emerging of Metaverse, with which the arts will end up having to, if not migrate, at least dialogue.

Returning to the initial "provocation" - and because this cycle of conversations has sustainability as its background - Idylla Silmarovi stressed an idea that had already been discussed in the first talk: talking about sustainability implies "bringing up issues that go beyond the consumption of fossil fuels or plastic".

Therefore, the talk also debated the sustainability of the current production methods in the arts, with the financing that is almost always associated with the new production and a system of great festivals that "induces a market of premieres", as Cristina Planas Leitão stated.

Planas Leitão also recalled an idea brought by the visual artist Roland Gunst in the previous session of this cycle when she recalled the "peace of mind" that he felt in that initial moment of the pandemic, an idea illustrated with special acuteness by the expression "celibacy of thoughts", used by Olga Drygas.

Drew Klein, who directs the This Time Tomorrow festival in Cincinnati, USA, defended an idea that had already become familiar in the first talk of this cycle: the idea that, with the pandemic, many people have reconsidered their way of existing in the world. A fundamental change "seems more possible now than it did four or five years ago", he believes.

This is the promising spirit with which one can face the challenge of sustainability beyond the most simplistic answers that "often promote exclusion" (Cristina Planas Leitão) or are merely greenwashing (Nayse López).

The distance issue - and, in that sense, the need for long journeys that the circulation of artists and their works implies - "will always be present, whether we like it or not", understands Olga Drygas. The challenge that will have to be answered is if we want to "place more ideas in our community", as it is the festivals' role, or "let's put the planet first".

The Polish programmer presented a hypothesis of answers, considering that the emergency that the planet faces implies "changing the system" more than "changing a festival or an institution".

Drew Klein used this idea to remind people that the impact of the artistic world on the number of international air travels "is so small" that the action of festivals and artists and festivals, in practice "doesn't matter".

However, the role of the arts has always been to raise the possibility of "imaginative thinking", creating conditions to "normalise new patterns of behaviour and collaboration between agents" that can "influence the thinking of society" and thus contribute to the necessary change.