Press releases

MOGILEV, 20 January (BelTA) – The 10th International Youth Theater Festival "M@rt. contact", which will take place in Mogilev on 21-27 March, will offer a diverse program, Director of the Mogilev Regional Drama Theater Andrei Novikov told a press conference on 20 January.

This year's anniversary festival will become a real holiday for the city. The educational part of the festival will be reduced. There will be neither jury nor traditional master classes. But there will be many performances and a wide geography of participants from 10 countries (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Germany, Israel, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan). These will be mainly the companies which showed most amazing performances at previous festivals and won the love of the audience.

The playbill features 19 performances, and they all will be shown at a time convenient for the audience. They are totally different, but in order to keep the experimental focus of the festival, we will show innovative bright productions that are looking for the form, means and a creative language, Andrei Novikov said. "Indeed we decided to do without a jury this year, but we decided to allow the young performers “to go wild”. Over the years, the festival has nurtured a group of creative young people and they will be allowed to choose the best youth performance. Guys will do their best to see the entire program, will work with the audience, gather opinions and sum up the results at the end of the festival. We will see whether they succeed on the Day of Theater,” said Andrei Novikov.

The project was launched in 2006. Over the years, the festival has become one of the most important and anticipated cultural events not only in Mogilev but also in Belarus. The geography of the festival is wide. Over the years the festival has shown 122 performances from fifteen countries: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, Slovenia, Poland, Moldova, Armenia, Israel, England, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Kazakhstan and Bulgaria. The aggregate audience has made up more than 25,000.

The founders of the festival are the Mogilev Oblast Executive Committee, the ideology, culture and youth affairs department of the Mogilev Oblast Executive Committee, and the Mogilev Regional Drama Theater.