Media

A choice of quotes from the press on SEAS from Odessa to Skegness.

 

SEAS has been the most entertaining arts festival I have encountered so far, mostly because of the incredibly enthusiastic, open nature of everybody involved and the variety of art exhibited. It is one of the few festivals I have witnessed that has successfully integrated with local events and venues, dispelling a lot of people’s reservations about contemporary art and creating positive encounters between usually disparate groups.
Review; Charlotte Pratley, Nottingham Visual Arts, October 2009

At a first glance the festival programme may seem narrow. And only for the really interested and the initiated. But if you look closer on the content it becomes apparent
that a lot of work has been done to make it accessible to a broad audience. We are privileged as an audience to be served a programme of this caliber.
Christine Kristoffersen Hansen, Nordlyspuls, 12 September 2009

The idea of getting contemporary art – which so many are afraid of – out amongst people and make them curious really worked yesterday. /…/ (Tiyatro Ouynevi) made sure that the opening of SEAS was exciting. And highly relevant.
Review; Lasse Jangås, Nordlysplus 12 September 2009

The width of the arts festival SEAS is impressive.
Stein S. Fredriksen, Nordlysplus, 20 August 2009

Fascinating stories that stick
The montage technique used creates several meanings and ironies, contrasting with the sad quality that the counter-tenor Nuri Harun Ates beautiful voice creates, but also to the nostalgia that is heightened by the speechless presence of Gloria played by Eva Stellby. (…) it is the fascinating and flowing narrative of Glorious Death that sticks in one’s thoughts.
Review; Birgitta Johansson, Svenska Dagbladet, 19 August 2009

Expectation glows in their eyes. Turning towards the audience they display their qualifications and future dreams, but disappointment quietens them soon enough. While waiting to be welcomed and accepted, they pass the time in monotonous activities as their doubts grow and dreams are buried. With a nod to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot the activities grow more absurd, as if the waiting in itself and the loss of hope turns the characters into strangers to us and to themselves. The physical acting style, at moments clown-like and akin to circus numbers, creates a close connection with the audience. Music and song create shifts in the mood from melancholy to skittish happiness. (...)Waiting… has a physical expression that stays in the memory.
Review; Birgitta Johansson, Svenska Dagbladet, 19 August 2009

The theatre group Tiyatro Oyunevi and Mahir Gunsiray from Turkey have just shown me – apart from the tought provoking and tragicomic performance Waiting… - a new interesting performance space in Gothenburg. A theatrical space where other languages can be spoken which I do not have to understand to embrace the performance.

We can pass national boarders and recognise ourselves in ideas that concern ageing, emigration, racism, immigration and identity crisis. Once again the festival has found the right place for the performance. The church café, with simple tables and chairs, a closed room where the rest of the world is left outside for a while, comes very close to the actors as well as the audience.
Review; Malin Clausson, Göteborgs Posten 20 August 2009

Raised eyebrows, wondering eyes and many laughs. The reactions were many when the culture project Black/North SEAS came to Alingsås this Thursday. (…) – (Suitcases) is really great, I feel struck, syas (Kjersti Hellqvist) at the same times as the actors strike up a beautiful yet sad song. – Everything is beautiful, how they sing, their make up and how they sit together on the staircase. At the same time it gives you a sense of lost hope.
Calle Björned and Petter Tarenius, Alingsås Tidning, 14 August 2009

The Perfect Stranger
Still it is some of these voices form the East that are the most interesting in the festival (Passage09). For instance Nedyalko Delchev’s and Plovdiv Drama Theatre’s big suitcase outside Dunkers, that tells about the times in a poor dictatorship; at the same time the installation opens up to ones right to also enjoy the happy memories of a childhood. After all. (…)
(The Kiss and Waste Project) is the (Passage09) festival at its best, as the perfect stranger that gives out peoples’ innermost thoughts for all to see and hear
Review of Passage09; Johan Malmberg, Helsingborgs Dagblad 7 August 2009,


“They invite only the best of the best to this festival.”
Expert Ukraine, www.expert.ua

Stenseth works on contrasts, bringing together in the space of a movie theater two films with opposite content. “Letters from Odessa” was presented by a young lady who unsuccessfully wants to find a father in her future husband and by an elderly Frenchwoman who just lost hers. Three screenings and six other films are still to come. It’s a pity that all of them will be in English with English subtitles because this deprives many spectators of the pleasure of enjoying the texts: without exaggeration, the texts in this project are wonderful.
Review of Kiss and Waste Project; Larisa Danilenko, for “24” from Odessa

If for some, theatre was still associated with baroque stucco, red velvet curtains and the passionate voice from the high stage, then the participants of the international Black/North SEAS project have dispelled for good the myth about stage art as the literal reading of classical literary texts.
From a review of Sweet Dreams directed by Dmytro Bogomazov “The cultural expansion of experimental theatre in Ukraine continues” – Vera Baldyniuk

Time will show the results of the first Black/North SEAS. Meanwhile, it’s very gratifying that Ukraine was chosen as the starting platform for the ‘two seas festival,’ and that Eugenio Barba, one of the world’s most notable theatre directors, is taking part in the project.
Sasha Yeremeyev, http://www.pik.org.ua

The guests from Europe installed their ‘Fantomats’ in the Odessa city park located near Derybasivska Street not knowing that it would cause an unpleasant dialogue with the police… But, their disagreement was amicable. The police allowed them to leave their still figures there for one day and then they moved them to Prymorsky Boulevard.
Kateryna Konstantynova, Dzerkalo Tyzhnia (“The Mirror Weekly”)

The group of police, journalists, visitors to the city park and English-speaking participants of the project didn’t quite understand what was going on and how this would all end. The launch of the festival was a success: order only hinders actual art and deprives it of its key components - directness, spontaneity of reactions and the obligatory elements of absurdity. What happened accomplished one of the festival’s objectives ideally - to show the face of a port city by implanting foreign cultural elements into its structure.
Larisa Danilenko, “24”

The law enforcement officers hit the nail on the head. While art critics and curators argued until dawn about what modern art is, the Odessa police gave it a wonderfully accurate definition – the violation of law and order.
Viktoria Polinenko, Ukrayinsky Tyzhden (“Ukrainian Week”)

Politics and economics have already demonstrated their inability to unite Europe - perhaps art can. The artistic “SEAS” caravan has set off on its two-year journey. Having taken with it a rich crop of creators, it has sailed to maritime countries, casting its anchor in port cities. Inclined to meta-genres and co-production of various kinds of art, the project demonstrates modern trends in European art.
Nataliya Fedorova, teatr.com.ua

The two theatre and dance productions – "Monday in the Sun", created in one of the most important European centres, the Garajistanbul from Turkey (choreography of physical dance investigating the relationships between men through images of friendship with historic and cultural connotations) and a pseudo-stand-up comedy, "Beer Tourist" (Wun-derbaum, Netherlands) – presented both in Odessa and in Mangalia, turned out to be excellent litmus solutions for the way in which the public space is structured on different coasts of the Black Sea.

Gina Serbanescu, Observatorul Cultural 

Black/North SEAS succeeded in changing, for a few days, the atmosphere of the little town situated by the shore of the Black Sea (Mangalia). This happened because many of these artistic productions took place in the very centre of the town, to the surprise of the passers-by.

Corina Sabau, Radio Romania International

Intercult brought from the North Sea to the Black Sea the most shocking and enthusiastic of the creations that makes you seriously rethink the concept of theatre these days: the Black Sea Oracle of the Dannish company Signa.

Iulia Popovici, www.liternet.ro


 

 

Black/North SEAS : Making the waves of inspiration and trust

By Dragan  Klaic

Look at the map: between the Black Sea at the East and the Northern Sea at the West lies a good chunk of our old continent. These two seas seem quite apart, separated by a huge land mass of Europe, divergent histories, climates and cultural currents,  two busy seafaring realms, quick to pull statistics of shipping, trade, containers disgorged in the harbors, tons of goods in transport but less vocal to describe their cultural connections and routes.  And this is precisely the ambitious goal of this 3 years long project: to intertwine those two maritime zones and to connect those who live and work along their shores, building on the experiences and the artistic and social capital accumulated in the previous Seas project (2003-2005), focused on the Baltic and the Adriatic seas. 

Once again, we enter the port cities along the sea shores as points of exchange and trade, as privileged places of intercultural communication, as testing zones of conflicting habits, life styles, languages and memories. In our project, each selected city becomes a stage, to produce new artistic works and present art made elsewhere, to debate and reconsider own cultural constellation in relation to the wider geographic zone and its cultural streams, winds and undercurrents. In 2008,  the exploration of the  Black Seas starts from Odessa and ends in Istanbul, passing along the Romanian and Bulgarian coast through Mangalia, Balchik and Varna. In 2009 several Nordic, British and Irish cities of the Northern Seas wait for another crisscross route to be mapped. In 2010, those two coastal zones should be visibly interconnected with joint artistic projects.

The Black Sea shores reveal archeological traces of cultures vanished long time ago and a post-industrial debris of recent downturns and failures.  Commercial harbors, seeking to keep their cranes busy,  compete with new important trade centers and shipping routes. Tourism is on the go and yet the danger of overbuilding and making sandy beaches shrink under concrete and neon looms everywhere. Mighty tributaries bring a constant polluting water mass and make fishing boats rot idle in the harbors for once ample fisheries are severely depleted nowadays. While strong memories of invasions, wars, siege and exile remain vivid in the region, the European Union stretches since recently to the shores of the Black Sea but peace cannot be taken for granted at its every spot since there are still places of tension and some contested borders, and the rifts created by exclusivist demands, hostility and mistrust. North Sea knows less political tensions but ecology and de-industrialization hamper the development of its old port cities, commercial interest clash and fishing quotas hurt, migratory flows alter the population and provoke new divisions.

A movable feast of performances, concerts, exhibits, debates and seminars will reexamine the cities on its route and probe their heritage and their future prospects, test their openness and strength of will to engage with the others, to invest, build and absorb. Contentious memories will be shaken and reshaped, talents connected and federated around artistic ideas and urban regeneration projects, specific locations explored for their potential to nourish art. Local vibrancy will be attuned to winds of creativity descending from the open sea to the harbors. There will be events attracting a public of locals and visitors, and there will be processes of matching, coupling, joint experimentation, deliberation and polemic, mixing insiders and outsiders, experts and concerned citizens, artists and politicians, NGO activists and  academics, civil servants and arts funders, producers and presenters. By making and presenting art and probing the developmental potentials of harbor cities, Black Sea/North Sea seeks to generate waves of inspiration, creativity, trust and good neighborhood, along those two coastal area and across Europe.