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The regulars to the biggest festival of drama theatre in Ostrava are used to the fact that they do the countdown to the beginning of the festival and look for the last tickets this time every year. The long-lasting uncertainty about the reopening of cultural life has naturally affected the 12th edition of the festival because the traditional date at the turn of May and June would be truly uncertain and extensive limitations. This is why we have decided to postpone this year’s edition a bit. As we do not want to leave our hungry audiences in suspense for a long time, we have decided to organize the 12th Dream Factory Ostrava in two acts.
Act 1 will take place on 18-20 June in the open-air theatre behind the Ostrava Culture House and the surroundings and it will offer a refreshing return to open-air cultural life. The intro evening on Friday will feature the Goose on the String Theatre from Brno and their recent production The Conspirators Gathering. The authorial production about the phenomenon of conspiration theories will offer a calming harbor to minds disturbed by the abundance of contradictory information. Or, it does not need to be like that… because what can you believe today?
“The safest option is to verify it by going to see the performance. The audiences can definitely count on the fact that Goose on the String interpreted the resonating topic with their special humor. They can also see Sylvie Krupanská, who was mainstay of the Petr Bezruč Theatre,” says Tomáš Suchanek, the director of Dream Factory Ostrava.
The unknown band PROTON!!! from Ostrava will occupy the open-air theatre on Saturday night. It is actually the famous VOSTO5 ensemble from Prague our regulars know from our Dream Factory, with Petr Marek, the leader of the music band Midi Lidi, with a thrilling story about the local forgotten music legend. The end of Act I will feature a pub spirit – not due to the final party, but it will belong to Bohumil Hrabal, whose work is inseparable from pubs. The collage of Bohumil Hrabal’s images and notes will be presented in Palaverers staged by the Drama Studio in Ústí nad Labem on Sunday evening.
The weekend afternoon will feature a family program: Saturday will see Studio G from Ostrava and their puppet fairy tale Hello, Jácíček and the street performance Cross-Country Odyssey by the contemporary circus duo Bratři v tricku. If the weather is bad, the productions will be indoors in the Culture House of Ostrava, which is the main partner of the festival today. The visitors must keep all the currently valid epidemiologic measures, which are also associated with the limited number of tickets for the performances. The presale starts on Friday 28 May in the box office of the CHO and online.
A famous actor/actress assumed patronage of the festival and became the face of the 12th edition. To keep the spirit of the opening performance of Act I, the identity is partially masked and will be revealed in the visual promotion of Act II. All curious and impatient viewers can develop their own conspiracy theories about who this is and what is the relation with this year’s festival. The author of the visual materials for this year’s edition is Jan Kulich, like last year.
Act II of Dream Factory Ostrava will take place on 22-26 September in Culture House of Ostrava and Antonín Dvořák Theatre with the most interesting performances that have been recently staged in Czech and Slovak theatres. The important part of the program is more challenging productions from Czech independent companies in the former Palace Hotel and Petr Bezruč Theatre.
