PAZZ Festival
The PAZZ Festival is an international theater festival in Oldenburg. It has been held every two years by the Oldenburg State Theater since 2008 . The festival director is Thomas Kraus.
concept
PAZZ is an international performing arts festival that takes place every two years at the Oldenburg State Theater in and around the parade hall. Like jazz for free form in music, PAZZ stands for free form in theater. In contrast to many short-lived projects, PAZZ wants to create a long-term connection between subsidized theater structures and the independent theater scene and bring them into meaningful work and cooperation contexts. Different, also international, work and production structures are to be brought together. PAZZ wants to think further about international cooperation, develop model examples and structures and thus set new standards. PAZZ is not a showcase festival, but a work festival, a platform that aims to facilitate productive exchange between artists, curators, spectators, politicians and journalists.
program
The festival program consists of independent productions as well as co-productions and productions by the Oldenburg State Theater. With the PAZZ IN PROGRESS program, PAZZ is working with independent groups as co-production partners - in 2012, several co-productions are on the program as a visible result of this program (Mammalian Diving Reflex - The Best Sex I've Ever Had, Theater Replacement - Dress Me Up In Your Love) In addition, new productions will be tried out during the festival in order to then present the preliminary results of this process (Metro Boulot Dodo - Call Me: When You Get There, Ant Hampton - Elsewhere, Offshore). In 2012, PAZZ IN PROFILE offered the British artist Ant Hampton and the Canadian theater group Mammalian Diving Reflex the opportunity to show their artistic profile and their way of working in a selected retrospective. In the Container City in front of the parade hall, which was built especially for PAZZ in 2012, freight containers are used to create an open space that visitors and artists can use together. It is a venue, information center and place to stay at the same time. In the Tranzzfer container contest, 3 selected actions and installations are shown, which offer the possibility of an encounter between viewers and artists. In the container talks, an examination of the productions seen should take place, embedded in discussions on topics of contemporary theater. Artists, festival directors, dramaturges and journalists come together for an exchange.
Supporting program
The supporting program of the PAZZ Festival consists of performances by local and national bands and a range of workshops, seminars and, from 2012, container talks, as well as an open-air cinema. During PAZZ 2010 a meeting of German theaters took place organized by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, which is funded for cooperation with foreign theaters in the Wanderlust Fund for international theater partnerships. In 2012 the public annual conference of the Dramaturgische Gesellschaft will take place at PAZZ during the festival, in which the relationship between art and research and the increasing interest of art in the sciences will be discussed. In addition, the PAZZ 2012 with the translation program GETTING ACROZZ is dedicated to the problem of the linguistic transmission of foreign language theater productions for a local audience and the question of how the communication can be designed to meet the special artistic requirements. In this context, all productions that will be shown during the 2012 festivals will also be broadcast new and in some surprising ways.
advancement
The PAZZ Festival is funded in 2012 by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, as well as by the National Performance Network (NPN), the Landessparkasse zu Oldenburg, the British Council and CEWE Color. The Oldenburg State Theater is funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture and the City of Oldenburg .