IDEM 2020. International Performing Arts Festival
The IDEM Festival reflects the frenzy and fragility of the new global reality. Imbued with a spirit of social protest, but also plenty of fun and poetry, this year’s line-up will feature the voices of artists on the front lines of international stage action, willing to dialogue, reflect and inspire as they guide us into a stimulating Socratic debate.
For this intermediate edition, given the impossibility of welcoming artists in person, we’ve invited those who came to last year’s festival in 2019 and those who are scheduled to appear at the next in 2021 to join us in a past-present-future conversation. Artistic and social debate is the key to turning this difficult moment into opportunity, hope and future.
The festival will present a combination of online and off-line events featuring artists from Italy, Switzerland, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, Lebanon, France (Guadalupe) and Spain, who will address themes like Afrofuturism, environmentalism, beauty, the Black Spring and balance, not to mention the enduring impact of resistance, loss, solitude, fear and injustice.
Zimbabwean artist Nora Chipaumire will inaugurate the online sessions in addition to presenting a video about her performance #PUNK. During this session, we’ll learn more about the Black Spring, her creative activity during lockdown in New York, her shows, her music and nhaka: a way of being, a way of thinking, a way of practising and sharing.
Italian artist Chiara Bersani will have a chance to share her personal universe with emerging artist Bárbara Bañuelos as they talk about creative poetics and the present moment. At the end of this session, we’ll be able to hear Chiara’s new piece with Bárbara’s participation. Cordata (Roped Party) is an elusive performance conceived during the early days of lockdown, at the beginning of 2020, and is an attempt to fulfil a wish: in other words, to observe a landscape together.
The fantastic, irrepressible Pippo Delbono will join us from his Italian residence and invite us to view four of his works online.
That same day, we’ll be able to see a guest artist from the last festival, Tania El Khoury calling from Beirut, and Tomàs Aragay and Sofía Asencio (Sociedad Doctor Alonso) from Barcelona. These Mediterranean natives who’ve never met before will come together in an online session to share their opinions and visions of art and life.
A 20-minute online video will be the first appearance in Madrid of today's hottest Afrofuturist group: Fulu Miziki, coming to us straight from a future where humans have reconciled with the earth and with themselves.
Members of Radio Nikosia (Barcelona), a collective made up of disabled persons who are leading the charge against forcible identity-based exclusivisms, will interview the choreographer and renowned dance instructor Lèna Blou (Guadalupe), historian, messenger and creator of gwo-ka, a dance style that revolves around imbalance and the art of not falling.
Milo Rau, a director and activist whose documentary theatre is shaking up the international stage, will converse with iconoclastic Zimbabwe-born artist Nora Chipaumire. Both have a profound knowledge of African reality and the contemporary stage. After their encounter, we will be able to watch an online documentary about Milo Rau’s work Hate Radio, directed by Rau and his collective, the International Institute of Political Murder.
And to cap off this special edition, celebrating the return to the performative and physical space, the company Sociedad Doctor Alonso will perform their work Sobre la Belleza [On Beauty] in the courtyard of La Casa Encendida. The piece is made up of the bodies of individuals who are in their seventies, creating a sculptural work about space and time.
We hope that each of these sessions will, on some level, convey the idea of a fresh, longed-for dream world and a new, slower pace of human life.
IDEM 2020 is curated by Marisa Lull.
