NEW THEATRE INSTITUTE OF LATVIA

contemporary performing arts in Latvia and abroad

This year, the International Festival of Contemporary Theatre Homo Novus took place for the nineteenth time, dedicated to the actions of hospitality, collectivity and the potentialities of working together, not apart. We warmly welcomed both new and many well-known and beloved artists, as well as the visitors who continue to return year after year not only for the programme, but also for the personal relationships and sense of belonging that the festival provides.

Together we welcomed the opening of the festival at the centre of the festival in the former “Casino Latvia” premises on Kaļķu Street with the contemporary dance association SIXTH, who presented their work-in-progress developed in the NTIL Casino Summer Residences, focusing on the playfulness and vitality of the old casino.

Even before the opening of the Festival Centre, the audience participated in Krista Burāne’s musical site-specific performance “All birds sing beautifully” in Dzegužkalns park, re-enacting a symbolic song-battle between the wild birds and humans. Meanwhile, a variety of urban animals met on the stage in Lullaby for Scavengers – a performance by British comedian and provocateur Kim Noble, that explores loneliness and the human/animal divide. South Korean artist Jaha Koo visited the Homo Novus Festival with the second part of the Hamartia Trilogy – the performance “Cuckoo” – taking the audience to a journey through the last 20 years of Korean history, combining personal experience with political events and reflections on happiness, economic crises and death. A melancholic horror story about the unbreakable bonds of friendship was presented for several evenings in a row by the domestic theatre troupe “KVADRIFRONS” in the performance “The Sleeper Awakes”, while LAUKKU Group asked to join them in the courtyard of the Latvian National Art Museum for an extraordinary experience where art and construction came together in “Dreaming of a Perfect Arts House”.

Several days of the festival were also devoted to serious discussions around the ethics of artistic participation in the BE PART Symposium, finalizing a 4-year-long project initiated by a network of 10 EU and non-EU partners that critically explores the politics and practices of participation in the arts field. The Symposium events were attended by at least 600 spectators and participants, including around 100 international partners, artists and community members.

Thematic and performative parties emerged every night at the Festival Centre, available free of charge to anyone interested. On September 2 we had our Accessibility Celebration Day that involved active dancing, a performance by three local sit-in comedians and groovy sets by DJ Richy Rich. Since 2021, Homo Novus aims to elevate the diversity and inclusion of all art forms, bodies, and audiences and is determined to provide contemporary performance encounters for everyone. We exorcised through exercise with dancers Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen from Australia and lost control with everyone under the guidance of Rūta Ronja Pakalne and Laura Gorodko from Latvia. We sang Queereeoké for 5 hours with Berlin artists and the Baltic Drag King Collective. And were happy to see or local deaf community present on most of the social events of the festival!

The emotionally saturated work “Save the last dance for me” by the Italian choreographer Alessandro Sciarrioni received special sympathy and ovations of our audience, as well as “Western Society” by the legendary Gob Squad who also involved spectators to perform several roles on stage. Gob Squad additionally ran a 6-day Festival School, approaching different strategies for co-creation and guiding participants through social tasks, all framed by the concept of ‘wrong families’. The group member Bastian Trost later shared his highlights of the festival to the theatre magazine “Teātra Vēstnesis”: “To share a moment together. This is what will also stay with me from Riga. I know the father scene has been done many times before, but here in the second show I did it with a person from Latvia. And I really felt this weird connection with someone performing as my father, while actually them being a person living here, having their own way of speaking, their accent, their own stories. That’s always so moving for me as well. To see that coming together.”

This year’s Homo Novus Festival gathered together more than seventy artists, in the creation of performances and master classes, involved 360 representatives of different communities, including 170 children who participated in the creation of the new Riga city-guide “Riga Book”. The “White Night” and “Beyond Participation” film programmes, as well as the platform based on collective creation “Guxxi Fabrika”, the LAUKKU open-air performance and the Elektron.art traveling radio studio broadcasts attracted around 1000 visitors, while the festival was attended by more than 6000 people in total.

Photos: homonovus.lv/galerijas

See you all again next year!

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