KrakowInformer.com

Dedykacje (Dedications) Festival

All the important cities on the Polish cultural map – among them Warsaw, Poznan, Torun, Wroclaw and Gdansk – have their own theatre festivals. Until recently, Krakow wasn't one of these cities – which is hard to believe, judging from how well the Divine Comedy, the Street Theatre Festival and the Dedications Festival blended into the Cracow atmosphere. Things have changed in 2001, when a group of people from Krakow decided to organize their own theater festival under the Wawel Hill.

The result of their actions – the Dedications (Dedykacje) Festival – proved to be one of the most unique and important theatre festivals in Poland. The Dedications' uniqueness comes from two things, both disturbingly obvious. Firstly, Krakow is a city that, because of its multicultural past which can still be seen in its landmarks and customs, is perfect for organizing an international theatre festival. Secondly, the idea behind “Dedications” is to dedicate each edition of the festival to a different playwright or theatre current.

Organized in 2002, the first Dedykacje festival was dedicated to Moliere. Than came ballet, Chekhov, the theatre of Polish Romanticism, Beckett, Stanislaw Wyspianski, and finally Bertold Brecht in 2008.

Each of the Dedications Festivals gathered not only theatres simply showing their adaptations of plays of a certain author or representing a given current – it created a means of a “theater conversations” between different interpretations, showing how the lens of one's culture can change one's vision.

The Dedications festival was organized in the Fall up until 2008, when the Brecht edition was conducted in two parts, one in June, and another one in November.

There is little information about future Dedications festivals, and neither the topic nor the date of the Dedykacje 2009 are known. What is known is that the 2010 Dedications Festival will concentrate on William Shakespeare's works.