Rifts and depths

Festival directors as well as artists all over Europe are facing similar challenges: in the shape of a highly economized discussion about art, how to reclaim the relevance, the autonomy and power of art itself in a way other than by the museum-like preservation of culture? On the example of Maribor Theatre Festival 2012, I propose some ways of how to deal with this. The real challenge is not in programming a hermetic, avant-garde art festival, but in creating a heterogeneous programme with rifts and depths and bitter clashes in the large, highly subsidized institutions that stand in a representative tradition, avoiding a homogenous aesthetic tenor.