Performance Platform festival 2027

The autumn edition of PPf 2026 takes place at a time of socio-political re-stratification, when it is important to foreground shared, diverse and alternative perspectives to the conservative patriarchal ones that have positioned art, culture and future processes along class lines. The programme revolves around the festival’s politics, grounded in collaboration, sharing resources and expanding performance as a critical art that can be envoicing (Badovinac), cross-pollinating and creating commoning, supporting new ways of thinking towards a seismic socio-political shift.

In the first part, envoicing as a process through which particular experiences, bodies and knowledges become audible and present in a shared space takes shape through the research residency The Other Monument, from 5 to 16 November, with choreography and concept by Renae Shadler, dance and co-creation by Emil Ertl, Soroa Lear, Marija Saveska and Deni Zhernovska, and set design by Camille Lacadee. On 11 November, we will have a glimpse into the process, which, through dance and movement, opens space for marginalised bodies and the bodily experiences of people with disabilities, trans people and women. It examines power and visibility, exploring “other bodies” that challenge the static, heroic representations in the monumentalisation of public spaces. On 12 and 13 November, cross-pollination unfolds through the circulation of knowledge that expands, multiplies and is reshaped through What We Inherit, What We Reimagine. Co-curated with the festival curator and curators Nade Cieva, Mihail Paskoski, Elina Wegener, Juliana Arosemena, Manuel Bendig and Marlene Sophie Kirsch, and artists Martina Danailovska, Antonija Dimitrievska, Teodora Ezhovska, Angela Georgievska, Krsto Grigorijadis and Ana Lazarevska, participants from the international school Curating in Context, where the programme was developed through learning and creation of common knowledge. Cross-pollination will unfold throughout the spaces of MKC - through artistic works that bring different bodies, actions, ideas, materials, sensibilities and positions into performance, alongside activities where artistic processes and discourses will be discussed, tried out and explored, and where people will meet. 

This intertwined programme allows situated knowledge among artists, curators and lecturers to cross-pollinate and extend, creating a space for commoning. The programme thus becomes a space in which knowledge and artistic works are co-created as a shared resource, circulated and multiplied. The mutualities continue until 23 November, when the programme closes with a collaboration between two artists and two festivals, PPf and MOT, where Viktorija Ilioska’s lecture-performance Hope for the Best – Prepare for the Worst and Maria Huber’s performative drag lecture Swamp Drama will be presented together. They explore bodies that carry, endure and support one another amid the wild contexts in which we all try to sustain them. Through collective bodily scores, queer storytelling and shared vulnerability, the works approach mutuality as a practice of redistributing weight, making space for grief and sustaining the capacity to persevere together.

 We bring PPf 2026 to a close with two lively festival programmes, in spring and autumn, which have constellated artistic and curatorial practices, emphasising mutuality and relations, while questioning the ways and values through which we connect, act and live together. We understand our festival as a space that, through presenting art and creating different forms of sociality, carries the political agency that we share. In these times of war, militarisation and the increasing totalitarianisation of power, we need to come together through different gestures and actions and, within our small environments - perhaps not so significant to some - create spaces of mutuality and produce different metabolisms in which life can unfold.