38. ULICA FESTIVAL
4-6.07.2025 i 13-15.07.2025
Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage.
The festival performances you will see this year are unique not only due to their breathtaking choreographies. They are also strong voices on issues that still hurt, divide and disturb.
In urban spaces – those open, lively and non-obvious – dance becomes a tool of protest, resistance, manifestation of community and also a chance for better understanding, an intimate gesture, an invitation for closeness. It is a celebration of life by touching the ground and floating above it.
Our festival’s strength is the street stage which eliminates division in each and every form. Division between the artist and the viewer. Between art and everyday life.
Dance is needed today more than ever. Not only as a form of art, but also as a form of presence in the world.
Jerzy Zoń
Artistic Director
photo: Bartek Cieniawa
SEE PREVIOUS EDITIONS
ULICA FESTIVAL
If you were to look at the KTO Theatre’s street festivals from a drone perspective, the view would resemble Bruegel’s works. Here is the monstrous scene of the Main Market Square of Krakow, aand here are the decorations: the Cloth Hall, tenement houses, the Town Hall Tower, the statue of Adam Mickiewicz, the Church of St. Adalbert. And dense gatherings of people, at several points of the monstrous scene, motionless around the individuals who are frolicking. Someone is walking on stilts, someone is dancing, someone is singing, there is an acrobat on a tightrope, a rubber man and a ventriloquist. There is a funny dwarf with a white face and a red ball on his nose, and a walker who walks up the stairs without stairs, and a juggler, and a hat with a rabbit at the bottom. And there is a guy who kicked another person in the calf and now pretends that it was not him but that bald man with a moustache and a silly smile, who is standing among the onlookers and applauding… That’s it! Who did it? Who is playing and who is not? Where is the illusion, where is the truth? If this year a pale unfortunate man embraces a tree, just as he did in the previous year, and bangs his head against the tree trunk, crying in despair, because after leaving the liquor store he dropped a plastic bag with a bottle of vodka in it – how will you, a regular street festival frequenter, decide if this is a scene from a show or a scene from a hard life?
Lady Macbeth’s Bagels
Paweł Głowacki
36. edition of the ULICA festival, held under the theme of The joy of a backyard regained, is devoted to broadly understood phenomena, issues and characters which we can help us to return to places that we know very well, although they are now consigned to onlivion. To all those places that we never grow out of and to which we happily return.
The area next to a building, apart from being considered as a very safe place, is often associated with carefree fun, a place of getting together and joint entertainment. Its appeal, despite the frequently modest space, dilapidated walls, the neighborhood of garbage dumps and the lack of anonymity, was once rooted in the sense of community – in its collective nature. Everything there was done together: children explored every inch of free space, erected buildings of sand and huts of branches. They played hide-and-seek, climbed trees, and the response to their mothers shouting „Come home!” was always „Just a moment.”
The backyard was a place of mischief, creativity, making something out of nothing and unbridled fun. However, the chatter heard there once has now died down. Nowadays our backyards are empty, as they have been replaced by the attractions of the virtual world.
For 35 years, every year during the summer holidays, the Old Town in Krakow turns into a great theater stage for three days. Artists from the farthest corners of the world (this year, f.ex. from African) come to the Market Square to present their performances – to entertain and move the audience. We are talking about ULICA Festival organized by the KTO Theater and Director Jerzy Zoń, the flagship event of Krakow, recognized around the world, which every year hosts over 180 artists from around the world and attracts crowds of residents and tourists.
”In other words, yesterday will return. Life will be again like it used to be before we began to stealthily sneak by the walls – The ULICA Festival will commence,” says Paweł Głowacki, the author of Patient Fables written specially for the 34th edition of the Festival.
In other words, monumental shows, phenomenal theatrical performances, happenings and other festival events return to the streets. „Jerzy Zoń’s summer theatre ritual will return,” and it will bring happy moments and surprises. Hope entangled with reflection to awaken the joy of life that pulsates within each of us.
It combines thrilling colours, unusual music and extraordinary talents of artists from all over the world. It is an outdoor THEATRE FOR YOU. It is undefinable art that weaves its way into urban spaces to deliver its message, emotions, a new or even bizarre sensation.
When, over a year ago, I worked on the programme of the 33rd edition of the ULICA festival (“bizarre acts” being its leitmotif) I did not expect that the start of the year 2020 would verify the sense of bizarreness of the developments around us.
Reality has changed our initial plans. The Festival had to be moved from its traditional dates in early July to the first week of September. The context of the mentioned “bizarre acts” has changed as well, which made us introduce some corrections to the programme, reflecting the need for a new glance at ourselves, at the sense of the presence of art in our life and of its manifestation in public space.
As Albert Camus wrote, the plague is about starting over.
Jerzy Zoń
Artistic Director
