The Granara Festival began in the year 2000 as a theatre festival, and has since become the meeting ground for all the realities that operate in Granara: in the first week of august, theatre education art technology music nonviolence dance hospitality film agriculture and food all come together, and the lot of Granara and friends, in their roles as staff, recognize themselves as a community.
Theatre and the arts in general are a language that we share. It helps us to confront our lives and our world, what it is and what we could be.
The festival unfolds through theatre shows, workshops, discussions, concerts, walks and games and shared work and a round ring of tables with a bonfire in the center, a circus tent and an open stage under the stars at night, and through the week we share and confront our visions over the present time, provoked and stirred by art on stage, nature around us, and the social and cultural experiment that the Festival in itself represents.
We always try to bring together young independent groups and more experienced masters of the art.
We try to foster dialogue and participation.
We look for plays and performances that address enquire, investigate, question the present and shake it, possibly, as it goes by.
We value the crossing of cultural lines and language barriers between the generations, the transmission of skills, values, methods. And their questioning.
We value the fragility of our eco-system, of our social system, of our economical system, etc., as a testimony to our ignorance, and to our need to search, share, and confront.
We value the crossing of cultural borders and the sense of displacement it brings.
We also try to see what Granara can do for theatre
We have lowered the Festival's energy consumption by introducing, in some cases, the artists to led light technology.
We have old giant oaks in a clearing in the woods, and when the grass is soft dancers venture outside of their safe wooden ground, singers hear the resonance of their voice through the hills, children improvise with puppets they just now learnt to build, and poets write the words that birds are whistling.
Be a part of the Granara Festival
No one here is completely and always immersed into art. We ask to everyone who comes and stays for more than one day to take a little portion of the daily chores. It's little more than symbolic but we believe that sharing worktime gives value to the experience of being here, and greatly helps to feel the festival as something we build and share together.
