How it’s done in Ravenna
Magda Piekarska, “Teatralny”, January 17th 2024
https://teatralny.pl/rozmowy/jak-to-sie-robi-w-rawennie,3857.html

Magda Piekarska: POLIS, or city-state, or, more properly, a social community. Is this the idea of your festival, you want to build a community around theater?  

Agata Tomšič: Our festival exists since 2018, we named it POLIS because one of our goals was to activate the local community. We try to do this through audience development and participation, which involves the audience not so much in the creative process, but in conscious reception. We offer our audiences performances that reflect their present, but also offer the possibility of transformation, if only we use imagination as a tool. This is what we try to do as artists – we use theater as a mirror of reality, we use imagination to create visions of a different, better world. We do this through the language of contemporary theater. The productions we host at our festival have been combining these qualities with formal research from the very beginning. At the beginning there were Italian productions, but in 2022 we opened the program to the European contemporary theater scene, which made the festival change to an international format.

[…]