Jiri Nekvasil,Director of The Moravian-Silesian National Theatre in Ostrava, the Czech Republic

I wish the first edition of the TRANS/MISSIONS festival to launch a new, long tradition of meetings between our cities and artists. And I am glad that Ostrava theatres (and one of Tešín) can be presented in such a select company, because a festival like that has so far been missing in this geographical and artistic agglomeration.

The first years of festivals are usually like pilot classes and they serve as crash tests, where the method of trials and unexpected errors is used to determine the strategy of further flawless development. This rule will not apply to TRANS/MISSIONS, as the festival is a wondering being. What Jan Nowara, the director of the Rzeszów Theatre and the initiator of the entire festival, goes through this year for the first time, in the next year will be experienced for the first time by Peter Himič, director of the Košice theatre. And I am the next in queue.

There will be as many pilot classes as the organising cities, which, in addition to the annual portions of organising adrenaline, will mean one thing for sure: each year’s festival will be quite different. The denominator of the TRANS/MISSIONS is therefore not one place, but one idea.

Its population and its size make Ostrava a small town on the European scale. Being the third most populous city in Bohemia, it has less inhabitants than Polish Bydgoszcz, for instance. Still, it has six professional theatre scenes, its own ensemble of opera, ballet, and musical, as well as other independent artistic scenes.

The TRANS/MISSIONS festival is one of those good opportunities for presenting Ostrava as an artistically diversified whole.

Jiří Nekvasil
director of the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre in Ostrava