Take part in free community workshops!

Twenty artistic workshops and cultural community events will be conducted throughout the city between January and June. They will be run by professional and experienced visual artists – culture animators – who will work with various social groups and communities drawn from Kraków’s districts. They will take the stories of Orfeo and Eurydice, and Majnun and Leila as the starting point for considering the significance of love, loss and longing, and how they are woven into the fates of our heroes.

We are open to a broad range of types of workshops, whether comics, dance, cooking, theatre or literature: all means of artistic expression are worth following. Most important is to discover how these timeless love stories can influence others in 2019 and 2020, a time when so many people are affected by loneliness and rejection.

We would like the stories of our heroes reach as wide an audience as possible, which is why we will run some of our workshops outside the usual cultural hubs in the centre of Kraków, involving people who find it difficult to access culture in their daily lives.

June will be the month of Orfeo and Majnun as once the workshops are over, we have planned a series of shows in various urban spaces to showcase what they produced. In squares, parks, and on bridges, we will show the people of Kraków how inspiring mythical love can be today.

We want this series of workshops to mark the start of the urban laboratory: a creative space that will impact integration and the social development of local people with the use of cultural tools.

The whole production will be supervised by the project curator, Daniel Arbaczewski – theatre actor, director, teacher and instructor, and a culture manager. A graduate of the Wrocław Theatre Academy (in the doll faculty), he also graduated from the Theatre Teachers’ School at the Theatre Institute in Warsaw, and the culture incubation course at the Culture Workshops in Lublin. Arbaczewski works with theatre centres in Poland and abroad (including Palestine, Norway, Greece, Belgium, Turkey, Indonesia), where he participates in theatre projects and study visits, and runs workshops for students, youth and teachers.