ABOUT SOFA FEST
For three years Elsinore Theater has been the artistic director of the English street theater festival SO Festival in Skegness, East Lincolnshire (see below). In 2020 the physical format of the festival was unfortunately canceled – instead, we met in the digital world for SOfa Fest.
SOfa Fest took place in England the 1.-2 August. Performances and talks were live-streamed from SO Festival’s Facebook site og Youtube channal.
This was repeated in Helsingør the 22. and 23. august, when PASSAGE Festival streamed the content via Facebook og Youtube.
Read about the entire programme and (re)watch the performances on SO Festival’s webpage.
PROGRAMME DURING PASSAGE FESTIVAL 2020
At PASSAGE we presented the following aktivities/performances in collaboration with SOfa Fest:
About SO Festival
For three years Elsinore Theater has been the artistic director of the English street theater festival SO Festival in Skegness, East Lincolnshire. The festival is supported by Arts Council England.
The coastal town of Skegness is one of England’s hotspots for inland tourism, a tradition that goes back generations where the mines of The Midlands closed every other week, allowing miners to fill their lungs with the fresh sea air. The mines have long since closed, but tourism during the summer has continued, and every year hundreds of thousands of low-income English families still plan their holidays in Skegness.
In 2018, the SO Festival became part of the National Portfolio Organizations under Arts Council England, and the artistic management of the festival was passed to Jens Frimann Hansen and Elsinore Theater, based on the festival concept of the street theater festival, PASSAGE, in Elsinore. A concept based on the challenging of existing artistic formats, a strong international artistic program, international collaboration, a long-standing commitment to theater in non-profit residential areas and real involvement of local citizens, who are not part of cultural life.
The collaboration with the SO Festival was so successful, that Elsinore Theater was asked to also deliver an international street theater program to the nearby town of Grimsby in 2020. Unfortunately, this festival, which should have taken place in June, was also canceled due to COVID-19. The festival was part of the Arts Council England program “Cultural People and Places” with a total budget of more than £ 20 million.
“There has always been a great interest for Elsinore in England, but in these years when Arts Council England invests large sums in peripheral areas, it has also caught the eye of how cultural investment has changed a city like Elsinore,” says theater director Jens Frimann Hansen.
As a replacement for the Skegness SO Festival, Elsinore Theater is now working on a digital conference on theater in the public space and outskirts in collaboration with Arts Council England, the Magna Vitae Trust for Leisure and Culture and the BBC: SOfa Fest.
