16th Little Warsaw Autumn
Space as a Score
The Festival, or a Landscape of New Formats for Listening and Co-creation
Over the past few years, I have become increasingly convinced that one of the most important tasks facing contemporary cultural institutions and organisations is no longer simply to commission new compositions, create new works, or stage yet more events. It is to devise new ways of encountering art and music: ways not only of listening, but of acting; new modes of participation and new formats for co-creating art and music. This is not merely because the world is changing. More importantly, children and young people are changing, as are the ways in which they experience reality. The 16th Little Warsaw Autumn is therefore shaped, above all, by new formats: new ways for children and young people—and adults too, of course—to encounter contemporary music.
Contemporary music has never been an art of safely repeating familiar solutions. It has always sprung from the need to seek out a new language. If we genuinely want to invite new generations into it, work at the intersection of art and education now demands the same courage. For artists and curators, devising new ways of listening to and experiencing contemporary music seems not merely a right, but a responsibility—perhaps even a privilege.
This year’s Little Warsaw Autumn therefore does not tell people about contemporary music. It seeks to make it happen—in urban space, in motion, in performance, in action. Through the shared presence of children, young people, artists, composers, educators, and audiences. Some 500 children and teenagers are co-creating the festival this year—not as listeners, but chiefly as performers, co-authors, and co-hosts. Here, education does not precede art. It becomes one of its forms.
This may also be why this year’s festival edition tells a story of hybrids, of a world in which boundaries increasingly reveal themselves as conventions: between nature and the city; between a concert and a performance; between an installation and a walk; between an audio drama and an urban game; between education and art; between a child and an artist. Creative practice is, after all, a distinctive form of hybrid thinking: the bold conjunction of things that appear impossible to combine.
It is no accident that one of this edition’s protagonists is the goosander. For several decades now, this bird has been learning Warsaw—and Warsaw has been learning the bird. The processes of synurbisation and synanthropisation show that nature does not disappear from the city; on the contrary, it negotiates new terms of coexistence with it. Increasingly, I think of the goosander as a contemporary ‘Warsaw Mermaid’: a new symbol of the city emerging before our eyes—a city that never ceases to change, yet remains a living organism inhabited by people, animals, sounds, memories, and imagination.
All this year’s projects grow out of that single story.
Goosanderopolis—an audiovisual installation by Dominik Strycharski and Alicja Tkaczyk. It tells of hybrids: of nature and civilisation, children’s and artists’ imaginations, human and bird. The project invites us to see creative practice as a space where different ways of thinking meet in a shared experiment.
Sculptures Sing the Wind—a site-specific performance bringing together five children’s and youth choirs and five composers: Aleksandra Bilińska, Alicja Gronau, Anna Ignatowicz-Glińska, Anna (Sasha) Jędrzejewska, and Edward Sielicki. It has been co-created with performance artists Aleksandra Bożek-Muszyńska, Magdalena Fejdasz, and Weronika Pelczyńska. Seeking out the voices hidden in sculpture, landscape, and wind, the choirs turn Królikarnia and the sculptures in its park into a living score.
Space®opera 3.0: The Tale of the Mountain Builder—an original curatorial format developed collaboratively with children, young people, educators, and artists. The Mountain Builder’s literary world takes shape through a seven-part series of site-specific performances at different locations across Warsaw. Seven new choral miniatures and seven site-specific audio dramas by Olga Pasek, Barbara Zach, Mateusz Ryczek, Agnieszka Widlarz, Jarosław Siwiński, Włodzimierz Żukowski, and Żaneta Rydzewska will be heard for the first time. Together, they form a hybrid format comprising a walk, site-specific audio drama, performance, compositional micro-residencies, and a web app, guiding participants through Warsaw as a space shared by nature and civilisation.
They Have a Language of Their Own!—a video performance and audio drama, with music by Rafał Ryterski and script, video, and direction by Amadeusz Nosal, inspired by the annual journey made by Warsaw’s goosanders. Humorous and at times absurd, this story of birds learning human language becomes a reflection on diversity and coexistence—and on whether we really need to become more alike before we can learn to live together.
Nearly 500 children and teenagers from Warsaw and the surrounding area are co-creating this year’s Little Warsaw Autumn. The programme brings together 15 children’s and youth choirs and ensembles, one adult choir, 14 conductors, and 14 composers contributing new works created specifically for this edition. Audiences will hear 20 first performances of musical compositions and projects combining words and music: 12 miniatures, one large-scale hybrid work, and seven site-specific audio dramas. The latter make up one of the most extensive participatory projects of this year’s edition—space®opera 3.0. Taken together, these works tell a many-stranded story of the city, nature, and contemporary ways of experiencing music together.
All these activities are, in essence, one story: of a city that can be heard as well as seen; of music that leaves the concert hall and becomes part of a space shared by all; of children who cease to be an audience and become co-creators of culture; of choirs that are not merely performing ensembles, but communities of voices, movement, and presence. I also see ever more clearly that the practices developed through Little Warsaw Autumn stand alongside contemporary models and approaches emerging in the Scandinavian countries—models grounded in performance, participation, and experience. Not because we wish to imitate them. Quite the opposite, I believe that it is precisely by devising formats of our own that we can contribute something genuinely original to this European conversation.
Contemporary music and art are remarkably close to the experience of children and young people today. Not because they are easy, but because they resemble the world in which children and teenagers are growing up: many-stranded and ambiguous, full of change, technology, movement, different languages, and multiple perspectives. Rather than teaching correct answers, contemporary art and music cultivate attentiveness, collaboration, courage, imagination, and the ability to build relationships. Perhaps that is precisely why we should keep devising new formats for our youngest generation—or rather with them: formats for listening and for artistic expression. Not in order to simplify contemporary music, but to allow it to meet those who already think about the world as boldly as it does.
The result? This ‘Sixteenth’ may not roar, but for the first time it finds its full voice: through some 500 young throats, it sings out a call for a decisive performative and participatory turn in music education. Give children the right to replace the outworn model of passive listening with co-creation, movement, action, and experience. With listening in motion!
Anna Kierkosz
Programme and artistic curator of the 16th Little Warsaw Autumn
