The international festival of high school theatre Juventafest, organized by the “Medija-Art” Association and held for the eleventh year in a row, hosted more than one hundred participants from five countries and provided them with a unique opportunity to spend all five festival days together socializing and learning.
Since 2019, Juventafest, in cooperation with the Association “Life with Down Syndrome of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina”, has become part of the movement for inclusion, and young people with Down syndrome participated in the workshops this year as well.
Also, as part of the workshop for professors, drama club leaders in high schools, on Saturday, September 9, the presentation “Drama pedagogy in schools, key factors for the success of inclusive drama creativity” was held.
Festival workshops are a valuable part of the programme, because they enable young people to expand their knowledge and express their creativity, which they are sometimes not even aware of. On the second day of the festival, high school students from Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina began invaluable exploration through four workshops led by experts specialized in these fields.
Irma Alimanović, actress and assistant professor, subject Movement of the Acting Department at the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo, generously shared her years of experience with young people with the participants of the character mask workshop.
The participants of the musical theatre workshop also worked hard, led by Irma Mulić, head of the Department of Performing Arts of the first educational and production platform for musical theatre in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the Institute for Music, Theatre, and Multimedia, where she engages in teaching pedagogy to children and young people.
The object animation basics workshop was held under the mentorship of Stipe Gugić, who graduated in acting and puppetry from the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek, after which he gained valuable international experience. In 2021, he founded the artistic organization MOMO based in Sinj, which produces puppet shows.
Edis Bilić, an actor whose education includes acting, speech and voice, singing, stage combat, work with masks, clowning, dancing and on-camera acting, extracted the maximum potential from the participants of the dance workshop.
The workshops of the 11th Juventafest, as in previous years, are a great challenge both for the mentors and for the participants, who, through their daily work from Thursday to Saturday, managed to surpass themselves.
The audience will have the opportunity to see the presentations of their work on the last day of Juventafest, followed by the award ceremony and the closing of this year’s festival.
