Voila! Theatre Festival: Interview with Co-Directors

November 7, 2024

Interview: Voila! Theatre Festival: Co-Directors Amy Clare Tasker and Katharina Reinthaller

Voila! Theatre Festival runs from 4^th – 24^th November at nine different venues across London.
For more information visit: https://www.voilafestival.co.uk/

This week, we interviewed Co-Directors of Voila! Theatre Festival Amy Clare Tasker and Katharina Reinthaller:

1. Can you tell us a bit about the origins of Voila! Festival?

Amy: Voila started in 2012 as a French and English bilingual festival, when The Cockpit’s director Dave Wybrow happened to programme a handful of French shows around the same time. Sharlit Deyzac was an actor in one of those shows, and she had so many ideas that Dave invited her to take charge and run Voila! The festival responded to the Brexit referendum by expanding to include all European languages from 2017 onward, as Voila! Europe Theatre Festival. Now, with our new model in 2024, we have expanded the festival again to embrace all world languages, and we’re Voila! Theatre Festival once again.

2. Where and when is the festival taking place and what can we expect to see?

Katharina: This year’s Voila! is happening in nine venues across London for three weeks until the 24th of November. This is our biggest ever festival with 72 shows and events, from immersive headphone experiences to physical theatre to readings of newly translated Flemish plays.

Amy: We don’t set a theme for the programme, and we love to see what themes emerge from the submissions. This year we have an exciting mix of political pieces and personal stories. Wherever you go at the festival, you can expect to see artists playing with big ideas, theatrical forms, and world languages in innovative and unexpected ways.

3. How important is it for you to provide a platform for emerging artists?

Katharina: We love seeing artists develop through their experience at Voila, whether that’s by participating in our Miniatura scratch night, or having an opportunity to premiere a brand-new production at the festival, or using the platform to grow their audience and raise their profile. Artist development has always been a core part of the Voila! ethos, and it feels even more vital in 2024, when resources and platforms for new work and new artists are becoming more scarce with the reduction of arts funding since the pandemic.

4. The festival is being billed as panlingual – which languages can people expect to hear, and how far have performers travelled to take part?

Amy: There are 35 languages represented in the festival this year, including Cantonese, Farsi, German, Norwegian. Portuguese, Zulu, Japanese, Greek, Bulgarian, Xhosa… you can filter shows by language on our new website to explore! Most artists or companies who take part in the festival are based in the UK, but some of their team members might come from abroad.

Katharina: We are proud of our partnership with Thessaloniki Fringe, where we brought over the show μεταδραματικό / postdramatic which will be in Greek with English surtitles one night and vice versa the other.

5. Have you faced any challenges whilst organising the festival and how have you overcome them?

Amy: Planning a multilingual festival with international artists involved, we need to take into account additional practical as well as creative obstacles. This could be travel logistics or figuring out how to sub/surtitle a show – especially if it uses multiple languages or no English. Artists might not have a huge network in London or be familiar with the theatre landscape in the UK, so we always make sure we clearly outline how the festival works and are honest about expectations and risks.

Katharina: With our new multi venue set up, we have been figuring out a lot of new systems as we go along! This year’s venues have been wonderful willing guinea pigs to help us set up a festival model that can scale up as Voila grows in the future.

6. What has been your favourite moment leading up to the festival so far, and why?

Amy: We’ve just celebrated our opening night at The Cockpit with our Miniatura scratch night of new works in progress. It was so much fun to see these seedlings of ideas starting to grow, and to see so many of the festival artists coming together in the foyer after the show. We also have a WhatsApp group where the artists are asking questions, sharing resources and supporting each other in the lead-up to their performances. It’s great to see this surge of festival spirit!

7. What are you looking forward to?

Katharina: There are some shows that really embody the panlingual focus of the festival, with languages as the topic of the performance like Wall of Babel, or even becoming a character in the show like the unreliable translations in Sub Titles Over.

Amy: We also love to see artists from different theatrical backgrounds coming together to make something brand new when they mash up techniques from their theatre cultures. For example, HôLY-PôLY is a wild kaleidoscope of a show by a British-Norwegian clown duo, and Naran Ja is inspired by a range of influences from Soviet stop-motion animation to well-known children’s literature, with a dash of absurdity and mime.

8. What do you hope audiences take away?

Katharina: We want to give audiences a unique opportunity to encounter something new and surprising that they might not have seen before. For people who have come to the UK from elsewhere in the world, there’s something very special about seeing theatre in your mother tongue when you’re far from home. For outward-looking Londoners, the festival opens a window to innovative independent theatre from all over the world. Wherever you go at Voila! we hope you’ll enjoy the vibrant mix of cultures and the welcoming festival atmosphere.