Transit 6: Women on the Periphery

I am in Holstebro, Denmark at Odin Teatret for the 6th Transit International Festival of Women's Performance. Organised by Julia Varley approximately every 3 years since 1992, the Transit Festival is a highlight of the Magdalena calendar. It's a great coming-together of women theatre makers from all over the world, for an intense period of workshops, work-in-progress showings, discussions, performances and of course a lot of great conversations over good food & drink :)

This year, there has been a new periphery to the festival - an extra four days of training before the festival itself began. About 30 participants attended this part, with another 20 or so arriving for the workshops that started today. I'm not doing a workshop because I'm part of the "Women With Big Eyes" group, a collaboration between some of the senior Magdalenas & a couple of others like me. This is the third meeting of the group, & today we started with a day of sharing new proposals & ideas, as well as watching the video of our first performance, at Transit 5 in 2007. Unfortunately the video from the second performance, in Cuba last year, is still in Colombia ...

The first couple of days are always full of meetings & greetings which is really great. This is my fourth Transit festival so it's nice to feel the familiarity of it all, to already know the staff here at Odin & to have a sense of coming home. I will do my best to post here during the festival, but I know it's going to be a full-on time so i won't make any promises - & will try to enlist some others to do so as well. For starters, here is Dawn's post about the opening during which julia asked iben nagel rasmussen to show her exercises around the tension of losing balance as an illustration of what julia was talking about.

Later, after another full day at Transit - trying to get an early night but already it's half past midnight. dawn is horizontal, while madeline has returned from her bar shift & we are discussing the performances from this evening. But i can't discuss & write at the same time ... Maria Porter is one of the documenters of the festival, & she is putting more photos online every day - click here to see them. there are also some women from brazil who are making a video documentary about Transit - this will be a great resource.