About festival
The International Festival of Contemporary Theatre Homo Novus is the leading performing arts festival in Latvia and one of the biggest in the Baltic region. It takes place in Riga and introduces audiences to both new and renowned artists that seek ways of expressing their views and opinions about the world and the society. Festival offers a range of performances as well as seminars, workshops and other activities. Since 1995, twenty festival editions have taken place, presenting around 400 different guest performances and producing several dozens of new works.
The festival Homo Novus has now been running for 30 years, and on this anniversary, it turns its gaze inward, inviting reflection on the meaning of independent theatre, culture, and the very existence of art. On uncertainty and impermanence as preconditions for change. Resistance, resilience — the precarious ground where growth continues even when it’s suppressed or silenced. Fear as the driving force and catalyst for invisible underground movements.
We will talk about unarmed resistance to war, about women who refuse to accept the role of victim. Their courage is the focus of Polish director Marta Górnicka’s production Mothers. A Song for Wartime. In the exhibition Cities by Night, Italian artist Valentina Medda explores how fear is deliberately fostered in the urban space — a political tactic aimed at tightening control, and restricting the female body, to “make us stay home.” Meanwhile, British artists Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill present a personal reimagining of the Pinocchio tale, posing a powerful question: how easy is it to tell the truth about who we really are?
Several Latvian artists reflect on the human role in environmental change, and on the imbalance between nature’s autonomy and the pressures of civilization — drawing inspiration from places like the clear waters of Lake Ummis and the Ķemeri Bog. The festival’s central focus is a unique international Un-Conference, dedicated to planetary sustainability and new forms of knowledge exchange between the arts and natural sciences.
As for the urban transformations that are a hallmark of Homo Novus each year, this time we’ve entrusted them to students from the Scenography Department of the Art Academy of Latvia and participants of the Festival School. Under the title “Reconstructions”, these young artists present their vision of tomorrow’s urban theatre stages — approaching reconstruction as a scenographic element in its own right.
This year, the festival will take place in motion — between performance venues, cultural spaces, open-air locations, train stations, and across different cities. We invite you to join scientists on an excursion into the bogs, to travel with us to Daugavpils — where the festival began in 1995 and is still warmly welcomed — and to Valmiera, where it has never been before, but where the art space KURTUVE will temporarily become a home for contemporary dance. We’ll bring along the birthday guest’s yellow balloon — that fragile, handmade, ready-to-burst bubble, filled with our own breath, which never fails to gather people and spark joy wherever it goes.