2019 - Dedication to Simon Stephens

The 5th Edition is dedicated to British playwright Simon Stephens

SIMON STEPHENS

By Colin Ellwood

"Simon Stephens is the perfect dedicatee of the Dreams Before Dawn Festival of radical and emergent European theatre, especially in this moment of the UK's political self-excision.

Simon’s Europe I would suggest is - like Simon’s plays, and the ‘DNA’ of Simon’s core preferred production process - a Europe not of the imposition of rules but of offered possibilities and connections; of both roots and routes, origins and potentials all equally cherished; an algorithmic mapping of echo and commonality; of noise become pattern; one that values latency over explicitness; offer over demand. His work honours the individual vector in the European matrix; the point in the embracing and dispersing cultural field, according priority to neither, celebrating and balancing both. And that, surely, is what the Dreams Before Dawn Festival is about too. All are enactments, celebrations and excavations of the Mother load."