• Fieldwork: DRAK+: Building a Platform


    DRAK+ emerged during the 3Place project as a response to a growing community of teenagers who wanted to engage with theatre not only as spectators, but as active participants. Rather than creating new isolated formats, Drak Theatre chose to gather its youth-oriented activities under one shared platform.

    DRAK+ functions as an entry point, a meeting place and a framework that connects artistic creation, participation and community-building. Its guiding principles are authenticity rooted in young people’s own topics, dialogue instead of predefined answers, learning through experience, and continuity through return.

    By uniting different formats under a single identity, DRAK+ helps young people orient themselves within the institution and understand theatre as a space where they are welcome to stay, return and grow.

    What we learned

    • A clear umbrella platform strengthens continuity and visibility for youth engagement.
    • Young people are more likely to return when they understand where they belong within an institution.
    • Third places benefit from recognisable structures combined with flexible content.
    • Dialogue-based formats create stronger identification than outcome-driven ones.

  • Festival Visit at Regiony 2025

    In June 2025, the partners of the 3Place project met in Hradec Králové for a joint festival visit to Regiony 2025, the Czech Republic’s largest theatre festival. Hosted by Drak Theatre, the visit formed part of the project’s annual dissemination activities, in which partners attend one another’s festivals to share artistic work, fieldwork outcomes and experiences from the project.

    Regiony is a major international festival, presenting around 350 productions over eight days and reaching approximately 50,000 spectators each year. For the 3Place partners, the festival visit combined artistic observation, professional exchange, public dissemination and internal project reflection.

    Presenting 3Place in a festival context

    The main objectives of the visit were to introduce the 3Place project to the Czech theatre community, to connect international project partners with the local theatre scene, and to share concrete outcomes from the project’s fieldwork. A further aim was to identify artistic work — both Czech and international — that could be relevant for future programming at partner festivals such as Showbox and Schöne Aussicht.

    An important aspect of the visit was also the opportunity for all partner teams to meet in person. After more than seven months without a physical meeting, the festival created space for in-depth discussion, exchange of experiences and planning for the final phase of the project.

    Experiencing Drak Theatre’s artistic work

    As part of the programme, Drak Theatre presented three of its most recent productions to the project partners:
    The War of the Buttons, Metamorphosis and Sonnets.

    Together, these productions offered insight into Drak Theatre’s current artistic approach to work for young audiences. The performances represented a wide range of formats and genres — from a grotesque drama in a traditional stage setting, through an immersive live-cinema production, to a classroom-based performance created specifically for school contexts.

    The War of the Buttons and Metamorphosis were followed by Kitchen Table discussions, allowing partners to observe how Drak Theatre works with audience dialogue as an integral part of its artistic practice. Sonnets included a follow-up workshop with the participating class, which partners were also invited to attend.

    Czech and international guest productions

    In addition to Drak Theatre’s own work, the partners attended four Czech guest productions. These included intimate object-based and visual theatre by Berta Doubková and FRAS, as well as work by Alfa Theatre, a major Czech institution with strong international engagement, and Loosers Cirque Company, one of the leading contemporary circus ensembles in the country.

    The international programme at Regiony 2025 featured fourteen foreign ensembles from ten European countries. During the visit, the partners saw five international productions, including Crooners by NIE Theatre, The Mountain by Agrupación Señor Serrano, Shades of Shadows by Tangram Kollektiv, and two Catalan productions presented as part of the festival’s thematic focus on Catalan work.

    The immersive production An-Ki by Cia Ortiga became a particular point of interest. It proved to be one of the most popular audience hits of the festival and sparked immediate follow-up: representatives from Junges Ensemble Stuttgartcontacted the company directly after the performance to explore possibilities for a guest performance in Germany.

    Public dissemination and professional dialogue

    A key moment of the festival visit was the public presentation of the 3Place project, held on Sunday afternoon at Drak Theatre. Representatives from all partner organisations presented their institutions and their roles within the project to an invited audience of Czech theatre professionals, critics, theorists and a representative from the Czech Creative Europe Culture Office.

    The presentation generated strong interest and led to lively discussion within the Czech ASSITEJ Centre. It also resulted in further contact from the Czech Creative Europe Desk, which later requested an in-depth interview with Drak Theatre to support wider dissemination of the project.

    Project partners’ meeting

    Sunday morning was dedicated to an internal working meeting for the project partners. Despite the busy festival schedule, a full morning was reserved for focused discussion. Partners shared updates on their ongoing fieldwork, reflected on experiences from the festival visit, and agreed on next steps for the final six months of the 3Place project.

    The in-person meeting allowed for spontaneous, unmediated exchange that complemented the partners’ regular digital communication and strengthened the collaborative foundation of the project.

    • Festival visits provide a powerful framework for sharing project outcomes through artistic experience, not only through presentations.
    • Experiencing work together creates a shared reference point for professional dialogue and future collaboration.
    • Public dissemination benefits from being embedded in an existing professional context with strong local presence.
    • In-person meetings remain essential for trust, depth and strategic alignment in international projects.
    • Festivals function as third places for professionals as well as audiences — spaces for encounter, exchange and reflection.

  • Digital Workshop #8: Transformation as Artistic Practice

    The workshop was directly connected to DRAK’s development of a new production inspired by Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and involved 13 participants.

    Concept and intentions

    The workshop aimed to create a safe digital space for individual creative processes, allowing participants to decide how much they wished to share. Artistic distance—through metaphor, humour, and non-realistic forms—was used to support personal reflection without pressure.

    Working process

    Participants engaged in a sequence of individual and collective creative tasks:

    • Private space exercise: imagining and physically embodying a personal safe space
    • Metaphorical transformation: writing short responses to “What would I be if I were…?”
    • Poem ‘I am from…’: composing poems from selected metaphors
    • Memes: visual expression using non-human imagery
    • Diary of transformation: writing fictional accounts of personal metamorphosis
    • Object / puppet theatre: staging another participant’s text using found objects and minimal language

    The tasks offered multiple artistic entry points, making the workshop accessible to participants with varying levels of experience.

    Outcomes and reflection

    Although participation numbers were lower than hoped—likely due to seasonal factors and online fatigue—those present engaged deeply with the tasks. The format proved strong enough that the same structure was later adapted for an in-person workshop with significant success.

    As a result, DRAK plans to further develop this methodology for use in educational materials and audience workshops connected to The Metamorphosis