Perm to host the 3rd International Festival of the twinned cities
“Come together!” International Festival of the twinned cities of Perm takes place every 5 years and is related to memorable events in the city’s life. The coming Festival is dedicated to the 295th anniversary of the city’s foundation.
On September 19-23, 2018 Perm will host the 3rd twinned cities festival “Come together!” , which will get together the actors and performers from the cities twinned with Perm – Agrigento (Italy), Duisburg (Germany), Louisville (UAS), Oxford (the UK) and Qingdao (China).
The festival takes place every 5 years, traditionally related to the city’s “jubilee birthdays”. Its mission is seen as creating cultural space with no borders, providing the venue for communication and exchange of experience and values. With this goal in view, the festival sets up an art residence to produce unique collaborated projects involving musicians, artists, choreographers and actors from different countries. The twinned cities envoys include arts leaders and groups who work in collaboration with their Perm partners to create a variety of joint productions – performances, concerts, fashion shows, exhibitions, etc.
This year the festival will present 8 joint productions. The participants from the twinned cities have already been involved into staging and rehearsals in a distant mode, planning the production process, exchanging the materials – from ideas to sheet music and scores. Rehearsals are already underway and will shortly continue in Perm.
The Festival participants include Graziano Mossuto (Agrigento, Italy) who is collaborating with the famous Perm group “Voskresenie”; designers from Duisburg (Germany) representing the Esthetique brand of the Duisburg Disability Workshops will produce a joint fashion show with the DIVA Fashion House from Perm. The dancers from the Oxford-based “Justice in Motion” Theatre Group will perform together with Eugene Panfilov’s Ballet Group. The Festival program features an International Argentina Tango Fest with world-famous dancer Marcella Duran (Louisville, USA) and champion of Russia and the Baltics Dmitry Liferov as headliners. Find more on the Festival program and participants here.
It is worth noting that the festival invitees include representatives of the countries with which Perm has traditionally friendly links. Eva Maliti (Bratislava, Slovakia), writer, playwright, literary critic and translator, will present the reading of her play together with the actors from the New Drama group led by Marina Olenyova.
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The twinning links of Perm have been developing for over 25 years, using the best practices and the experience gained by the twinned cities. Perm implemented Louisville’s experience in creating Extreme Park and the city’s call-center. Oxford shared the ideas to organise the community centres. Theatrical productions of the Carmen, the Westside Story and others were staged in Oxford with the participation of Perm actors and musicians. Agrigento has become a regular venue for the Perm Culture Days festival with around 200 Perm representatives participating each year. German Duisburg started a number of important and useful joint initiatives : business-missions have become a traditional event for both cities; the Perm Zoo became the home for lemurs donated by the German partners; there is a new project underway aimed at developing cooperation in social integration of the disabled.
This year will mark the a 15-year anniversary of the links between Perm and Chinese city of Qingdao. According to many of the twinned cities representatives, the twinning relationships have been based on and largely stimulated by the openness of their Perm partners to new ideas and their readiness to use the best practices, as well as by the cultural environment of Perm, providing both for keeping up traditions and a challenge of the most avant-garde performances.
In 2018 Perm was top-listed in the ratings of the Eurasia Regional Section of the World organization "United Cities and Local Governments" for international activities of the cities with over 1 mln population.
In the same year Perm became the winner in the nomination “People’s diplomacy as efficient local government “ at the V International Forum of the best municipal practices organized by the Union of the Russian Cities in Bishkek (Kyrgizia).