The 3rd International Festival of Performing Arts “Stories” 2026 begins on 24 July. But first – the workshops
In just one month, Płock will once again become a meeting place for performance artists from around the world. From 24 to 26 July 2026, the city will host the 3rd International Festival of Performing Arts “Stories”, featuring performances, artistic interventions, and encounters with artists from Poland and abroad.
Before the festival begins, the Masovian Museum in Płock will host a four-day performance workshop led by the internationally acclaimed artist duo VestAndPage (Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes).
Taking place from 20 to 23 July, the workshop will bring together participants for four days of intensive artistic practice, focusing on performance, presence, collaboration, and creative exchange. VestAndPage are internationally recognised performance artists whose projects have been presented around the world. They are also the founders and artistic directors of the Venice International Performance Art Week.
The workshop will culminate in a public presentation during the 3rd International Festival of Performing Arts “Stories”, offering audiences the opportunity to experience the results of this collaborative creative process.
Performing the Spectral
This workshop explores the body as a porous site and the site as a spectral milieu—unstable thresholds where presence and absence, memory and materiality, the visible and the invisible continuously intersect. Drawing on VestAndPage’s performance-as-research methodology, participants engage in an immersive process in which action precedes interpretation, and knowledge emerges through embodied experience.
Spectrality is approached not as something ghostly, but as a condition of co-presence: what lingers, withdraws, or remains partially perceptible. Through practices of listening, slowness, vulnerability, and risk, participants explore emergence and disappearance, fragility and transformation as generative artistic forces.
Working with elemental materials such as water, breath, light, shadow, and found objects, participants develop site-responsive actions, durational exercises, and performative scores that attune them to subtle forces, traces, and resonances inhabiting bodies and environments.
There is, indeed, a special relation between performance and spectrality, as the performance space so often becomes a place of conjuring. The presence of performers, of objects and words, or even of the empty space, is fundamentally permeated with paradox: things are what they are and, to an extent, they are simultaneously other. In this entanglement of reality and alternative realities, of presence and memory, one can say that spectrality is inherent in political visions of the future.
The workshop culminates in a shared performative constellation in which bodies, materials, temporalities, and non-human agents coexist without hierarchy. Performance becomes a living threshold where the porous and the spectral converge, and where meaning remains open, relational, and in continual transformation.
