JARDIN ROUGE 2023

Cyborg Experiments

Jardin Rouge will take the theme of Cyborg Experiments this year, and will explore it in three different countries.

Each edition of the festival becomes an opportunity to find new forms to dream supposed realities. Cyborg, because we want to explore ways to fight the feeling that we are stuck in a world that does not fit us and doesn’t allow us to grow. Cyborgs can be used as a tool to look into different ways of being ourselves, impact the world around us or ourselves, and research how to play with norms, constraints and reality. Topics may include: humanity and its limitations, social organization and disruptiveness, science and nature.

Experimentation, because it’s an active world. It represents the idea to try something new without knowing the outcome of it. After these years of crisis- sanitary, political and social- the artists need free and safe spaces to integrate what they saw, learned and felt and to be able to build new ways of expressing themselves and creating new worlds.

In the Beginning

Since 2019, Martijn Grootendorst, artistic director of Theater De Roode Bioscoop, has given Snowapple a month-long ‘carte blanche’ every year. Martijn is convinced that the Snowapple collective can play an important role in the cultural environment of the city of Amsterdam by breaking with convention and counterbalancing established venues.

The festival offers a new form, but at the same time has long-standing cultural roots. Snowapple, Moon Cabaret, Theater de Roode Bioscoop and a host of guest artists have joined forces every year to create this festival with workshops, performances, screenings, meetings and all kinds of art.

In March 2021, we succeeded in organising an underground edition in Amsterdam, adapted to the health constraints. We were delighted to see that the audience was there.

We then celebrated the opening of Casa Snowapple Mx in Mexico City, an inclusive cultural space, with an exceptional Jardin Rojo festival. For two days, the Moon family honored Mexican artists, especially women whose work is still too often invisible.

In 2022, the festival expanded and took place for a month in three mythical theaters in Amsterdam, around the theme ‘intergalactic’.

The Jardin Rouge family grows every year, from artists to thinkers, from researchers to poets, sometimes cousins from a mysterious land, forgotten brothers or sisters, or troubadours on their way to somewhere else. We believe in a nomadic festival, inspired by the places, encounters, languages and artists who call it home.