In its fifth incarnation, the Izrekanja festival remains faithful to its basic mission – to bring top-notch poetry to the stage in the lapidarium and, within its embrace, to intertwine promising and top-notch, domestic and foreign authors and performers.
The main poetic guest of this year's festival is the Polish poet Krzysztof Siwczyk (born 1977), who is also a literary critic, occasional actor and author of 16 poetry collections, the poetry pamphlet Długie dno and essays on literary criticism. His poems have been published in all major literary magazines at home and abroad (Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia, Canada, France, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, etc.), and have also been included in five domestic and foreign anthologies, including the Slovenian anthology of recent Polish poetry Aklop (LUD Šerpa, 2005). He also played the title role in Lech Majewski's biographical feature film Wojaczek. For his role, in which he portrayed the Polish poet Rafał Wojaczek, he was nominated for a European Film Academy Award in 2000. He also appeared in the film Bluesmani and the intergenerational project Czuje głód (I Feel Hungry), and the film Widalony (The Exiles), in which he played the main role, premiered at Era New Horizons in Wrocław. Since 2000, he has been a member of the European Film Academy and the Polish Writers' Association. He is a columnist for the newspapers Polityka and Gazeta Wyborcza, and his reviews are also published on the online portal Polytika. He is employed by the publishing house Instytut Mikołowski, where he edits the literary collection and the literary magazine Arkadia. He lives in Gliwice.
The musical part of the evening will be performed by the band Tori Tango.
Accordionist Jure Tori has already created an enviable musical opus in more than fifteen years of his solo career, and he has also demonstrated his creative maturity with his original tango, which he performs with the Tori Tango band - it is a unique version of tango, characterized by a variety of genre approaches, rhythmic twists and technically precise performance. The group, which, in addition to Tori, also consists of a guitarist and a singer Matjaz Stosic, violinist Kurt Bauer and bass player Ewald Oberleitner, attracted attention with her first album For One Touch (Klopotec, 2016), which, with its original approach to established forms, was considered the first completely original tango music in our country.
Last year, the band, which was joined by two Argentine singers, Gabriela Alarcon and Slovenian beatboxer Murat, has further developed the aforementioned poetics with the album Respirando. It features ten original compositions, the sound of which ranges from Astor Piazzolla to the landscapes of the Gotan Project.