20 years of artistic risk 

Showbox 2025 opens on Monday, November 24th.

This year the festival celebrates its 20th anniversary and is Norway's largest international performing arts festival for a young audience. A renowned festival, because the performing arts field for children and young people in Norway is artistically strong and interesting. Here we have living proof of how good cultural policy and investment in artistic content pays off for artists, organizers and not least for the young audience. 

Decades of risk-taking 

It has been argued that the quality of Norwegian performing arts for young audiences began to improve 10-15 years ago. It began long before that, with established artists who have been working for 20, 30, 40 years. Several of these companies are still active, and new companies can stand on the shoulders of the established ones, who have paved the way for a diversity of ways of making performing arts. With new artistic methods and a curiosity to produce for the target audience. The development is still on an eternal upward curve.  

In addition, through the establishment of Den kulturellter skolesekken in 2001, Norway gained a unique national system for the dissemination of professional art encounters to Norwegian children and youth. This gave Norwegian performing artists additional opportunities to create performances in which the exploration of new strategies within aesthetics, arenas and how to meet the audience was central. The willingness to take risks that these performing artists have had has been enormously important for the development of the entire performing arts field in Norway, also within performing arts for adults and in institutions. 

It is in this context that Showbox has developed since 2005. By highlighting the good performing arts that have had explosive growth and to highlight the artists' willingness to take risks and ambitions. Since the beginning, the festival has tried to mirror some of the risk that the artists have shown by taking chances in programming, showing newly produced performing arts, including premieres. In this picture, there will also be incorrect programming, but it is the result of high artistic ambitions and a desire to show performing arts that are the subject of discussion. 

The element of risk keeps the festival constantly evolving, even 20 years after its creation. This year's opening performance reflects this: Encounters. Oslo by The Feminist Secret Society of Helsinki is a live conversation between two young people who are sitting hidden from each other, and where two actors on stage, via microphones and earphones, convey what they say word for word. It is both a performance and a real, first meeting between two teenagers. No one knows what they will talk about, what will happen, but through the performance, young people in 2025 are allowed to express themselves freely about what they want while being looked after by professional performers who lift it into a scenic context. 

Norwegian contemporary art and international opportunities 

The festival will showcase the breadth of what exists in the performing arts field for young people here and now. The high artistic level of Norwegian performing arts is highly sought after internationally. In recent years, there has also been a significant increase in international delegates to the festival, with the result that more Norwegian performances are booked for tours abroad.  

Often, surprisingly, we can hear from international guests that they experience Norwegian performing arts as political, even about performances that in the Norwegian context do not have a political sting. Due to good support schemes, the free Norwegian performing arts field for young people has been able to quickly respond to the world around them and create new stories for a new era, often in other stage spaces than the traditional ones. The fact that the formal language can also be experienced as having a political dimension must be said to be a success for the free performing arts. And where does the path forward lie for the performing arts and young people? Will we be able to maintain the willingness to take risks in a time when polarization seems to be growing and where more people criticize art they have most often not seen?    

“Relevance for the young target group” 

Showbox has never had the sole goal of showing performing arts that are “relevant to the target group”, that is, based on the idea that children and young people are one group of people with similar opinions about what strikes them. Art and quality have always been at the center in that the festival has trusted that children and young people, on par with adults, should have access to a wide range of forms of expression and perspectives so that they can make informed choices related to their lives and the society around them. The goal of art experiences is not for everyone to agree, but to provide experiences and perhaps initiate something – thoughts, feelings or considerations, as a basis for conversation and critical thinking. In an uncertain world, we believe that art and art experiences themselves are more important than ever, and that we must therefore dare to show art that can challenge. 

Creating spaces where young people learn to put into words what they have experienced and to handle disagreements is also one of the reasons for the establishment of Unge stemmer in connection with Showbox in 2012. Here, young critics follow the festival and review performances. The project has now grown beyond the festival and become a relevant part of the Norwegian art community, where the young voices are now cited by the larger institutional theaters.  

Competence and self-confidence 

The festival would not have developed its role without the dialogue and collaboration with the county organizers in DKS, who took ownership of the festival early on and who have played a major role in giving Showbox the position it has. The combination of expertise and self-confidence among both artists and organizers, together with the infrastructure and economy that came with the strengthening of the free project-based performing arts field and DKS, has pushed the field forward, and the potential is still endless.  

Showbox is a window into Norwegian contemporary performing arts. With the artistic level that has been built up, the potential is still endless, but it requires a political will to continue investing. This year, the festival shows 19 different national and international performances over three days on a number of stages in Oslo, in addition to professional events and social gatherings for the industry. The performing arts field for children and young people in Norway is a success. It should give self-confidence and the will to continue investing, both from artists and politicians.