The 15th Art of the Street International Festival starts June 29 to last until July 1. It will feature multimedia and various other forms of art. It will be held on the streets of the Old and New Towns, along the Royal Way, in the Agrykola park and the Pola Mokotowskie park.

The festival, held for the first time in 1993, has become part of the capital's summer calendar of cultural events. In recent years, the festival's idea and formula have evolved together with changing city functions and new ways of using urban space.

In the beginning, the festival mainly involved open-air theater shows as a way of challenging established cultural conventions. With time-as the city gained a new image and hundreds of new restaurants, pubs, cafes, shopping centers and the metro system-the festival was expanded to include other forms of street art. The event shows that city space can become a natural environment for artistic activity, and that city space features such as bus stops, sidewalks and metro infrastructure can be meaningful for visual arts, the event's organizers say.

This year's Art of the Street includes street shows and various kinds of open-air events. The festival will be a meeting platform for theater, dance, music, circus and film artists. The festival's program features performances by theaters such as Wędrujące Lalki Pana Pezo, Akt, Novogo Fronta, 8 Dnia, Pławna 9 and Gry i Ludzie. The festival's final show will be Tsunami, performed together by the Gliwice Music Theater, the Banialuka Puppet Theater and the A PART Theater in the Agrykola park July 1 at 10 p.m. Theaters featured in the "Open Stage" category will include Teatr Emocji i Wyobraźni (Theater of Emotion and Imagination), Teatr Między Innymi (Among Others), Teatr Poza Tym (Besides) and Teatr Stacja Szamocin (Szamocin Station). Installation artists will include Antoni Grabowski & Friends, Ernest Zawada, Galeria Podpora Stropowa, Krzysztof "Semp" Bielecki and Krzysztof Żwirblis.
Agnieszka Domańska