Showbox is an annual international festival, a showcase and a meeting point for artists, organisers and everyone whose interest lies in performing arts for a young audience. This year's edition takes place from 29 November to 3 December.
Every year in December, at several venues in Oslo Showbox presents a varied range of innovative contemporary performances of different genres and formats. The festival program also includes lectures, seminars, discussions and networking events, to contribute to the further development and strengthening of performing arts for children and young people. Show also runs a blog by a group of teenagers who participate in the festival. During the week they publish their thoughts, interviews, reflections and reviews of the different performances.
The festival will begin on 29 November with the event "States of exception (15:20-16:20) – An hour that shaped Norway": a team of cartoonists, musicians and film artists will reconstruct the time it took Anders B. Breivik to blow up the Norwegian government building and then execute young social democratic politicians at a summer camp in 2011. Unlike films about the terrorist’s action, or plays that read aloud from Anders B. Breivik’s manifesto, the artists do not work in retrospect, but in a sense prospectively.
In 2005, the Performing Arts Company established the annual Showbox festival for the performing arts. The goal was to strengthen the competence of the performing arts in the target group of children and young people and to introduce new artistic projects to a wide audience from all over the country. The organisers try to facilitate every aspect of the festival to be able to receive direct feedback from the young members of the audience themselves.
