The Safety Zone is the space where strategies are constructed for survival, for overcoming crises, and for the configuration of a future that makes sense.
The Safety Zone offers a framework for critical thinking and understanding together.
Access to the Safety Zone is open to all, not just to elites (intellectual, economic, or political).
The Safety Zone guarantees respect for humanistic values. On its territory, individual rights are respected and the common good is sought.
The Safety Zone is a space of solidarity, not of polarization.
The Safety Zone has room for the sort of real dialogue that TV discussions and online interactions often only mimic.
In the Safety Zone, the authentic living of collective experience raises a question mark over the noise of ready-made ideas, of wrong turns that risk becoming the norm.
In the Safety Zone, we celebrate together inspiration, generosity, irony, vulnerability, difference, courage, empathy, aesthetic risk-taking, exchange of ideas. We celebrate life and trust that humanity will win in its confrontation with the absurd or with injustice.
The boundaries of the Safety Zone have to be continually extended. Each step lost in the face of pressures of any kind is step towards disappearance.
If the Safety Zone disappears, it must be reinvented.
The Safety Zone is not to be confused with a comfort zone.

The 34^th edition of the Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival proposes to all its participants, the local public, visitors from Romania and abroad, productions that raise discussion of relevant themes, pressing matters for today’s society, created by authors with an artistic language that is personal, striking, provocative. The twenty-six productions based on contemporary Romanian texts or dance and outdoor performances are the work both of state theatres (Constanța State Theatre, Bacovia Municipal Theatre in Bacău, the State Jewish Theatre in Bucharest, the National Theatre of Craiova, the North Theatre in Satu Mare, the Fanny Tardini Dramatic Theatre in Galați, the Theatre of Romanian Playwrights in Bucharest, Masca Theatre, Nottara Theatre, Gong Theatre in Sibiu, Szigligeti Theatre and Regina Maria Theatre in Oradea), and independent companies, some of them already well-known to the general public (Auăleu, Replika, Reactor, Centrul Dialectic, Ceva), while others are at the start of their activity. As in previous editions, the Festival is present also in the towns of Roman and Târgu Neamț, and this time also in the rural environment of Neamț county. The productions will be performed on the Main Stage of the Theatre of Youth, on the Mobile Stage of the Festival, and in various open air locations in the three towns.

The international section ‘Something to Declare’ presents six productions, from the Czech Republic, Bulgaria/Germany, Ukraine/Germany, Slovenia, Kosovo, and Belgium, the work of women playwrights whose creations have circulated in the European space, at festivals and on tour. Five of their authors are from East-European countries, which face similar problems: migration, precarious work conditions, economic, social, and political situations that are difficult—and in the case of Ukraine, even dramatic.

It will also be possible to see three productions from the Theatre of Youth’s 2022–2023 season: The Housewives’ Apocalypse (directed by Nicoleta Esinencu, a writer and director from the Republic of Moldova), Rhinoceros by Eugen Ionesco (directed by Radu Iacoban), and our latest premiere, here. melancholy (directed by Irina Moscu after a text by Daniel Chirilă)—the first production created as part of the European project ‘Unlock the City’, co-financed through the Creative Europe programme.

Alongside the productions staged in the course of the Festival, the public is invited to attend launches of books and cultural magazines, concerts, showings of documentary and fiction films, installations, and exhibitions of such famous Romanian visual artists as Lia Perjovschi and Dan Perjovschi. The ‘Critical Spectator’ workshop, now in its seventh year, is aimed at teenagers who want to share their experience of seeing the productions with their colleagues. It is coordinated by theatre and film reviewer Mihai Brezeanu.

All the productions are followed by discussions between the artistic team and the audience, moderated by the young writers Olivia Călin, Daria Ancuța, and Mihai Ivașcu.

We invite you to explore with us the artistic territories and places for reflection of the Safety Zone!