Sfora Festival

The daytime program of the SFORA festival emerges from the moment of the summer solstice—a time when daylight stretches almost to its limits and the boundary between the known and the unknown becomes porous.

Its point of departure is Midsummer Night, which falls during the festival—a celebration associated with nature, fire, water, the body, community, and ritual, later appropriated and rewritten by Christianity as Saint John’s Eve. This calendrical proximity is no coincidence. It stems from the Christianization of older folk customs rooted in pagan traditions.

SFORA, however, does not return to this history in order to reconstruct it. We are interested instead in what happens to tradition when it is removed from the fixed order of ritual and filtered through the body, queer experience, desire, movement, and play. Rather than reproducing a ready-made set of symbols and gestures, we reactivate the celebration on our own terms.

The performance program brings together choreographic, movement-based, and dance practices, drag performances, ballroom, voguing, poetry, site-specific actions, and collective practices of presence. Performances by Dana Ozeri, Lagoona Aqua Pussy, Hiemera, Hrabina, and Leon Dziemaszkiewicz, alongside a ballroom jam led by Mother Bożna Elle, open a space of intensity, expression, and collective energy.
Workshops include voguing with Mother Dana Elle, Abstract Impro Dance led by Wiktor Klimaszewski, Martyna Ksyta’s poetic practice, Relax in Chaos by Szymon Atis Brakoniecki, and yoga sessions led by Eliza. Together, they create space for more intuitive and relational forms of participation—grounded in movement, attentiveness, exploration, and work with the body and language. Martyna Ksyta’s poetry workshops focus on everyday observations, emotions, and creative mindfulness, treating poetry as a tool for experimentation and intimate documentation of experience. A gathering on music production led by Adam Brocki expands the program through the exchange of experiences and collective reflection on the creative process.

Each of these activities activates different tensions. Drag transforms identity into spectacle and a tool of freedom, deconstructing cultural frameworks of gender and visibility. Voguing pays tribute to queer communities that have spent decades creating their own languages of pride, expression, and survival. Choreography and improvisation approach the body as a site of memory, transformation, and the possibility of transcendence. Poetry opens a space for what is intimate, everyday, and difficult to name.

The program is complemented by short films curated by Patricia Puentes, discussion panels, and food by Julia Cichocka, together creating a temporary space of community, conversation, and the circulation of experiences.

The SFORA daytime program does not function as an “aftercare” space for the festival’s nighttime events. Rather, it extends the festival into a different frequency—one that is softer, more relational, and fluid. We are interested in the festival not merely as a sequence of events, but as a temporary form of being together: a space for encounter, experimentation, rest, self-performance, and the co-creation of a momentary community.

Here, Midsummer Night becomes a field of transgression—a moment of passage between water and fire, darkness and light, ritual and performance, community and individual experience. Water carries flow, regeneration, and the possibility of change. Fire evokes intensity, risk, desire, and the chance to burn away what no longer serves us. Between these elements emerges a space for a body that refuses to be read according to established norms.

We are interested in tradition that is appropriated, rewritten, and reinvented; tradition that does not stand still but works through bodies, relationships, and gestures; tradition that can be unruly, sensual, communal, wild, tender, and excessive. Rather than asking what tradition once was, we ask what it might become. What voices can be written into it? Can ritual become a site of emancipation, freedom, and queer community? Must ritual refer only to the repetition of the past?

We do not want to return to the source. We want to leap over fire and leap into fire. We want to enter the water to wash from our bodies the roles, expectations, and systems imposed upon us. We want to cross the boundary of the known and invite you to remain with us in rituals where one can appear beyond the norm, beyond measure, beyond shame—together.