Turning points are never a comfortable time. They are ruptures—moments when the established order is longer taken for granted and a new reality has not yet come into being. Programming the 46th Warsaw Theatre Meetings we have tried to capture this state of suspension between what once was and what is presently emerging—between disintegration and potential opportunity.

The turning points we explore span the personal and political, the artistic and generational, the social, structural, and emotional. Some of them appear suddenly, others germinate for years before bringing about irreversible change. Our programme showcases theatre-makers for whom the medium is a tool to explore the present, with all its tension, anxiety, rebellion, and hope. Their productions probe the bounds of dramatic, documentary and performative theatre, reaffirming that new ways of thinking about the world very often arise as the result of taking aesthetic risks.

The festival's core theme is also an invitation to reflect upon the turning point that is the advent of a new generation: how the young artists of today are making theatre their own, and how they have been inspired by the experience and sensibility of previous generations. The festival is a space for encounters and dialogue where different perspectives can inspire one another.

These turning points can be deeply personal as well as collective. In Marina Otero's Ayoub, the body is an archive in which extreme experiences such as pain and exhaustion coexist with a constant urge to overcome its own limitations. Rather than describing a turning point, Otero embodies it by confronting her audience with the tension between control and loss thereof, between love and make-believe. In No Yogurt for the Dead, Tiago Rodrigues treads the line between life and death. The universal human experience that is the death of a loved one is a fundamental turning point, one with which we all can identify. We Are All Belén, directed by Katarzyna Minkowska, provides a striking example of a social and political turning point where an individual's experience of violence and oppression is transformed into a collective act of resistance. Here the turning point is not one single event but manifests itself in the process of community building.

Romeo Castellucci's production of Bérénice highlights a turning point inherent in the language of tragedy: the moment when words are inadequate and silence says more than the most ornate rhetorical devices. In The Pyramid of Animals,Michał Borczuch depicts the turning point that was the political transformation in early 1990s Poland, which coincided with the radical shift in Polish art brought about by artists centered around Gregorz Kowalski's notorious studio, the Kowalnia. Agnieszka Olsten's Immanuel Kant addresses turning points from a philosophical perspective, dismantling the figure of rationality by showing how fragile it can be when faced with the chaos of the world.

Fear Eats the Soul by Jędrzej Piaskowski and Hubert Sulima draws on personal experiences of exclusion in order to expose structural social tensions with a view to finding a way to perceive the Other as someone who can no longer remain invisible. Marcin Wierzchowski's The Case of David Frankfurter depicts a historical juncture that sparks reflection on responsibility, justice, memory, and epigenetics. These turning points aren't just ethical or social in nature: they are also deeply political, bringing us face to face with the most pressing issues of our times.

Finally, Maja Kleczewska's Tkocze (The Weavers) revisits a classical text to zoom in on a moment of social unrest when economic injustice led to inevitable upheaval. History is treated here not as a closed chapter but as a cyclical process, a reading that is taken even further in Peace by Robert Talarczyk and Szczepan Twardoch—a futuristic vision of Poland in the wake of a devastating civil war.  As defining as they are divisive, conflicts are turning points which teach us that borders exist not only on maps but, above all, in the collective imagination and the structure of our identity.

We will also be showing pieces that examine turning points in terms of society and class: The Exterminating Angel, by Data Tavadze, and Domestics, directed by Agata Puszcz. On top of that there will be student productions and performative lectures by international artists, giving a total of 16 works from Poland and abroad, many of which will be followed by aftertalks providing an opportunity for intense and exciting discussions.

The entries at this year's Warsaw Theatre Meetings do not give easy answers. On the contrary: they challenge and provoke us by complicating the picture, because every turning point is not just a moment of change but a condition which we have to learn to navigate. As a common space, theatre is a place where this condition can be not just examined but experienced.

Perhaps theatre's greatest strength lies in its ability to arrest us in moments we normally rush past: in the gap between the familiar and the emergent. At a turning point.

Wojciech Faruga, Julia Holewińska, Jan Jeliński, Karolina Lipińska, Lena Tworkowska