INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN'S AND YOUTH RADIO DRAMA FESTIVAL
Bratislava, 29 January – 2 February 2007
Dear friends of radio play for children and youth, dear colleagues,
At the very beginning I can assure you that I will not join those sceptics who like grumbling about the wickedness of our youth and the general decline of morals and cultured manners in both the wide and narrow sense of word. If I accede to this thesis, a thesis about the world being on the road to ruin, about the world without any values, I would admit, though indirectly, that my generation is one degree more catastrophic than was our fathers’ generation. Then it is obvious that their generation is a bit worse than the generation of our grandfathers, and this continues up to Adam. In this succession, willingly or unwillingly Adam then comes out as the only genuine gentleman, or for the devotees of Darwin’s evolution theory I have even better news - the last ape who was not able to grip a cudgel in his forelimb was the only really polite, cultural and valuable man.
On the other hand I am well aware of the fact that the consequences of faults made by our society will be revenged on youth. And the greatest ones on the children of our children. Among the greatest faults committed by us due to lack of imagination belongs to forgetting about all children as soon as our own children leave school. And there is another faulty forgetting. It is the forgetting about the child that lives in all of us until death. And in spite of that in moments of weakness we profess to this child and delightfully narrowing our eyes we remember how amazing the world was in the time when we were young and small. That is right. The world of childhood was, is and I hope will be amazing forever. Allow me, as an old radio employee who for several years dramaturgically prepared radio fairy tales for broadcasting, to note that radio fairy tales and radio plays for youth had and still have their irreplaceable room in programming. This fact is respected also in our new programme structure. I enjoy it very much because we all know very well how important it is to develop just in this area the activities which have a regular long-term effect actively supported by skilled experts.
That is why I would like to turn your attention to the approaching Prix Ex Aequo Festival which in terms of its programme is dedicated to adults’ artistic activities addressed to children and youth. The dramatic form of a radio play has excellent preconditions to appeal to its respondents very effectively. We should say “to reel in”, if we speak the contemporary language of our listeners to whom the radio plays of this festival are addressed. A young man is accustomed to getting information „through his ears“, from trendy „sayings“, over music up to – thanks to the function „in at one ear and out at the other“– skilfully filtrated adults’ recommendations for life. A radio play is an excellent medium, which is able to work effectively with these phenomena and among other facts confirming this truth are tens of radio plays, which have been successfully presented and awarded in the preceding five annuals of this Festival. I am convinced that the radio plays submitted to the present 6th annual of the Festival will be able to speak to the children and youth by their topicality and polished form, by perceptiveness to vivid themes, an active language treatment, as well as by compositional methods and the vitality of the final form. Though our ambition is not to sigh morosely about "What is the present world and youth coming to?", after all we must admit that in the situation in which our society appears, when it rearranges its cardinal activities and searches for new self-confident expressions in this rapidly changing world, it is not easy to create a space for the activities aimed a priori at the youngest generation. Despite this, it is the most reliable way how to create preconditions for our children in order to avoid repeating at least the most unwise faults of our fathers.
Also in connection with this I am very glad that in the collection of important international events organized regularly by Slovak Radio in co-operation with the EBU, a biennial Prix Ex Aequo, international children's and youth radio drama festival, has its place. I wish this Festival to be vital also over the further decades, success to the competing entries submitted to this annual. And you - the participants of this international event - I wish a pleasant ennobling feeling arising from your membership in the club of friends of children’s and youth radio plays. Because I believe that it is an elite club.
Dear friends of radio play for children and youth, dear colleagues,