Festival «Microfestival»

   For one week Hanoi hosts a festival built entirely out of small things — short films, miniature performances and close-range conversations, spread across small cafés, courtyards, gardens and stages around the city.

   The name comes from a university course called «The Computational Beauty of Nature», after Gary William Flake's book on how nature builds immensely complex structures from simple rules repeated over and over. The defining property of a fractal is self-similarity: zoom in on a small part and the shape of the whole appears again. Artistic director Linh Valerie Pham takes that as the founding idea — however small a joy looks, examine it closely and the structure is still intact.

   The programme brings together Vietnamese and international artists: Papermoon Puppet Theatre, Tom Lee, Linda Wingerter (The Stringpullers Puppet Co.), Gavin Glover, Cirque Obscure, Dorothy Melander-Dayton, Karla Kratch, MoxHyang, Hoang Dung and the collective trăng trong góc. The week also premieres three experimental works still in progress.

   It is organised by TồLô Puppet Theatre, a puppetry and object-theatre company with more than twenty productions behind it. MicroFestival closes their SKĐA:XKQMAN* project, an investigation of where puppetry, camera work and live performance meet. Partners include Goethe-Institut, ATH Theatre and the British Council's Connections Through Culture programme.

   If you know the big stages and want something different — a room where you sit close enough to ask the maker a question the moment the lights come up — this week is a rare chance. The whole programme is built on visual storytelling, so most of the work asks little of your language skills.

   One practical note: the detailed schedule, the venue for each session and the way to register are being published gradually on the event page, so it is worth following it before the week starts.