EFA Monthly Digest June 2026 - Part I
Each month Simon Mundy highlights what is happening across the European Festivals Association (EFA)’s network, offering a glimpse of the many ways our community is active across Europe and beyond.
Read Part I of the June EFA Monthly Digest about the festivals taking place this month. As June is particularly rich in festival activity, Part II will be published soon with further highlights.
Festivals in ancient heritage locations
There are three festivals in full swing this month that combine modern programming with extraordinary ancient heritage:
In Greece, the Athens-Epidaurus Festival runs until 29 August, split between venues in Athens and the two theatres from the fifth century or longer BC at Epidaurus, 200km further south in the Eastern Peloponese. It was in the large theatre near Epidaurus that the Athenian playwrights like Euripides and Aristophanes had their work premiered. Watching music or theatre there is truly to abolish time and the acoustics are so clever that no-one has ever bettered them (I know, I've tried them out). Next year, 2027, please note, the festival will be our host for the European Festivals Summit (18 – 21 April).
Across the Aegean in Izmir, the festival there (until 8 July) uses its Agora from much the same age as Epidaurus – rebuilt in the second century AD after an earthquake on the orders of Marcus Aurelius shortly, before his death. The Quotuor Magenta, an Anglo-French ensemble, will be performing works by women composers there on Friday 12 June at 9.30pm. In the much more modern (2008) AASSM, the city's main concert hall, the festival brings the ancient and modern together in a programme called Earth and Sky for pan pipes and harp (9pm Thursday 18 June).
Close to the Adriatic rather than the Aegean, in Ravenna, capital of Theodoric's remains of the Roman empire a thousand years after Epidaurus was built, the festival runs until 11 July. One of its most interesting events is Francesco e il Lupo (St. Francis and the Wolf) – an 'opera and breakfast' by composer Giorgio Babbini and librettist Silvia Rossetti being held during the weekends of the festival in several locations. 'Where is the wolf?' the festival asks. 'What does the wolf represent? Taking place across the entire city of Ravenna, the theatre will reach into its neighbourhoods and countryside wherever people wish to invite it by organising a space. The wolf is fear. While fear grows and expands in the dark, daylight reveals that the wolf itself is fragile, just like we are. That light shines through the crystal-clear voices of children, who still have the ability to see what is now lost to the eyes of adults.' The overall programme is huge but among the classical events is the Artemandoline Baroque Ensemble, tracing the music for the mandolin from Naples to Madrid (City Art Museum, 9.30pm Sunday 28 June) and the great singer of Portuguese fado, Dulce Pontes, performing in the mediaeval fort of the Rocca Brancaleone (9.30pm Saturday 4 July).
Mediterranean Festivals
The Cyprus Contemporary Dance Festival takes place in the Rialto Theatre, Limassol, and Municipal Theatre, Nicosia (until 21 June). As well as local dancers and choreographers it includes performers from France, Germany, the UK, Greece, Finland and Belgium. A story that resonates is The Barbarian Nights, devised by the French choreographer Hervé Koubi, which looks at the way people through the ages have migrated across and to the Mediterranean basin.
Still in the Mediterranean, the Malta International Arts Festival (12 – 21 June) has events in multiple genres around the island, including large scale sand sculptures in three locations and, on the first night in the Society of Arts in Valletta, a piano concert of Ravel and Mussorgsky played by Jacopo Petrucci, the audience distracted intentionally by 'sand artist' Erica Abelardo. No remarks about sand in the sandwiches, please! There is plenty of contemporary dance and one performance that looks frankly terrifying is one by Myrgon, a Greek artist who 'works at the threshold between sculpture, movement and ritual, using raw clay as an extension of his living body.' He will be doing it underground in a 16th century water cistern accessed below the street outside the Courts of Justice.
A lot further north and in considerably more comfort, the Vilnius Festival (5 – 25 June) features Lithuania's main orchestras. Two programmes stand out as offering something special. The National Symphony Orchestra (7pm Friday 12 June) has the very fine conductor Oksana Lyniv leading them in her fellow Ukrainian, Borys Lyatoshynski's, tone poem Grazhyna and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. A few nights later (7pm Wednesday 17 June), the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra is directed from the violin by Sergej Krylov in three serenades: one for strings by Elgar, that for tenor (Ian Bostridge), horn (Ben Goldsheider) and strings by Britten, and Leonard Bernstein's wonderful response to Plato's Symposium - back to Athens we go) - which is basically a too rarely played violin concerto.
Holland Festival happens (until 28 June) in venues in Amsterdam ranging from the venerable (Felix Meritis, from 1788, housing one of Europe's oldest surviving concert rooms) through the great Concertgebouw to the relatively new Musiekgebouw, Eye Film Museum and National Opera. In Amsterdam West there is the 'queer led' Club RAUM, which has Holobiant, described as 'dance, costumes, make-up and a catwalk (5.30pm Saturday 13 June), De Nieuwe Liefde dedicated to language and word arts, and the converted Gashouder (gas holder) which seems an appropriate space for a sound and light performance of the music for the HBO series Chernobyl by the Icelandic composer Hildur Guanadottirs (8.30pm Saturday 20 June).
Theatre festivals
Three theatre festivals complete the picture for those going on in the first half of June.
Again in Lithuania and centred at the Klaipeda Drama Theatre, the THEAtrium Festival (until 18 June) has the subtitle 'We Shall Grow Thorns In Our Garden'. Those 'thorns' are productions from Spain, Greece, Albania and Estonia.
In Slovenia the Maribor Theatre Festival (until 21 June) is the country's largest in the genre. It involves a high proportion of the country's theatre groups, both professional and student, which means there is a pathway to public performance for those entering the profession in the future. Documentaries, discussion events and a production competition supplement the main programme.
The Campania Theatre Festival (12 June – 12 July) takes place mainly in several theatres in Naples but also in the outdoor spaces of the old palace of the Neapolitan kings, especially its carriage courtyard, which is effectively the festival's main stage. There are 'drop by events' too in its 'romantic garden', which (since they involve DJs and a singer with the locally significant name of Vesuvian) might be slightly less quietly romantic than usual.