The 15th edition of "Little Warsaw Autumn", taking place from September 19 to 28, 2025, focuses on performance – a favorite form among children and young people – and on spatial thinking. The program will include performance-concerts, exhibitions, and site-specific events: 14 events involving around 120 artists, including as many as 80 children and young participants. Audiences will hear 16 premiere pieces and improvisations, and experience works that combine music, theatre, movement, and visual arts. Many events will offer free admission!
“The festival, like a fifteen-year-old, balances between childhood and adulthood, between imagination and reality, celebrating community, diversity, and intergenerational dialogue,”
notes Anna Kierkosz, curator of Little Warsaw Autumn.
During the performance ONCE UPON A TIME / NOW at Teatr Baj, through the use of sounding objects – puppets, instruments, and improvisation – we will try to find common ground between the world of the youngest children (so-called “the very-very-littles”) and Warsaw’s oldest residents (grandmas and grandpas). This is an event balanced between exhibition and concert, musical improvisation and theatrical animation.
Both kids and adults will be swept away by the energy of Artur Zagajewski’s music and the Piosenki ensemble during the concert “Family Songs” at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Songs will be performed together by the audience and the artists, accompanied by bouzouki, clarinet, piano, percussion, and accordion.
As part of the new Space®opera 2.0, with music by Aleksandra Bilińska and Agnieszka Widlarz (National Museum in Warsaw, Czech Centre), children, youth, and their caregivers will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in a variety of artistic forms created at the intersection of disciplines – between theatre, movement, language, music, and architecture.
Another site-specific performance, “Histories (of) Connections”, will take place in the PAST building, best known for its role in the Warsaw Uprising. Few people remember, however, that it once housed a telephone exchange – a place where the daily conversations of Warsaw residents crossed paths. In this performance, featuring music by Andrei Evdokimov, traditional songs, electronic compositions, and captured phone call sounds come together with the building’s acoustics.
Throughout the duration of the Festival, the exhibition "SAMPEL: THE SONIC CROSS-SECTION OF AN INSECT" with music by Andrei Evdokimov will be on display. Insects or samples? They arrived in Warsaw straight from outer space (that is, from the imagination of children and artists) – and only briefly, for the time of the iconic music festival Warsaw Autumn. You can find them in six different locations across Warsaw:
- the park in front of Ujazdowski Castle
- Castle Square
- Piaseczyński Canal in Agrykola Park
- former brown bear enclosure (near the Zoo)
- National Stadium
- Warsaw Culture Observatory Lab
The exhibition, performances, and the Samploscope app offer creative activities for and with children aged five to one hundred – for exploring, listening, and hands-on experience.
Partners of Little Warsaw Autumn include:
Warsaw Culture Observatory, National Museum in Warsaw, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Teatr Baj, Teatr Guliwer, Ogrody Muzyczne Foundation, Czech Centre in Warsaw, and Dom Spotkań z Historią.
The events are carried out as part of the "Space®opera 2.0” project and co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage under the "Language Diversity" grant program of the Institute for the Linguistic Diversity of the Republic of Poland, and through an artistic scholarship for the "Polish Space®opera" project from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in the field of "culture dissemination".
Detailed programme: https://warszawska-jesien.art.pl/2025/program/program,little-wa
