{"id":68432,"date":"2026-04-08T14:42:01","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T10:42:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/?p=68432"},"modified":"2026-04-08T15:01:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T11:01:08","slug":"theatre-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/theatre-of-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Theatre of war?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It might not have escaped your notice that Dubai is about to witness two short play festivals. You might think the world of 10-minute theatre is a bit too circumscribed for this kind of arm-wrestling, but it is happening \u2013 two competitions vying for the same participants and indeed the same audiences on the same dates and with the same prices.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Backstory: for some years now the Short+Sweet organisation has been doing 10-minute play festivals around the world \u2013 including Short+Sweet Dubai<\/a><\/strong>, which until last year was effectively outsourced to and housed at The Junction in Alserkal Avenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For 2026, S+S has decided to set up its own operation and its own festival. At the time (last September) it said<\/a> “this move to a direct-management model follows the recent conclusion of the organisation\u2019s third-party licence agreement in the UAE. It marks a renewed commitment to artist-first governance and paves the way for a suite of new initiatives designed to discover and elevate local talent …” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And to that end Dubai\u2019s New Covent Garden Theatre has been booked for Short+Sweet Dubai 2026. There’s a nice symmetry to this: the first S+S Dubai was held inn2013 at Ductac, the original tenant of Mall of the Emirates’ carpark-adjacent venue. The festival moved to The Junction the following year and stayed there … until last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Junction responded: it decided to leverage its position and 13 years\u2019 experience of actually running a microplay festival to come up with a direct competitor called X Fest DXB <\/a><\/strong>2026 (which has nothing to do with the short-lived tech-plus-art X Fest in Alserkal Avenue a couple of years ago).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now we have the situation with two not-very-dissimilar festivals. They are running across the same dates, weekends from 18 April to 24 May. They both feature the 10-minute limit on play length (which to be fair has long been a standard for the short-play format). The seat prices are the same (AED 120 for the heats, AED 150 for the later stages). And they\u2019ve both been promoting themselves to the same theatre community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s not clear who’s winning the battle for participants. The X Fest promo promises at least 10 original plays each weekend, and they have two evening sessions on five successive weekends (Saturday, Sunday) plus a full three (Friday too) on the final one, 22-24 May. Short+Sweet makes no claims about participant numbers; it also misses out the weekend of 9-10 May altogether, but has two sessions a day \u2013 3pm and 7.30pm \u2013 on the previous three. Its sessions appear to be half an hour shorter than X Fest’s, but maybe the run time is only indicative. S+S is taking only one day for its finals weekend (23 May) but again there are two shows on the day (tickets prices tbc).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

X Fest DXB has only one date with two sessions, the afternoon of 26 April; that\u2019s labelled Youth Week (a pretty short week, but maybe they\u2019re anticipating growing it into a separate young people\u2019s theatre festival in the future). X Fest\u2019s other neat variation is its third weekend (2-3 May), designated \u2018Untranslated Week\u2019 for plays performed in languages other than English \u2013 a welcome recognition that Dubai is a genuinely polyglot place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By our count that all means a total of 14 sessions for X Fest, 18 for S+S. If you go to all the X Fest shows without any discounts you\u2019ll pay AED 1,890; assuming S+S keeps the AED 150 price for its Gala Finals, you\u2019ll be shelling out AED 2,340 to attend all their shows. Oddly, neither seems to be doing bulk-buy offers, not even a weekend pass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neither party has said too much publicly about the reasons for their falling out, and we\u2019re not going to get into it either \u2013 except to note that in the last week the S+S people have been using social media to publicise a statement <\/a>that isn\u2019t going to smooth things over anytime soon (and presumably isn\u2019t intended to). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are a couple of really strong points in it: \u201cWe take the protection of our intellectual property seriously and reserve all rights in relation to its use\u201d. Which is as it should be; IP is too valuable to risk. But this does sound like a precursor to legal action. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then there\u2019s the meat of the statement: \u201cWe have been made aware of concerns within the community regarding participants being discouraged from taking part in Short+Sweet Dubai. We would remind all parties that artists have the right to choose where they participate, and any effort to discourage or restrict that choice may have legal implications under the AE’s Federal Competition Law\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, that sounds like an accusation; there would seem to be only one organisation that might conceivably seek to discourage participation in S+S Dubai.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe things will be clearer (and friendlier?) after the two festivals have finished. But even if there\u2019s no illegality, the head-to-head nature of the competition and the coincident dates and evening timings are surely going to mean that audiences and performers will be taking sides. In neither case can you make a decision based on who\u2019s performing or directing, or what the playlets themselves are. But there’s a lot of good theatre in Dubai, actors, directors and companies (and there are more original playscripts too); maybe there is enough room for two festivals, which would imply something over 125 separate playlets involving say 350-400 people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Junction has the track record, the practical experience, and importantly the contacts in Dubai\u2019s theatre world. Short+Sweet has the organisation, the international heft, and importantly the name. It all kicks off (as it were) on 18 April \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n

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It might not have escaped your notice that Dubai is about to witness two short play festivals. You might think the world of 10-minute theatre is a bit too circumscribed for this kind of arm-wrestling, but it is happening \u2013 [… more]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":68436,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-festival","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}