Softening as a strategy
Co-funded by the
Creative Europe Programme
of the European Union
Creative Europe Programme
of the European Union
is a European cooperation project on hope. The hope we’re interested in is about ‘broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act’.
Parade of Horribles is a roaming devised work, combining performance, spoken word and projection to celebrate differences with empathetic humour and amplify consciousness around the psychological effects of Climate Crisis. Going from City to Town, spending time with community groups in each area to better understand their lived experience, their fears and desires to translate into imagery for the street. Audiences will happen upon, share, and remember images designed to start conversations. Parade finds ways to create empathy between people and rejoice in the vibrancy that difference brings to our lives.
The synergies and challenges that the encounter between the biological and technological worlds presents have been at the center of attention for the berru collective. Their works tend to combine living and non-living structures, whose interaction allows us to understand the complexity of these same structures and speculate on their potential collaborations in creating sustainable systems. This is a Collection Europe project, promoted by ACT partners COAL and Culturgest, in the framework of the Portugal-France Season 2022.
Who has the right to define what human rights are? There’s no easy answer. Ideas about what is right or wrong in the way people organise and interrelate vary greatly from culture to culture, and the possibility of a communion of values is all the more difficult the more one tries to achieve a “universality”. Choosing a group of people who can define human rights poses a problem of representativeness and, with regard to the representation of minorities, highlights the limits of democracy itself. Furthermore, the limits of what is considered “human” raises doubts, insofar as rights of other entities directly involved in human action should be considered.
What kind of attention do we give to the sounds of the environment we inhabit?
The Silencing is a sensitive exploration of the role of the spectator in a theatre space. It mirrors what is happening outside of it – the profound impact that human activity has on its physical surroundings. On stage, a group of young storytellers establishes a shared practice of listening by interweaving autobiographical narrations, speculations, and audio recordings. They fill the theatre space with words and sounds. Until words fail them and there are no more stories to tell.
Under the direction of Chilean choreographer and expert for crowd choreographies, Jose Vidal, 40 dancers from the Hamburg HipHop Academy and the Contemporary Dance School come together for a flashmob-like large-scale event in a dance intervention in public space. Based on the structure of flocks of birds, schools of fish, and herds, the work asks what invisible threads or multidimensional networks (tramas = tissue) must be at work so that a multiple organism emerges from the sum of individual bodies that is more than the sum of its parts.
“Thinking out of the box is exactly how the box thinks. We are the boxes we strive to out-think,” writes philosopher Bayo Akomolafe, speaker at the eighth edition of Ecopolis where artists, thinkers and doers break open our frames. Social, ecological and economic crises force us to think about a radically different way of living. Can unheard stories help us with that? Stories that link different generations, geographical areas that are far apart or ancient knowledge and technology. Can activism as a form of love take us further than doomsday thinking? “The world is not about to end; we are already living with a different world,” Akomolafe continues. Ecopolis brings stories that depict an inclusive and sustainable future for this new world.
The impact and disastrous consequences of war remain a painful and often underexposed topic in the debate on global warming. Access to raw materials is often the root cause of conflict and ecological warfare, such as the draining of rivers, is increasingly used as an instrument of violence. Military exercises and operations waste enormous amounts of energy and leave behind hallucinatory amounts of debris. It is both cynical and ironic but some exercise areas and war zones are so polluted that no one is allowed to enter them. They are instead declared nature zones where nature is given free rein and can heal. The war in Ukraine also puts violence forcing governments to strive to make our energy sources more sustainable on the agenda.
Drawing on a variety of practices – the study of fungi, fashion, fermentation, dance and sculpture – MOLD approaches the theatre machine as a multiplicity of bodies. It strives to stage not only a performance but also a farm, an environment where dance, objects, audience, light, music, scents and costumes interact as living cultures. A garden dedicated to cultivating, abandoning, inoculating, braiding, duplicating, sprouting, warming up and decaying.
Imagine yourself on a beach, or not, watching it from above. The scorching sun, sunscreen, shiny bathing suits, and sweaty bodies. Weary limbs sprawled lazily on a mosaic of towels. Imagine the occasional shouts of children, laughter, the sound of an ice cream van in the distance. The musical rhythm of the waves in the surf, a soft sound. The rustle of plastic bags swirling in the air, then floating silently, like jellyfish, below the waterline. The roar of a volcano, or an airplane, or a speedboat. Then a chorus of songs: everyday songs, songs of worry and boredom, songs of almost nothing. And below them: the slow creak of an exhausted Earth, a sigh.
Ôss is how you say ‘bone’ in Creole. It is also reminiscent of the expression OSS, common among karate practitioners, which refers to ideas such as pressing, pushing, supporting. What interests us in this show is the bone as a keeper of ancient secrets, revealing anatomical orientations, a structuring box for soft and fragile parts. Building a strong skeleton, where the foot serves as the brain, the heart serves as an elbow, and the knees are a liver and an ear, will naturally be possible for us, since the difference between hard and soft matters little.
