Carried out by Albane Guinet-Ahrens, La Belle Ouvrage for the TEATROSKOP Programme 2015-2016.
Launched in 2012, the TEATROSKOP programme (platform for the performing arts in South-East Europe) has endeavoured to initiate, renew and boost exchanges between France and 13 countries in the region in the fields of theatre, dance, circus and street arts and puppetry. The first necessary step has been the mapping of potential partners for French artists and professionals: festivals, receiving houses, theatres and companies established in one of the countries of the programme: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia & Herzegovina, FYR Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Hungary and Turkey.
Over the last three years, TEATROSKOP has endeavoured collect and share information, to initiate and foster encounters, to support the mobility of professionals and accompany some of these innovative projects. The questions of the sharing of knowledge, of training and capacity building in the field also quickly came to the fore as major challenges for the region. At the same time, the new EU programmes (Creative Europe, Erasmus+) put these issues at the very heart of their objectives. La Belle Ouvrage put together a consortium of a dozen partners and put in an application in early 2014. If it wasn’t successful in the end, this project allowed us to initiate new dynamics for TEATROSKOP.”
On the demand of TEATROSKOP – Institut Français, La Belle Ouvrage carried on this initial collection of initiatives, good practices and interviews, which is obviously not an exhaustive panorama of what’s going on.
This document strives to put these in context and to sketch some of the possible routes for further developments. Still, it was conceived and designed as a document likely to be widely circulated amongst training and performing arts professionals. La Belle Ouvrage hopes it proves a relevant and valuable resource for schools and training institutions related to the performing arts. It features both elements of context and ideas for potential partnerships as well as providing contact details. La Belle Ouvrage also hopes that the interviews and the examples of exisiting projects featured in this document can be a source of motivation and lead to future contacts and projects amongst cultural actors within this large region of Europe in which Teatroskop operates.