-
Festival visit: Meet us at Schöne Aussicht
Every other year our German partner JES Stuttgart hosts their wonderful festival; Schöne Aussicht. With a blend of international and local productions, the festival attracts several international delegates.
All the partners in the project is here, and during the week we will see shows, participate in talks and meetings.
The team at JES told us this about the curation process for their international program:
One and a half years ago, the curation process for the international guest performance programmebegan with an open call. We asked: HOW DO YOU HANDLE UNCERTAINTY? A question that we are constantly confronted with in a rapidly and unpredictably evolving world and that we hope will inspire and empower us – not only in our artistic work, but also in dealing with social, economic and political challenges. We therefore set out in search of productions that deal with uncertainty in terms of content, form or working methods. Over 200 applications were submitted, which enabled us as the curatorial team to put together a diverse festival program of productions that we see as possible responses, reactions or attitudes towards uncertainty.
In the ten selected productions, we experience uncertainty in a first encounter, in emerging and breaking relationships, in worries about the future, in the finiteness of life. Sometimes it is about plugging a dripping leak in the ceiling, sometimes about not getting lost between truth and lies. Some ask how we can hold, support and carry each other. Others simply ask: what do YOU need?
-
Digital Workshop #4: Imagining the theatre as a third place
Focus and rationale
One of the goals of Scenekunstbruket’s workshops is to carry out international research on the theatre house as a physical space and place. In this workshop, we chose to focus on the Third Place – Physical theme, which was particularly relevant at the time, as Kloden theatre was in the middle of its architectural planning phase. This made it possible to discuss and explore concrete adaptations. Both the Artistic Director and the Producer of Kloden participated in the workshop.
Building on our previous digital workshop (#2), we wanted this session to take the work a step further by imagining a complete theatre house. As the structure of the last workshop had worked well — both in terms of technical platforms and the decision to focus on one main task — we chose to build on the same format for this workshop.
Structure and task
A large group was attending this digital workshop, and a mix of familiar and new faces, both young and adultsAfter a brief ice-breaking session, participants were divided into six departments, each responsible for a different aspect of creating a fictional theatre house:
- Architecture
- Brand development
- Interior design
- Artistic programming
- Social events
- Ethics, inclusion and social responsibility
Each group developed proposals for their area, resulting in a collectively imagined theatre house. The task was intentionally open-ended, allowing humour, ambition and critique to coexist. This enabled participants to articulate expectations, needs and values connected to cultural spaces. The group engaged into the tasks, and with a lot of laughter and afterthought, we found several good tips in how to think at our institutions’ programming.
Outcomes
The workshop provided insight into how young people from different countries imagine welcoming, inclusive cultural institutions. It also demonstrated how digital formats can support complex collaborative thinking, even with larger and more diverse groups.
One of the findings was that the digital workshops function well as a way to stay in contact with young people who naturally move on with their lives in different cities, at universities, and in other contexts. It was encouraging to see that several participants experience the 3Place project itself as a third place — a space where they meet both familiar and new national and international peers they are not otherwise in contact with outside the project framework.
-
#3 digital workshop: Non-rational Inspiration and Spontaneous Creation
he workshop gathered 18 young people and professionals from Norway, Germany and the Czech Republic and was led by theatre educators Jana Nechvátalová and Klára Fidlerová.
The 3rd Digital workshop provided mainly 3 opportunities:
- to reconnect the young as well as adult participants who have already met at Camp Involve
- to make the first connection with new young participants from Norway and Germany
- to create
Focus and approach
The workshop focused on artistic creation driven by non-rational sources such as intuition, chance and spontaneity. It also functioned as a reconnection point after the summer break, while welcoming new young participants into the 3Place network.
Rather than working towards a polished outcome, the workshop emphasised process over result, encouraging participants to trust impulses and experiment without evaluation.
Hopefully, it was the first successful step to find our 3place in artistic creation.
Methods and tasks
Participants worked through a sequence of short creative exercises:
- Brainstorming inspiration: mapping personal sources of inspiration on a shared mural board
- Automatic writing: five minutes of uninterrupted writing based on musical stimuli
- Dadaist poetry: assembling poems from selected words and sentences to create unexpected meanings
- Classical comics: collaboratively adding speech bubbles to classical paintings without verbal communication
- Fictional film synopsis: playfully developing stories through associative thinking
Each task was designed to reduce self-censorship and support collective play in a digital setting.
Outcomes
Despite being fully online, the workshop created a strong sense of connection and shared experience. Participants reported feeling free to experiment and engage creatively with others, including peers they had not met before. The workshop demonstrated that artistic play and group cohesion can be fostered digitally when tasks are simple, imaginative and clearly framed.
