PLAY EUROPE Good practice example

At times when Nationalism, Xenophobia and the Hybris of Capitalism try to undermine the humane values of the European Union, students themselves have to take a stand and manifest their need and desire for cultural education and practical experience in the arts. PLAY EUROPE is a project of theatrical exchange with partners across Europe (France, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and Poland) who are active players in terms of providing and sharing ground-breaking cultural opportunities at university. It‘s by Playing together that we naturally take on our role and responsibility as European citizens, thus promoting the key values of solidarity and mutual respect. Each partner hosted one transnational project meeting and/or one implementation activity, all partners participated in the events, together we exchanged and explored new theatrical approaches and methods and got to know each other’s cultural background. In the scope of three transnational project meetings and four international implementation activities we were able to gather 140 active participants and met an audience of approximately 1.500 people. Together we organized two festivals, staged ten theatre plays, worked on collective work performances and gave workshops about sustainability and environmental issues. Due to the arrival of Covid-19, we had to suspend and later on cancel two of our activities as well as our transnational evaluation meeting, otherwise our project went generally as planned.The canceled activities were replaced by a collectively written book about the importance of ‘Europe’, ‘theatre’ and the experience of the project ‘Play Europe’ that brought us together. Our overall objective was to strengthen our partners’ motivation and confidence in the beauty and importance of their cultural work and inspire them by the diverse approaches that our network provided. By the feedback of our participants we are assured that we reached for what we aimed. Many of them applied several times to take part in our activities, enjoyed the great aesthetic differences they encountered and stated that they were especially surprised about how ‘easy’ the expected language barriers were overcome by their shared passion for theatrical expression.