The Arts
Art is the common denominator for all theatre companies involved in the network Crossing The Line. Our companies are artistically led, professional theatres and at the same time committed to meeting the challenges of producing, playing and touring theatre performed by artists that are disabled and non-disabled. For it is a challenge, as all art should be. And the biggest challenge is often not the disabilities of the artists, but rather the preconceptions of people around us and the expectations from the surrounding world on what we should and should not be.
The Projects
The first project Crossing The Line, was carried out in 2014-2017, culminating in a theatre festival in Roubaix, France in January 2017. Click here to see a short film about the project from the European Commission.
Trasna Na Líne
Trasna Na Líne is a partnership between Moomsteatern in Sweden, Compagnie de L’Oiseau Mouche in France, Blue Teapot Theatre Company in Ireland, Theater Babel Rotterdam in Holland and Teatr 21 in Poland, co-funded by the EU Creative Europe Programme. It starts in September 2019 and the partners are coming together to engage with each other’s productions at a specially designed festival as part of the Galway 2020 Capital of Culture.
To effect lasting change on how the mainstream performance sector understands and works with artistically-led performance made by learning disabled (LD) artists, Trasna Na Líne (TNL) will create a strong network of organisations, artists and audiences which recognizes and celebrate their talents. To achieve this we’ve set 4 TNL objectives:
1. To show the quality of our work, create 5 new touring theatre productions, made with professional LD theatre makers, for presentation at mainstream festivals.
2. Establish deep, lasting relationships between companies and artists in the partner countries, so that we can generate more opportunities to develop skills, learn from each other & make work together.
3. Involve companies from other countries in Europe and beyond so that more companies and LD artists are involved in creating new opportunities.
4. Raise the profile of LD artists & their work across Europe & beyond, via focused national dissemination activities, so that more people understand, support and know about it.
Ogmius
Ogmius is a partnership between Compagnie de L’Oiseau Mouche in France, Mind The Gap in UK and Moomsteatern in Sweden, co-funded by the EU Erasmus + Programme.
The projects aims to investigate existing resources for learning disabled (LD) artists training and support systems, following a methodology that will ensure dissemination and transferability. Activities within the project will be:
1. Professional practice workshops designed for LD artists. These workshops will enable LD artists to experience new practices and therefore gain new aptitudes. They will enable peer evaluation and self-evaluation as well as progression routes for the LD artists.
2. Job-shadowing modules for support staff. They will enable support staff to observe methods applied in other each partner’s organisation and share them to create a common corpus.
3. Ogmius will generate a training corpus, filmed documentation and a good practices report. Partners have chosen to work with a Project Dramaturg who will curate these outputs.
4. 3 events will take place during the length of the project that will be opened as widely as possible to local and international participants.