Common Stories
Common Stories has been initiated by the Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis, MC93 (Bobigny, France), in partnership with the Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles (Brussels, Belgium), Alkantara, Culturgest (Lisbon, Portugal), africologneFESTIVAL (Cologne, Germany), Riksteatern (Stockholm, Sweden), in association with TR Warszawa (Warsaw, Poland).
Orient Productions – D-CAF Festival (Cairo, Egypt, 2023), CulturArte (Maputo, Mozambique, 2024) e Les Récréâtrales (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 2025) are the cultural structures involved in the project on the African continent.
Over three years, from February 2023 to December 2025, Common Stories will set out to discover other, often invisible, stories and practices, while reflecting on the development of frameworks that are more conducive to welcoming and listening to different voices and perspectives.
Over the past 30 years, the European society has undergone profound demographical transformations. The question of the “Other” is shaking up national political debates and the very values of the European project. Performing arts, the art of representation par excellence, dealing with imagination and narratives, should mirror this increasing diversity, as well the complexity of European societies today. But on stage, among our audiences and within our teams, there is still a long way to go.
At its own scale, Common Stories will address the diversity issue in the performing arts through a multiple approach.
Each year, Common LAB brings together eight emerging artists based in Europe and working in the field of theatre, dance, and performance. Experimenting with collective and individual devices and broadening European narratives, this moving laboratory offers opportunities to learn and discover practices, artistic universes, professional environments and urban work contexts. The process allows knowledge and experience sharing, as well as the development of a personal artistic research.
