This is Common Stories, an European project

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.

Common LAB

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.

Find out more HERE.

Good Practices Factory

How to better host diversity on stage, but also around the stage, in our teams and within our audience? How do we try to inhabit these spaces of wealth, possibilities, but also tensions on a daily basis? What strategies have been implemented? What knowledge and experience have been acquired? Working groups will be set up in Lisbon, Bobigny, Cologne, Brussels, Stockholm and Warsaw to reflect together on a series of themes and to confront the very different European ways of understanding such challenges.

Find out more HERE.

Common PROD

How to open our stages to other narratives, the stories surrounding us but that are still to be listened to? Stories that carry the rich and multiple identities of today's and tomorrow's Europe. In 2024 and 2025, seven to eight stage projects, including some grown in the Common LAB, will be supported and coproduced. Accompanied projects will also benefit from the Common Stories network during the creation process and for their dissemination.

Common MOB

How to give greater visibility to existing works that are emblematic of a complex and plural Europe and that we feel, it is essential to share? In 2024 and 2025, four to six projects will benefit from mobility grants to be presented in at least two venues or festivals in the Common Stories network.

A Final Symposium

In November 2025, two days of colloquia and round tables will bring the project to a close at the Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles. By taking a theoretical and scientific look at Common Stories, they will bear witness to the directions and experiences developed during the process, while opening the door to additional contributions that will shed light on the new dynamics and narratives at work in Europe.

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.

More at www.commonstories.eu