Goran Stefanovski
Politics, poetics and practice: a few dramatic ironies from personal
experience
For many years I worked as a playwright on huge, pan-European theatrical projects. They gathered artists from, primarily, East European countries, but were co-produced by West European countries and intended for, primarily, Western European audiences. This packaging caused confusion and consternation in some quarters. There were series of misunderstandings and dramatic ironies, hits and misses. There were two simultaneous and contradictory processes going on. One was trying to champion the cause of sharing cultures, crossing borders, re-mapping and making sense of the new European challenges. The other was trying to avoid the traps and pitfalls of globalization, the “colonial gaze” and cultural imperialism.
The paper will give examples of my projects “Euralien” and “Hotel Europa”. It will also refer to a few addresses I have given to European cultural conferences in the past years, particularly the annual meetings of “Culture Action Europe”. It is an advocacy and lobby organisation based in Brussels, promoting arts and culture as a building block of the European project. Their aim is to influence European policies for more and better access to culture across the continent and beyond. They indeed deal with “Politics, poetic and practice”