The first project meeting of phōnē took place in Tromsø with selected artists from our 8 theatre partners and the two universities.
In those three days in Tromsø we had not only the opportunity to get to know each other, learn about the challenges of each institution and questioning each other for the meaning of each Regional and Minority language, language in theatre and our theme of Nature and Humans consequently implemented on all levels of artistic production. We had as well the chance to exchange in evening sessions, tradition, and culture of each Regional and Minority language. Each company | theatre represents themselves with a short introduction about their minority culture, the language, certain customs and traditions, songs, dances. Each of them brought a typical drink and food from their region to not only understand but feel the taste of different culture. In addition to that we were able to clear some organizational stuff, we went through every meeting, step by step and setting dates up for our whole project.
We had the opportunity to listen to an inspirational keynote by Arwel Gruffydd with a following discussion. He shared with us his thoughts, views, and experiences on making and presenting theatre in minority languages.
Nathalie Beekmann started via Zoom with targeted interviews with each artistic director and the management team for her evaluation process. She recorded the interviews to gain a deeper understanding of the expectations of this project, the artistic processes, and their plausibility. The interviews will mainly be confidential but parts of them will appear on our website and in the toolkit be:part.
On our last afternoon we went out to artistic and nature strolls through Tromsø led by Ørjan Steinsvik and Astrid Serine Hoel who showed us their favorite places, the oldest pub and tradition of former fisherman and a tour through the Polar Museum to get a better understanding for the nature and culture in the North.
