The directors meeting in Santiago de Compostela at Centro Dramático Galego was our sixth project meeting in September 2023.
During 4 days the directors of the professional project plays had the chance to exchange not only first artistic ideas for their plays but get to know each other’s artistic work in general.
We started our meeting to get to know the Galician culture and visited a Galician concert of a well-known musician: Abraham Cupeiro. He is a builder and multi-instrumentalist, he focuses on the recovery of instruments lost in time, and using them to create new sounds and interweaving them into music related to them. The concert was part of the music festival Maré.
The second day we started with the warm welcome and a house tour through the theatre by Fran Nuñez, the artistic director of CDG. Afterwards the general secretary of Linguistic Policy, Valentín García, met with the all the directors and opened our meeting. The importance of strengthening the minority languages in theatre was pointed out by him.
We spent the day getting to know all the very different and interesting working methods with best practice examples of all the present directors of our 8 partners. First artistic approaches to direct the play which was written for phōnē by the playwrights, were presented as well.
In the evening we had the opportunity to visit the City of Culture – Gaiás Cidade da Cultura – designed by a group of architects led by Peter Eisenman. Fran Nuñez gave us an insight view in the Galician culture policy, we visited the museum with Galician photography and art.
Next day, we did an important organizational job: We coordinated, on the impressions and different artistic approaches of each director, the so-called International Theatre Nights for Regional and Minority Languages (festival events). On 8 small festivals a mixed cast of 2 plays of project partners, directed by the guest director of the theatre, will meet. We discussed as well first possible options for translations with Odette Bereska, literary advisor.
During lunchbreak we had the opportunity to visit the local historical market of Abestos in the old town of Santiago. The afternoon continued with discussions on our phōnē network and future plans to continue this important work on strengthening the RML Theatre.
In the evening we visited the cultural world heritage: The Cathedral de Santiago de Compostela and the old town. We got a guided tour through the cathedral up to the roof, which was a very unique experience for all of us.
On the last day we went to a famous island, Isla de San Simon, former leper colony and prison, now a days used for artist in residence.
We met Galician artists in residency and saw three different shows – their results of the stay on the island. We met all the different artists during lunch and got a great inside view in their stay and the history of the island.
