Chronicle of a trip to Craiova

We’ve come to Craiova (Romania) for the Shakespeare Festival, held biannually in the city, one of the largest in all of Europe. At La Perla 29, we’re working to internationalize the company, both by exporting Catalan theatre abroad and by fostering cross-border exchange at the Teatre La Biblioteca. With these hopes in mind, we’re preparing the revival of the Catalonia Shakespeare Festival, which had already held eleven editions until 2015, in Santa Susanna, Mataró, and Barcelona.

In Craiova, we’ve had the chance to see firsthand how the festival works there, how it’s organized, and how, over the years, they’ve managed to make it a crucial event for companies from all around the world. It has also helped us start imagining our own festival, the projects that could fit into it, questioning why it’s important to celebrate a Shakespeare Festival in Catalonia, how La Perla 29 can make it unique based on the company’s experience, and what kind of connection we’d like it to have with the city and with various artistic and cultural projects in our country.

We’ve felt the warm welcome of the members of the European Shakespeare Festivals Network (ESFN), spread across 12 countries on the continent, which held its annual meeting in Craiova that we attended to present our intentions of reviving the festival at home. They applauded the restart of this festival, which had once been the reference point for Southern Europe, and unanimously approved its integration into the Network. We’ve also decided to participate in one of the shared projects, the Shakesphere, which coordinates international tours of new productions by emerging artists.

As we move forward with La Perla’s international project, we realize it’s crucial to believe in it. To dedicate efforts to understanding other realities, learning how culture is organized in other countries, contrasting visions from artists and cultural managers in contexts far from our own… All of this broadens our perspective, makes us more imaginative, personally connects us to people from other theatres and companies, and it is through these personal bonds and impulses that collaborations and exchanges can come to life.

We want to share with you a series of questions and ideas from the team that is launching a new Shakespeare Festival in Ukraine, and we invite you to reflect on them as well:

"Right now, war is the most present thing in Ukraine; such a war is the expression of a patriarchal system, with all its violence and aggressiveness. How do we create a Festival that is not patriarchal with Shakespeare?"
(Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Richards...)

"Our audience is traumatized by the war; how can we speak to them? How do we speak to a traumatized audience? What are the traumas of our audience? How do we address them?"

"Now, in the midst of the war we are living through, we realize that many companies and theatres are doing plays that draw from Ukrainian theatre in its origins, its forms, and its themes. Maybe we need to rethink this human story, the story we’ve been telling for a long time, that is now at risk of collapsing."

“Theatre is a place where we get together, we play together, no matter the circumstances.” And remember that in a Ukrainian village's theatre, they performed a children’s play, and the kids came in through the corridors in silence, calm, still; and they left playing, shouting, running, and chasing each other. That play broke open something stuck, a sadness, a lack of play and life.

And someone in the audience exclaims: “Here is theatre!”

“THEATRE IS HERE!”