 Wow, thank you very much Serge Ranganier and Maria Abek for these very beautiful speeches about Project Europa. We will now pass on to the first sessions of this European Theatre Forum under the common title Social Dimension of Theatre and Performing Arts. So let us introduce Ausa Ricard Dottir, Secretary General of IETM, the largest international network in the performing arts, one of the organizations that formed the European Theatre Forum Consortium. She will lead you through the morning sessions of the Social Dimension of Theatre and Performing Arts. Ausa, welcome. Good morning. Thank you very much, Dina and Ian, and thank you all the speakers of the opening sessions. It was lovely to hear the sound of the German language and as we will amongst other things be addressing language diversity. I briefly thought to myself if I should shift to my own mother tongue. But I'm going to save that for later. As you said, I represent IETM, one of the 12 networks which have jointly worked on preparing this forum for the last months. And the important topic at hand now is the one that we all share and burn for, whether we come from the networks, the European Commission, other stakeholder bodies or the sector at large. What makes the social dimension of the performing arts more fascinating now, more pressing and more important to digest, explore and work together towards concrete actions is the here and now we find ourselves within. A theatre that has for the last part been shut down for months, unable to do what it does best to connect with its audiences in the moment via thousands of theatres and venues and site specific locations across Europe. And this is what we are going to discuss today. How do we pave the way for a better stronger social conditions for the European performing arts. And I am happy to introduce to you our keynote speaker of the session, Gordon Tomka. Gordon is a researcher, a lecturer and an activist, working across the intersection of culture, politics and ecology. He is a professor of University of Arts in Belgrade, and his interest relate to the possibilities of crossing social, cultural and symbolic boundaries. In his keynote, he's going to look into the ways theater creates society and solidarity, and all the interesting avenues this open. Take it away, Gordon. Hello, Sam. And thank you to colleagues that spoke before me as a very motivating, inspiring and optimistic morning indeed. Let me share some words with you. It was a cold pre-industrial winter. But the trees cut neatly into logs were burning in his fireplace. His hands were holding a warm mug of tea. Tea that was picked by underpaid serfs and unpaid slaves in some distant lands and colonies. Prepared for him by his servants, just as was the food that his stomach was still digesting with the help of billions of bacteria in his gut. Yet, he wasn't thinking of slaves, servants, forests, colonies or his microbiome. He was thinking about truth and the ways he can take it from the cardinals, from the church without needing to share it with trees, women, bees, slaves or any of the numerous untrustworthy subjects surrounding him. As the warmth of the fireplace was traveling into his body, his mind was traveling outwards into the unknown, colonizing planes he didn't even know existed. His name was René Descartes, and he was alone together. Descartes is the father of an egocentric paranoid epistemology, a way of knowing that tries to know the world without contaminating itself with the suspicious juices of two of its epistemological arch enemies. First, his own body, those filthy senses, so easy to be fooled, so corrupt. Second, bodies of the others. You simply cannot trust them. They're no match for a high quest of finding the truth. So, he trusted his senses just as much as he trusted his servants. However, paradoxically, these damn bodies, filled with liquids, pulsating, flimsy, shaking and quivering, so philosophically incompetent, are at the same time what makes that quest possible in the first place. These bodies kept him alive. Without them, he would be blind, deaf, hungry and cold. But sharing the cogito with them, oh no, that meant not only sharing the knowledge of the world, but also sharing its privileges, and he didn't like it. Everyone has a body, and everyone can feel cold and hunger, so everyone can claim they know the truth. We think, therefore, no, no, no way. So with the posture of the brave lieutenant, he declared, I now enter the theater of the world with my mask on, with my mask on, with my mask on. Welcome to the Cartesian theater, cozy and certain, yet filled with anxiety, a paranoid theater, guns by the bedside, barbed wires and mind guards, a theater with only one seat. Reserved. Reserved for a cold face of the objective scientist, unmistakable design of the robotic arm, absent look of the romantic artist and unbendable will of the superhero. Reserved for pre-stress concrete of a construction miracle, and for judges straight as an arrow. For log frames, matrices, evaluation forms, and application platforms. For everything that is built to last, to stand still, to prevail. Paranoid theater is an exclusive, sleek, cynical creature that dubs everything, but itself. Brave, alone, and against others. Individuality, invincibility, certainty. At the gates of it, crowds gather. A historic woman yelling something, humback whales, protesters demanding something, a passing tornado smashing someone's house, a self-doubting young actor, a failed exam paper, a precarious warehouse worker, a confused algorithm, a stressed human body, a suspicious migrant lurking in the back of it, a form with a missing page, murder and thieves, hordes of homeless sleeping all around, and a bunch of incenting beans for decorum. Maybe something like crabs or whatever is on sale. They are confused, neurotic, disposable and exotic. Entrance denied. Paranoid theater has a peculiar relationship to life. Anthropocentric, profit-centric and industrious. Life starts with sowing the seed, they say, with activation, with improvement. Land, women, pupils, citizens, plots, audiences, ideas, all reserves, all fertile, but passive. One needs to get things going with them, you know. But no, life waits for no one. Activation is colonization. Life is very amicable. It likes to hang out with friends. Germination, you know, is only a reshuffling, a reconfiguration, not the beginning, but the continuation. Life forms create more life forms because they can't live alone without others. But in the Cartesian theater, the paranoid theater, life is broken into pieces, dissected, hierarchized, analyzed and categorized, to the point of no return. When objects start floating in the weightless, seemingly material intellectual fluid. Abstract, fetishized and meaningless. Lonesome, de-territorialized and boring forms of life. Burgers, almonds and quinoa are delivered from the sky. Digital data lives in the cloud. Pork, not pig. People choose their destinies. Waste disappears without trace. Perhaps somewhere in the backstage, somewhere beyond the frontier of their private concrete territories. Equally troublesome is the paranoid staging of the society. Society is a neatly arranged collection of individual paranoid projections. Like a chain of fast food venues, people simply spring up in logical formations. Following a formula, respecting hierarchies, protecting paranoid boundaries. Continuous naturalizations of paranoid biological theories. I was five and he was six. We rode on horses made of sticks. He wore black and I wore white. He would always win the fight. Bang, bang, he shot me down. Bang, bang, I hit the ground. Bang, bang, that awful sound. Bang, bang, my baby shot me down. With enough management, enough agencies, enough policing, enough middlemen, it can all work. Can it all work? It can all work. Can it all work? It can all work until the weekend comes. Until the night falls, until the doors close. And the ghosts of the excluded start haunting the paranoid spectator. Because life, life knows no curtains. Boundaries are leaking. Backstages of the world are spilling over. Our living worlds are getting denser and denser every day. Our societies are turning into gated bubbles. The roads we build bring back viruses. Smoke from our chimneys return home. China takes no more foreign garbage. We are encountering the limits of our certainty built on paranoia. An alternative to paranoid boundaries. An alternative to lone exclusive spaces. An alternative to paranoid theater. Do we know a different way? Yes. Oh, welcome to the curious theater. It's a different and undisciplined, brave and fragile. Uncertainly, but trustful. Made of bodies that move, that feel, that reveal. Bodies who come forth, who come together. Bodies that resonate. Eeking eyes and explosive hearts, sincere and utterly precarious. Alive. A pluriverse, a world with many worlds inside. This vulnerable, ephemeral and erroneous creation is not symphonic. It is music made of disagreement and trust. It's the noise of a forest. It's the silence at the crossroads. No universals, no unicodes, no metrics. Symbiosis without management. So curious theater is filled with talking trees, self-doubting critics, permeable mortars, welcoming smiles, migrating plants, inexplicable hopes, never ending deadlines, first texts of unknown playwrights, under research, huge symbiotic creatures, amazing tiny particles and composting piles. It is a slow, never-ending freefall of a snowflake. A silent rumble of moving continents. An invisible yet persistent growth of children. An absent presence of a distant loved one. It's not a freak show performed for the reaffirming joy of the paranoid normals. It is just what happens when everyone stops acting normal and gets theatrical. Light, night, falls on Bristol. At the deserted roof of a city garage, dancers stretch their limbs. Audiences find their way through cars, lifts and corridors into the open air. The rain starts and the dance begins. A wild dance, a weird dance, a dangerous dance. Concrete with white parking stripes, reincarnated as a dance floor. A theater slowly morphs into rave, dancing turns into resistance. It is a dance that transforms lines, dance that demands the space, space for moving limbs, for skins and bones, for breathing, for living. In the messy reality of Cairo and its metropolitan street life, between surprise and enchanted publics and moral control of the streets, one can find a peculiar and thought-provoking practice of open air theater. An artistic collective, Mahatat, knows the streets are overlooked by numerous law and order institutions. So their theater is quick. These guys as street vendors, they pack their stages, props and effects in rolling carts. All of a sudden, a theater is born. Unconventional, disturbing, entertaining. Nevertheless, it is a lasting and haunting reminder that streets belong to the people, to the laughter, to the solidarity. Finally, in the Colombian rainforest, silence is a sign. A sign of an upcoming danger. Paramilitaries, drug traffickers, gold diggers, illegal lodgers. They look for victims for unexploited resources for opportunities. These gangs profit from fear, from people hiding in their own houses. But not here. Silence they bring is a calling. It's time for theater. Women of this village come together outside their homes and start singing. A choir of resistance. A choir of dignity. A choir of life. Ana Julia Hidalgo, one of the leaders of the group proudly says, if they came to kill us, we will meet them as bodies that sing for life. They are still singing. So these tireless theaters represent a different political imagination. One then counts no losses and expects no wins. An imagination, not an expertise. A gut feeling, not big data. An embrace, not an expedition. Because no one knows exactly how the change will work. Because there are many right answers if there are enough questions. In the curious society, in the curious theater, society is about living next to a complete stranger. Feeling that we are inevitably dependent on others. That sooner or later, more or less often, we will end up in someone else's arms. Vulnerable, broken, contagious, ignorant and trustful, skeptical and hopeful. Making curious theater work is a work of care. Feeling care, sharing care. In the end of it all, we might learn how to live with bodies of our own and bodies of others together, weird again. Thank you for staying curious. To you, Ausem. Thank you, Goran. Thank you for those strong words, the poetry, the singing. And the food for thought for us in the coming days. I love the vision of the curious theater. Now, dear people, we move on, and we have three equally interesting workshops you can now join. And you have to bear with me, because I need to give you a little bit of information for you to be able to make your choice. First up, working conditions in the performing arts. The contribution of the sector to social cohesion, economic development and international relations is recognized and celebrated. Yet, the working conditions of our professionals are challenging these days. And the situations vary greatly from country to country, which today stifles all potential for cross-border collaboration. This first working group will explore the possibilities of an EU-level action on working conditions for artists and cultural professionals. Daphne Tepper from uni Europa will moderate this important session, in which we will hear artist voices. We will learn about the main challenges that have been mapped by the sectorial networks and associations, and we will get to know the visions of members of the European Parliament and representatives from two national governments. This is session one. Session two, they call it co-create now. Young performing artists will shape Europe's culture in the future. And most of them study in theatre schools and academies. Experts from respective universities in Eastern and Western Europe will discuss challenges, too, and chances of international collaboration in higher theatre and performing arts studies. They will sketch developments and focus on current issues like the autonomous Republic of Learning that Budapest students and teachers installed during their recent campaign for academic freedom against the Hungarian government. In their discussion, the panellists will unfold a perspective on the future of higher education of young artists and work out proposals for meaningful European action. This is session two. And then the third workshop. We will discuss access and diversity in theatre and performing arts. How can the arts be more inclusive? We will try to name the challenges and think about funding and policy to ensure access for a diverse audience as well as representation on stage. Moderator Stefan Fischer-Fels from Assatee International will, and this is his words, have some fascinating guests. So these are the three sessions that you can now choose from. And now Tina and Ian will take over and explain to you how all this is going to happen. Thank you and see you later today. Hi again. So this is the point where we can briefly explain how the attendees get to the sessions. So on the forum platform, you have three. You are already in the auditorium. You will find there are three links to the three different Zoom sessions and a longer description of the content and speakers in each session. So you can choose which one will be the most interesting for you. For those following this first day of the European Theatre Forum through the live stream, the three simultaneous sessions will be live streamed on the same page of the European Theatre Forum's website. And the streamed videos of the three sessions will also be available online after the forum. So you will have the possibility to catch up on their content. We will also, as already Alza mentioned, have a FinTech plenary session. So join us at 12.45 to hear about the discussion in each session. And there will be also QA where you can join and you have the opportunity to speak with all the speakers.