From May 29th to June 1st, the first meeting of the European network of playwrights Fabulamundi – New Voices was held in Rome. This is a new edition of the network that began its work in 2007 with the aim of popularizing and promoting contemporary playwriting among young people.
The multi-day meeting, held in one of the halls of the Roman National Theatre, Villa di Torlonia, was attended by fourteen organizations from nine European countries (Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Romania, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Serbia) with their selected nineteen playwrights. In this significant network, Serbia is represented by Heartefact, which proposed Biljana Srbljanović and Patrik Lazić to be part of the Fabulamundi community of writers. They will, on behalf of Heartefact, hold a significant number of workshops for young playwrights in Serbia over the next three years within the network, as well as have guest appearances in other partner countries. At the same time, many notable European writers from the network will visit Serbia, providing an opportunity for young people in Serbia to learn from them.
Within the Fabulamundi network, a total of 66 creative writing workshops will be held in 9 countries until 2025, involving over 400 young people who will constitute a new generation of playwrights empowered in playwriting with a special emphasis on gender equality, sustainability, and digitalization. The network also includes two significant European theater networks – CAE and ETC – which provide mentoring support.
Upon returning from Italy, Patrik Lazić stated, “The meeting in which Biljana Srbljanović, Andrej Nosov as the director and founder of Heartefact, and I participated was intense and significant. We met many notable colleagues with whom we will collaborate in the next three years and exchange groups of young writers. Some of them will come to us, and somewhere we will go to them. I see my participation in this network as an encouragement for young authors to ‘cross over’ and blur strict authorial divisions. Although theater directing is my primary profession, I am not satisfied with merely interpreting other people’s texts. If film directors have the freedom to be the complete authors of their works, why shouldn’t theater directors more often have the same right? The chronic lack of faith in new texts and new stories puts theater in a losing position compared to the phenomenal narratives we are exposed to everyday through series and movies. The workshops we agreed upon in Rome are expected to result in many new high-quality dramatic texts over the next three years.”
The Fabulamundi-New Voices network project is supported by the European Union through the Creative Europe program.
