ArtE remains resilient: Theatre premiere and international meeting in Porto and award for pilot project in Barcelona

Good news for ArtE! The Erasmus+ project ArtE - The Art of Employability celebrated the fifth theatre premiere of a pilot project on 18 June. Aiming at the high youth unemployment and lack of perspectives in Southern Europe, ArtE is running pilot projects with young unemployed people. Through a combination of drama training, job coaching and social work, the participants' employability is promoted, soft skills and entrepreneurship skills are strengthened, possible language barriers are broken down. The highlight of the projects are the public premieres in front of an audience, in which the participants can show what can be achieved in only 6 weeks of theater training. The premiere in Portugal can be watched here.

After five runs, it is clear that the pilot projects are the heart of ArtE. An impression of the practical work with the participants can be found in the bilingual ArtE-Blog, which also features a post by Dortmund students who had the opportunity to visit the pilot project in Porto and interview the participants via Zoom.

ArtE started at the end of 2019 and was surprised by the Covid19 pandemic shortly after its launch. Even though this made the start of the project quite bumpy, the project is pushing through: Against all odds and with the help of continuous adaptation processes, five pilot projects have been carried out in Europe so far. These took place in late summer 2020 in Germany (Witten), autumn/winter 2020 in Italy (Sesto and Prato), spring 2021 in Spain (Barcelona) and now June 2021 in Portugal (Porto). The sfs researcher Christine Best also travelled to the last premiere in the National Museum Soares dos Reis, in Porto, Portugal. Together with her colleague Kerstin Guhlemann, she is responsible for the scientific support of the project. In addition to the premiere, an international meeting of the project partners also took place.

After one and a half years of project work, most of which took place under pandemic conditions, it can be said that ArtE, and thus Social Art, is finding its way even under difficult conditions. Based on a great European project consortium, solutions for numerous emerging problems were continuously found with impressive commitment and a lot of creativity. This is also confirmed from outside: Most recently, the Spanish pilot project received the "Buero" award from the Coca-Cola Foundation in Spain and was invited to the Grec Theatre Festival as well as to the International Refugee Day in Barcelona.

More information can be found, for example, in the multilingual toolset on the JobAct method.