The TRAINART project aims at strengthening the competitiveness of the European Performing Arts sector and at shaping new skills for cultural professionals interested in developing innovative business models in the Cultural and Creative Industries.

The training programme is, therefore, a precious opportunity for those who work in the performing arts sector all over Europe.

In this brief interview by Theater NU, the four Swedish participants in the training programme explain to us why it is so important to share thoughts, perspectives and creative strategies.

Let’s go on and meet Robin N Spegel, Johan Paus, Freja Hallberg and Andreas Luukinen!

 

 

Name: Robin N Spegel
What I do: I am freelancing as a playwright, mixed with working with the performing arts groups Kvalitetsteatern and CRUSH. I am interested in queer stories and perspectives, desires, sexuality and love / family / relationships as themes and am very inspired by Hollywood movies. In Kvalitetsteatern, we work a lot with devising and often do collage performances based on self-experienced experiences. In CRUSH, we work collectively and make interactive, site-specific sound works.

I am participating in Trainart because: This feels like a very exciting way to get to know other people, by doing something together. I love to write and have my own work process but at the same time think that it is extremely lonely and dream that there should be writer’s rooms for playwrights, that is, that you should write more collectively. So all kinds of explorations about how one can work in new ways I think are exciting!

 

 

 

Name: Johan Paus

What I do: I am a freelance director. Most recently, I directed Let the Right One In at Stockholm Stadsteater Vällingby. My passion is to create engaging and striking performing arts, I want to get close to the brutality of life, enlarge and expose it to let what the words fail to capture take place. My absolute conviction is that art should enable experiences for everyone in an audience or group of participants, I work actively not to create elitist or inaccessible art. I wholeheartedly believe in creating complex and open works. Art for everyone.

I am participating in Trainart because: The performing arts world that I am part of is often closed to the outside world and busy with itself. I want to use Trainart to break away from that closedness and learn from the experiences and perspectives of others.

 

 

 

Name: Freja Hallberg

What I do: I mainly work with PotatoPotato, a performing arts company based in Malmö and Stockholm but which is often also located elsewhere, in Sweden or outside. I work mainly as a director, but also as producer, manager, marketer, concept developer, set designer, lighting designer, technician, costume designer, playwright, lyricist, photographer, composer, editor, programmer and so on. I am very interested in artistic organization – both in terms of organizational form, financing, communication and company structures but also in purely artistic work.

I am participating in Trainart because: My goal with this is both to develop myself, but also to bring with me these experiences and contacts to expand Sweden, which is a fairly isolated place from a contemporary performing arts perspective.

 

 

 

Name: Andreas Luukinen

What I do: I work as a performing arts producer and for a few years now have my main base at ADAS theater at Konstepidemin in Gothenburg. In addition, I have been freelancing, in recent years in projects at Teater Dictat, based in Varberg. At ADAS theater, my passion is to create, together with fantastic employees, productions that open the door to stories and experiences that most of us have not heard of – or that we want to forget. My geographical hubs in life are Donsö in Gothenburg’s southern archipelago, Lund in Skåne and Ostrobothnia in Finland.

I am participating in Trainart because: I look forward to exchanging thoughts and methods about the work we do in our respective fields and countries. Somehow it feels even more important in weird times like this. It would be fun to feel that someone is putting your knowledge in motion, the feeling when you think you have mastered something and someone suddenly opens a new door. Without having to value anything, just experience that… other, new. That feeling. Also longing to work with the rest of the group and explore the places around us (and in us?).