THE GENIUS IS DEAD

SABINA DHEIN,
2019
The Theatre Academy Hamburg works together with the universities in Copenhagen, London, Lyon, Vilnius, Lisbon and Teatro Pisa on the Erasmus Plus project "Entrepreneurial Challenges in Theatre Higher Education Curricula". Since 2017, teachers have been discussing the question of how a forward-looking education system must be structured so that young people can develop creative autonomy, formulate and realize their artistic vision. Cultures and forms of theatre and theatrical enterprise within Europe are highly diverse, and so are the training structures. While entrepreneurship has long been an integral part of the curriculum in some countries, it only sounds like a self-marketing and entrepreneurial thinking, alien to others. A three-week research laboratory with students and lecturers from the participating universities took place in Italy in July of 2019. 

The first dinner, careful acquaintance of the students, joyful reunion of the lecturers. The heat is burning over the small village. 

San Miniato Alto is situated above Pisa. Along a small road there are churches, monasteries and frescoes framed squares. It is a Renaissance festival, a place where everyday life is far away. We slept in the Franciscan monastery above the village, we worked and researched in the former Santa Chiara monastery below the village. In between, there are small grocery stores, a few restaurants and three cafés/bars, of which the "Centrale" becomes the most important spot for European communication and rapprochement at night. 

Search, share, not commit, leave things in the air, walk without touching the ground. 

An experiment, a laboratory, in which everyone shares their knowledge, all are learners and researchers. Clear appointments, little rituals. Warm up together every morning. Every evening we discuss the timetable for the next day together. The lecturers offer workshops (lasting several days) on pink cards and short, unique, repeatable training sessions and tools on yellow cards. Students can make offers on green cards.
We are the school of tomorrow! International, diverse, rich of experiences and knowledge, open to all, equal, curious, continuously growing" (Student) 

From week to week, the green cards of the students were more and more present in the timetable, a determined take over of exploding creative joy and freedom. 

Three weeks of learning: about the art of learning, about the art of teaching; Three weeks of sharing: Space, knowledge, ability, experience, stories, fantasies, utopias; Three weeks of inspiration, inner freedom, lived communality. 

In the midst of these centuries-old walls, in the delightful atmosphere of trusting artistic solidarity, the future of the theatre becomes miraculously concrete. The new generation works transnationally, transdisciplinarily, at high level without hierarchies in the team, in the collective. "The genious is dead", students wrote in a manifesto. 
1 Javier Atance Ibar Delimitación del término emprendimiento y su evolución histórica en las leyes educativas españolas https://www.fes-sociologia.com/delimitacion-del-termino-emprendimiento-y-su-evolucion-historica-e/congress-papers/3407/
2 En él se define como “un fenómeno pluridimensional y aunque pueda estar presente en diferentes contextos económicos u otros, y en cualquier tipo de organización el documento se centra en el espíritu emprendedor en el ámbito empresarial”.
3 LOMCE: Ley Orgánica 8/2013, de 9 de diciembre, para la Mejora de la Calidad Educativa. Publicado en B.O.E. nº 295 de 10 de diciembre.