The arts possess the ability to interfere with different cultures or social fabrics within a community. They lead to individuals forging relationships with the past and present, with the surrounding environment, and with the community itself; in short, with others. CROSSING STAGES is a project created by the Aula de las Artes at the Carlos III University of Madrid with the idea of building a great "ship" of European university artists, a metaphor for the stage project to be performed at each "port", breaking down boundaries and providing visibility for experiences of life and art which will bring together their "navigators" and reduce cultural and social distance. The aim is to promote intercultural dialogue between generations and social exchange, or a sort of barter process, seeking the creation of links between individuals and culturally distanced European groups, making them all part of the same experience where a project all together will turn into the art of relating what is different, giving it visibility and enabling communication based on coexistence, empathy and reciprocity.As an artistic principle we shall use the recreation of universal myths and their individual interpretations in each region, with special emphasis on the ones that can be linked up with the social reality being experienced in Europe today i.e. inspiration from a myth will serve as a pretext to research into a European reality which can be understood on a more general level from the different viewpoints of each participating country. It is important for us to talk about the difficulty of considering ourselves Europeans in a world where there is increasing migration and displacement: by staging a common heritage of myths and culture we seek to shed light on the conflicting elements of today that hinder effective integration between our countries, and with this clear in our minds, achieve a truly joint, much-needed and useful artistic dialogue.
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