The Goethe Institut has launched a month-long (14th March - 17th April) series of events entitled Europe Actually, focusing on the European common identity, including highlights such as the European Poetry Festival, and "The European Project" on the 26th of March.
The event Dramas from a Divided Europe, which is part of the Institut français / Goethe Institut programme 'Triangular Talks' will reunite theatre director Amy Hodge, writer Noémi Lefebvre and playwright Marius von Mayenburg, and be chaired by Jess Gormley, who produced Brexit Shorts for the Guardian. Throughout the evening, they will discuss the roots of Brexit, as well as wonder what the fault lines thrown up by Brexit are. They will talk about Lefebvre's short film We Are We and the collaboration of Hodge and von Mayenburg on The European Project, a series of fictional monologues. Following up the Brexit Shorts series of 2017, the project gives insight into how the economic and political affect the individual. Take the opportunity to rewatch a selection of the Brexit Shorts and We Are We before the talk.
The evening will open with a screening of the Brexit Shorts, a series of fictional monologues commissioned by The Guardian and Headlong Theatre. Travelling across the UK to give a voice to various and conflicting opinion, the project gives insight into how the economic and political affect the individual. The characters include a Welsh dairy farmer (The Pines written by Gary Owen), a Northern Irish mother (Your Ma’s a Hard Brexit by Stacey Gregg) and an immigration lawyer in Manchester (Shattered by Maxine Peake).
Noémi Lefebvre and Laurent Grappe will also show their film We Are We.
Born in 1964 in Caen, Noémi Lefebvre lives in Lyon and is the author of four novels, all of which have garnered intense critical success: L’autoportrait bleu (2009), L’état des sentiments à l’âge adulte (2012), L'enfance politique (2015) and Poétique de l'emploi (2018). She is a regular contributor to the French investigative website Mediapart and the bilingual French-German review La mer gelée. Further to a PhD on the subject of music education and national identity in Germany and France, she became a political scientist at CERAT de Grenoble II Institute and now teaches research methodology for music post-graduates.
Her novel Blue Self-Portrait was supported by the French Institute (UK) as part of the Burgess programme, and is the recipient of a translation grant by the Centre National du Livre (CNL).
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