My Tandem journey started in October 2017. I was absolutely lost in so many amazing stories and projects people are doing all around the Europe, and summarizing what I’m doing in 1 minut during speed dating – oh my god, it was a nightmare! Than I met Malou. Though our theater companies collaborated in the past, I didn’t know her. She is a bussiness coordinator at ZID Theater and part of its organisational team. In Serbia, in small indipendent theater companies its pretty rare to have logistic and business team to support the artistic one. Usually, as it is in my case cause I’m an actress and drama pedagogue, if you wanna do and make art, you have to build up all of your competences and skills (even ones you don’t have or don’t like) regarding organising, writing applications, marketing etc etc.

So, Bralou was born. First we came up with ideas for collaborations regarding projects our companies already are developing; but slowly, during conversations with Tandem team, who were sensitive and smart enough to catch the real essence of what could our project and process be (bravo Tandem!), we switched and focused to a theme of young leaders in theater companies and methods of knowledge transfer from senior managment. In a way, we switched to ourselves. And this was the exact and real need of my company and myself. We are non-stop in a working mode, that time and space to reflect, (re)think, plan and even fantasise about the possibilities for the future are so rare and so precious, that when you finally have them it feels like the touch of a fresh breeze.

The process we’ve designed and followed during this months was quite intense and beautiful at the same time. We went back, together with our directors Karolina Spaić (ZID) and Tatjana Pajović (POD), to a very vision of our work, and through this ’’Autodiagnosis phase’’ we’ve came up with certain important points from our personal history and history of our companies, as well as circumstances that led to this moment and created a contexts in which we are now. And, as one of the most significant revelations during this time was that after all, when you put out everything, the context, the turbulent circumstances, people coming and going away, so micro and macro point of view, the only ’’thing’’ that is sustainable is – yourself. The only thing that can make a real change are individuals aware of the importance of human competencies, such as empathy, communication, leadership. Change that comes from the inside, but change that connects us on a human level. So we focused our work into this direction. During Malou’s placement in Belgrade, we’ve created a workshop for young people of POD that dealt with personal competencies, and we’ve tried it out also during interim meeting in Greece with our Tandem collegues. We have an idea how to develop our work in this sustainable way of thinking, but about this we will write some other time. 🙂

This was a little sneak-a-peek into this deeply personal process of ours. The outcomes and methods we’ve created we will present during my placement in Amsterdam and ExploreZ festival (last week of September). Also, we will present it during Conference ’’What about the future – 18 years of POD’’ in December in Belgrade.

And the future is yet unknown, but we started to shape it together!