From Myth to Project
The MEDUSA project takes its name from mythology, but its vision belongs fully to the present. The choice of Medusa is not decorative or symbolic in a superficial sense. It reflects a precise cultural and political position: the desire to create space for voices, identities, and stories that are often considered difficult, marginal, or threatening within dominant cultural frameworks.
If the myth of Medusa tells us about fear – fear of female power, fear of difference, fear of what cannot be easily controlled – the project begins by asking how those fears continue to operate today. What is it that contemporary societies still struggle to look at directly? Which subjects are still simplified, silenced, or excluded from representation? Which stories remain at the margins of public and artistic life?
These questions are central to MEDUSA.
Theatre as a Place of Encounter
In the myth, Perseus confronts Medusa through the reflection of his shield. He cannot look at her directly; he needs a surface, an image, a mediation. This idea is deeply resonant for theatre. Theatre, too, is a space of mediation: it allows us to approach what is difficult, painful, or unsettling through representation. It does not eliminate fear, but gives it form. It creates a shared place where what has been hidden or avoided can be looked at together.
This is one of the founding ideas of the project. In a world where pressures to reduce complexity are growing stronger, theatre can remain a place of encounter, reflection, and transformation. It can help communities face what they fear – not in order to neutralise it, as Perseus does in the myth, but in order to understand it, listen to it, and make space for it.
Theatre can be a mirror, but not a passive one. It is a mirror that questions, unsettles, and opens possibilities. It allows audiences to meet voices and perspectives different from their own, and it creates a collective space in which identities are not fixed once and for all, but explored through conflict, relation, and imagination.
Identity as a Process
At the heart of MEDUSA is the theme of identity. But identity is not understood here as something static, closed, or essential. On the contrary, identity is seen as a process: something that is shaped through language, memory, relationships, and encounters with others. It is unstable, plural, and constantly in transformation.
This is especially important in the contemporary European context, where questions of gender, sexuality, migration, belonging, and cultural difference are increasingly central, but also increasingly contested. Many voices still struggle for recognition: women, LGBTQIA+ people, first- and second-generation immigrants, political refugees, and all those whose lives challenge narrow or exclusionary definitions of identity.
MEDUSA starts from the conviction that theatre can offer a vital space for these experiences to be expressed and shared. Not as fixed categories, but as living, changing, often contradictory realities.
Why Contemporary Playwriting
The project focuses on contemporary playwriting because writing is one of the primary places where subjectivity takes shape. To write is to position oneself in the world; it is to find a form, a voice, and a way of narrating experience. At the same time, dramatic writing is never only personal. It is a space where language becomes dialogue, where individual experience enters relation with collective questions, and where new forms of representation can emerge.
Contemporary playwriting is especially important because it allows theatre to remain in conversation with the present. It is where new conflicts, new sensitivities, and new ways of imagining community can appear most vividly. By supporting the circulation of contemporary plays across languages and countries, MEDUSA aims to strengthen a European space in which new writing can travel, encounter different publics, and generate dialogue beyond national borders.
The project therefore connects artistic research, translation, public presentation, and dissemination. It is not only about producing or promoting texts, but about creating the conditions for exchange: between languages, cultures, artistic practices, and audiences.
Female Leadership and Cultural Change
MEDUSA is also grounded in a clear commitment to female leadership in the cultural sector. This aspect is not secondary; it is part of the project’s identity. In many cultural contexts, women represent a large part of the workforce but remain underrepresented in positions of visibility, authority, and decision-making. Their work is often essential, yet not equally recognised.
By contrast, MEDUSA affirms a different model. It foregrounds the role of women not only as artists and writers, but also as curators, producers, organisers, researchers, and coordinators. It insists that leadership in culture can be exercised through collaboration, care, vision, and the ability to build inclusive processes. In this sense, the project does not simply speak about women; it is shaped by women’s work and women’s perspectives at every level.
To invoke Medusa here is to reclaim her not as an object of fear, but as a symbol of creative power, agency, and resistance.
A Space for the Stories Still to Come
In her play Like Lovers Do (Memoiren der Medusa), Sivan Ben Yishai stages the head of Medusa as a warning for all the stories that are yet to come. That image captures something essential about the spirit of the project. MEDUSA begins from the recognition that there are still many stories waiting to be heard, translated, staged, and shared.
The project exists to make room for those stories: to support contemporary playwriting, to foster inclusive identities, and to create a transnational space in which theatre can once again become a site of encounter and renewal.
For us, Medusa is not a figure to defeat. She is a figure to listen to. She reminds us that what has been feared may also be what most urgently needs to be seen.