TIP in Reggio Emilia: Leon’s Residency with E35 Foundation and MaMiMò Theatre Centre
In the fall of 2024, I had the honor of being selected by E35 Foundation as one of five participating theater artists at a two-week residency at Centro Teatrale MaMiMò in Reggio Emilia, Italy.
The residency took place during the first two weeks of November and consisted of full-hour days of creating and rehearsing at the Officine Creative Reggiane theater Monday through Friday, concluding with a single date of an evening performance in front of a live audience.
Our group, which consisted apart from me of four other theater artists (actors, directors and writers) from different countries across Europe, immediately began working with Fabio Banfo, actor and playwright, and Gabriele Albanese, dramaturge at MaMiMò. Before we started to share, reflect and discuss, we worked to identify a couple of themes and bring in something personal, be it an object, a thought or an idea. The topics ranged from truth and falsehood, existence and non-existence to censorship and self-censorship, digital distortion of reality, language extinction, and the transformation of words, to name some of them.
The common thread that we finally identified in all of this was the matter of what it really means to be human; what the true essence of modern-day humanity is, if there is one at all. These questions were re-imagined into a live performance piece titled What Do We Leave Behind? where, in an unknown distant future, the human species as we know it today has died out and our successors on planet Earth attempt to imagine what our lives had been like, having only a few artifacts left to spark their imagination and help them draw some sort of conclusion. The whole piece was created through the art of devising, a relatively new way of working for me and something I learned a lot from during this experience. Once we had reached some structure in our work, we proceeded to make it as cohesive and sensible as possible under the guidance of the artistic director of MaMiMò, Marco Maccieri.
The constant process of coming up with new ideas, throwing them out and rebuilding them into something completely different day after day has taught me patience and trust on a whole new level. Learning to let go and let the collaborative process lead the way forward, putting any ideas of specific results aside, is something I will carry with me for the rest of my artistic life.
All in all, this experience was immensely valuable to me, both as an artist and as a person. Being able to work as an artist at a theater in a city I have never been to before, meeting, getting to know and learning from wonderful people, both local and international, and performing in front of a completely new audience is something I will cherish forever.
Another reason I was particularly happy to work with MaMiMò specifically is because of the important social work they are engaged in. Located in one of the most segregated neighborhoods of Reggio Emilia, they strive to really be an inclusive artistic center that elevates and brings together people from all sorts of lives and backgrounds in order to strengthen the community, something needed now more than ever. They also work closely with the local prison, organizing acting courses and producing theater performances with the inmates. This is an issue that I particularly care about, so being invited to see Cecilia Donato’s performance about her work with the transgender community in the local prison and the staging of some of their life stories was a big and well-added bonus to the whole experience.
I am forever grateful to everyone at MaMiMò, E35 Foundation, my co-artists at the residency, Theatre in Palm and everyone else that made this experience possible for me. Thank you!
About the artist
Leon Brander is an actor and stage artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. After graduating from The New York Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in 2013, he is currently playing, at the Teaterverket in Stockholm, the role of Ariel in a modern rendition of The Tempest, written and directed by Anna-Maria Ingerö.
Article by Leon Brander
