Common Stories: Three Years Coming to an End

Common Stories is coming to an end after a three-year odyssey since February 2023 between Bobigny, Lisbon, Stockholm, Brussels, Cologne, Warsaw, Cairo and Maputo. In December in Brussels, partners and artists will gather one last time to look back on these three years and imagine possible futures.


Decentre the Stage
Three Days to Look Back on Three Years of Common Stories

From 11th to 13th December 2025, Decentre the Stage will bring together at the Theatre National Wallonie-Bruxelles the project partners, artists from CommonLAB 2023, 2024 and 2025, as well as artists from the Brussels scene, professionals, practitioners, academics and thinkers to question, confront, celebrate and reinvent what diversity, identity and belonging mean in today's Europe.

Curated by Safia Kessas, journalist, film director and member of the Advisory sCommittee, in dialogue with Isabelle Collard and the Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles team, the programme includes:

Institutional Diversity: Observations and Lived Realities, a workshop that puts into perspective issues of diversity in institutions.
Anatomie de la Risposte, a performance by Laurence Rosier based on her book La Riposte, explores the many ways of responding to discriminations, injustice or abuse of power.

Three round tables will gather CommonLAB artists and Brussels-based guest artists and activists around three themes: Family & Utopia, Memory & Mourning and Gender, Body & Resistance. Round tables will be moderated by Youness Anzane, Peggy Pierrot and Dr. Sarah Youssef.

Common Stories: Decentre the Stage will bring together on Friday 12 December at 7:30pm Mame-Fatou Niang, co-director of the documentary Mariannes Noires and founder of the Center for Black European Studies & the Atlantic at Carnegie Mellon, Hortense Archambault, director of the MC93, Safia Kessas, as well as artists Pankaj Tiwari (CommonLAB 2024) and Emmanuel Ndefo (CommonLAB 2025).

The Good Practices Factory 2025 Handbook is Online!

Through texts and interviews, this third and final 2025 publication reviews unique journeys around a common theme: Radicalism: a long-term transformation towards diversity?

From a reflection on racism within the theatre in Bobigny and Lisbon, in partnership with the União Negra das Artes, to perceptions of notions of diversity within teams in Brussels and Stockholm, from the development of a common Code of Conduct for cultural venues in Cologne to greater accessibility of the theatre for audiences experiencing mental health crises in Warsaw, our journeys towards more valuable practices have taken different paths over the past three years.

Download the GPF handbook / English version
Download the GPF handbook / French version

CommonPROD projects on tour

Over three years, CommonPROD have been offering CommonLAB artists various forms of project support, including residencies, research grants, co-production and production schemes. Twelve CommonLAB 2023 and 2024 artists have been accompanied, and several performances are already touring.

Upcoming dates in 2026


Sycomore by Saphir Belhkeir
AMC93 - Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis production, coproduced by Alkantara Lisbon, afriCOLOGNE and Riksteatern Stockholm, as part of Common Stories, a Creative Europe programme funded by the European Union.

– 30 January 2026, Festival Parallèle (Marseille)


Mother Tongue by Lucía García Pullés
Coproduced by the MC93 - Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis and Riksteatern Stockholm, as part of Common Stories, a Creative Europe programme funded by the European Union. A Bureau Cokot production.

– 17 January 2026, Festival 30/30 (Bordeaux)
– 31 January 2026, Festival Parallèle (Marseille)
– 23 May 2026, CAC-Brétigny (Brétigny-sur-Orge)


C!s-Tem Error by Nadim Bahsoun
Coproduced by Théâtre National Wallonie- Bruxelles and Riksteatern Stockholm, as part of Common Stories, a Creative Europe programme funded by the European Union. A Mi-Mai production.

– June 2026, Rencontres à l’échelle (Marseille)
– December 2026, Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles (Brussels)


Kabylifornie by Agathe Yamina Meziani
Coproduced by the MC93 - Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis, as part of Common Stories, a Creative Europe programme funded by the European Union. A production of Les Halles de Schaerbeek.

– 08 to 13 June 2026, Atelier 210 (Brussels)
– November 2026, Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles in the frame of the Crush Festival (Brussels)

COMMON STORIES

To know more, please find out about our activities, the CommonLAB artists, the supported productions and the different Common Stories programmes on our bilingual website: www.commonstories.eu/en

Common Stories is run by the Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis, MC93 (Bobigny, France), in partnership with the Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles (Brussels, Belgium), Alkantara (Lisbon, Portugal), Culturgest (Lisbon, Portugal), africologneFESTIVAL (Cologne, Germany), Riksteatern (Stockholm, Sweden), in association with TR Warszawa (Warsaw, Poland) and in 2025 with Orient Productions (Cairo, Egypt) and Les Récréâtrales (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso).