The Creative Collaboration Project Fund, launched in August 2008, has now come to a successful close, supporting 25 distinct projects taking place all across the UK and South East Europe in 2009–10.

The successful Greece-led project is Tales from the Bar of Lost Souls, a new, inspiring, multilingual theatre work, which weaves together experiences and expressions from different nationalities and cultural backgrounds. It focuses on ports as places of mobility, migration, creativity, imagination and shared histories. It is an international co-production combining new technologies with narrative and physical theatre techniques.

The lead partner, the National Theatre of Greece together with the Cyprus Theatre Organisation and UK theatre company Imitating The Dog have teamed up to create an innovative new piece of theatre to be presented in all three countries between September 2009 and March 2010.

The inspiration for the piece arises from the notion of Mediterranean ports as cultural melting pots, spaces of “heterotopias”, where national borders and identities are challenged by the ever-changing mix of ethnicities and nationalities. Set in an imaginary bar in an imaginary European seaport in the early 20th century, this new theatre work is a magical realist exploration of the importance of the Mediterranean to the psyche of the New Europe.

The collaboration is complemented and extended by a genuine cross-cultural exploration of workshop techniques aimed at young theatre professionals and theatre lovers. By focusing on the practice of story-telling and the use of multimedia techniques, the educational programme will enable young participants to articulate their own accounts of living on the border's edge and their own perception of the modern world.

			Director: Andrew Quick
			Text: Andrew Quick, Pete Brooks, Imitating the Dog
			Music: Simon Wainwright, Ed Waring, Richard Huxley
			Video: Simon Wainwright
			Set/Costumes: Laura Hopkins
			Cast: Myrto Kouyiali, Emmanuela Charalambous (Cyprus), Dimitris Kartokis, Nikoleta Kotsailido (Greece), Adam Nash, Simon Wainwright (UK)