MERAKI #2 - International university theatre festival

Published on April 18, 2023 – Updated on April 18, 2023

MERAKI is back for a new edition! From 22 to 27 May 2023, join the student troupes on stage for a multilingual theatre week: performances, meetings, workshops, study days, guided tours, etc.

In partnership with the Thé?tre National Populaire de Villeurbanne,
the Cervantes Institute and the Italian Cultural Institute of Lyon.

Project initiated by the cultural affairs department of Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University;
under the artistic, pedagogical and scientific coordination of Ilaria Moretti.

Photography : Antonella Mazzitelli & Alex Delecaut

Μερ?κι

The essence of ourselves.
Putting a part of our soul into what we create.

This untranslatable word is used in modern Greece to describe what you do with your soul, with panache, when you leave “a piece of yourself” in your work. It is this essence and this tone that we wish to give to our singular and multiple theatre practices at the University: human theatre, built on joy, creativity and commitment. A humanist theatre imagined in its ethical role, created with humility, poetry and a desire to understand ourselves and others.

This year...

We can blaze again.
The manufacture of violence

Ringing out as a call to write, to go on stage, this theme evokes the strength with which the theatre inspires its actors and actresses. It evokes the risk of treading the boards, of calling out, the vast silence, the effort of bodies in tension; it shows creation at work, highlighting the dynamics and radiant sensibilities that create theatre. Manufacturing violence… Making the theatre a place of self-expression, of collective awareness, a place of construction, a space for truth and a mirror of our world.

The rushing river they call violent
But the riverbed pressing it in
Nobody calls violent.

Berthold Brecht, ?ber die Gewalt