Five years ago when it was decided that Stockholm would have the honor of organizing the Cultural Capital of Europe in 1998, I reflected on the fact that Sweden for many years had been a link between the Third world, Eastern Europe and Western Europe. It supported struggles for independence in Africa and Latin America, it gave shelter to refugees and it was instrumental in creating dialogue in international conflicts. Through this history, Sweden acted as a "window to the world". This history placed certain demands on us, as Swedes and as Europeans. We at Intercult began the research process that resulted in Landscape X and the start of our cooperation with The New Theatre Institute/Latvia.

Europeans are all over the world. The most open-minded among them don't only move to another country, wear the right clothing and eat local food. They allow themselves to be transformed by the experience. European culture at its best has to do with the capacity to weave together a human pattern of multiple cultures. In European museums, arts and tourism you find a patchwork of influences from a history of extensive emigration, immigration and cultural imports. There's Alhambra in Spain, the whole of southern Italy and Sicily, the fuzzy borders between Asia and the eastern parts of Europe. A lot of cultural overlap. Meeting points.

It is a very large world.

Every individual has a story, just as every nation has history and a narrative. Problems arise when the organic transformation of this narrative is limited or controlled. This happens through isolation or through other ethno-centric mechanisms.

Great changes, meaningful changes, take place in the energy field between differences. For this reason, many contemporary artists are focusing on intercultural exchange as a source of inspiration and as a metaphor for a world where diversity is visible in a new way. This is not necessarily the same as "globalisation", which most often means an elimination of differences.

When a multi-ethnic theatre ensemble prepares a work, they have - roughly observed - three choices:

they can individually affirm their ethnic identities, creating a company of personalities defined on ethnic lines

they can try to ignore their individual roots and create a homogenous language and attitude, based on imagined commonness

they can cross-over, sharing their cultural memories and expressions with one another until a new collective chemistry is formed, the result of the meetings that took place

Many companies and individual artists in Europe today are taking the third alternative. They are observing, borrowing, transforming and re-mapping one another's territory. Theatres like Theater an der Ruhr (M¸lheim, Germany) Teatro delle Albe (Ravenna, Italy), Need Company (Brussels, Belgium), Theatre du Soleil (Paris, France) and Odin Teatret (Holstebro, Denmark) are doing this daily in their training and their production work. Writers like Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Goran Stefanovski re-think and re-write language, incorporating impulses from contemporary music and mass-media, always with their feet entangled in one or more roots.

The dominating force in the world today is migration - whether voluntary or because of war, natural catastrophe or economic disaster. Millions of people are on the move. And everything points to that this flow will not diminish in the near future.

How can Art not respond to this? How can our theatres and operas go on presenting "national" dramas, based on common ethnic experiences from a radically different historical era? We have seen the tragedy in the Balkans and the sores that will take generations to heal. We have seen the "national narrative" transformed into a monster, excluding and even killing those who are not "like us". We watch still the cycle of revenge.

And our artists - always prophets and critical observers - celebrate hybridity, bastardisation and fusion. They dare to search in the chaos of multiple identities and multi-linguistics.

A society undergoing a continuous questioning of its "purity" - ethnic and moral - is a potentially healthy society. If rubbing shoulders is what New Europe is about, then the artists will be our guides in the creative diversity which can result. Chris Torch (Catalogue Homo Novus'99)