Theater Networking Talents – TNT is an international festival dedicated to the new generation of artists – a place where fresh voices have the chance to be heard, and important space especially in a current political climate where many doors are being closed to the young artists. Designed as a launching platform, the festival brings graduation performances by young theatre directors from Romania and across Europe, placing them in a professional setting, while also offering a context for dialogue.
TNT is an artistic community where directors, actors, set designers, playwrights, choreographers, composers, researchers, producers, and many other artists come together to experiment, to discuss, to create. Through interdisciplinary workshops, debates, and performative readings, doors are opened to new ways of understanding theatre. Through its curated showcase, TNT helps bridge the gap between academic training and professional practice, creating space for visibility, recognition, and dialogue.
In a Romanian political context where culture is already marginalized, underfunded, and threatened by nationalist policies, the artistic freedom of young people lacks support and trust. This is the failure of structures built on compromises for social and cultural policies. Every project, no matter how fragile, is a small crack in fatalism and an act of courage.
And beginnings always carry the weight of responsibility.
For emerging directors, such spaces offer the opportunity to learn how to live art as a form of commitment – to themselves, to others, to the world. Young artists, especially those outside of cultural centers like Bucharest, often lack access to professional networks. TNT brings them together, creating a shared community that resists fragmentation and artistic isolation – both symptoms of an increasingly divided cultural space.
Perhaps this is, ultimately, one of the most important form of resistance: believing that small gestures – a rehearsal, a question, a conflict faced with honesty – can change trajectories.
Through partnerships with organizations that promote contemporary playwriting and text translation, through meetings with theatre directors, independent producers, and festival curators, TNT creates real connections between young artists and the professional world. The results are visible: directors launched here have already been selected for national and international festivals, have been nominated for UNITER awards, and have begun shaping the future of Romanian theatre.
Theater Networking Talents is a plea for active hope. Not the comforting kind, but the kind that pulls you out of inertia. It’s a place where the future is not passively awaited, but written collectively. And that alone makes it worth trying.
Theater Networking Talents is organized by “Marin Sorescu” National Theatre in Craiova and the Department of Arts and Media of the University of Craiova, with the support of the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Education.
Photo: Albert Dobrin
