ABSTRACT
Crossing The Line, made possible by a grant of €200,000 from the EU Creative Europe fund, brought together three of Europe’s leading theater companies who make professional touring theater with learning-disabled artists. This chapter investigates their twenty-seven-month collaboration, which incorporated residency exchanges, the making of new stage productions, wider industry engagement, and a culminating three-day Festival in Roubaix, France. Discussing his role as Project Dramaturg, Jonathan Meth argues that learning-disabled theater is not simply a subset of theater made by physically or sensorially disabled people. Rather, it might call for alternative dramaturgical strategies as well as different engagements from audiences. The Crossing The Line collaboration, straddling diverse languages and cultural systems, suggests that these approaches can productively embrace both the intercultural and the multilingual.
