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ROMA HEROES IN THE STREETS OF EUROPEAN CITIES

 

Roma are the biggest ethnic minority in Europe. However, the attitude of EU citizens towards us is among the most negative ones reported by the Eurobarometer. Although we are present in numerous countries, Roma self-representation is missing in mainstream culture and education.

“Roma Heroes in the Streets of European Cities” will highlight, at the same time:

  • the cultural values and roles, challenges and activities of Roma communities and their members in the past

  • current lives of diverse European cities and the cultural, artistic and educational values and potential of European Roma theaters. 

European Roma Theatre can empower young Roma and non-Roma people with the tools of art, education and open interactions, raise their awareness and inspire their inclusion with the stories and practices, values and challenges highlighted in performances and workshops.

By the stories and heroes of the performances we aim to promote the common values of Roma and non-Roma people and inspire their active participation in shaping the lives of their cities.

We – four Roma theaters working in the field of arts and education in Budapest, Rome, Bucharest and Seville – will bring, in the streets of our cities, theater and workshops. All partners work on creating self-representational artwork focusing on social issues and on realizing non-formal educational activities raising awareness and making active young people regarding inclusion and citizens’ activity. We don’t just do creative work on our own, but we involve young Roma and non-Roma people as actors, creators and trainers in our work, where they gain competences regarding artistic and cultural work, get informed about the Roma culture and develop their own creative skills when developing performances or workshop methods. We treat them as partners, who can contribute as much to our work as adult professionals, and believe that their points can make our work more genuine and fresh, too. By our work we will also give tools and inspiration to other artistic and educational initiatives to use new, creative solutions in their work.

  • We will collect innovative methods in a brochure that we will use in our own artistic and educational work, as well as share with other initiatives in the field.

  • We will collect stories, which will highlight the role of Roma communities in the past and present of our cities and the importance of inclusive, diverse, democratic societies and the danger of segregation and authoritarian regimes.

  • Based on those stories we will create theater plays, which will be presented in outdoor performances in public spaces relevant to the given stories. 

  • We will involve and train young Roma and non-Roma artists in the planning and realization of the performances, who will receive domestic offline and international online training, too. The performances will serve as multiplier events, through which we will reach young people and experts in education and culture

  • We will summarize educational methods together with our plays, videos about performances and digital tools in brochures that will serve as case-studies

One of the main focuses of the project is to guide young artists and trainers to gain competences and experience of success regarding cooperative interethnic creative work. This way we hope to increase their career perspectives and also shape their attitude towards inclusive societies, building towards active participation. We are positive that through this project young people’s attitudes towards Roma people and active citizenships will improve, and experts will gain new methods and inspiration for their work. By highlighting the stories of Roma people and communities and the values of Roma drama and theater, the Roma history and culture become an integral part of the European cultural heritage. We will empower Roma communities and young people by highlighting these values, too, and inspire the members of the majority to also act as tools of inclusion, when they recognize we all live in a continent that we share, in cities that we share, where we all have similar interests with most of our fellow citizens, regardless of our background.

EXPECTED RESULTS

Foundation Bricks Brochure. A collection of artistic, non-formal and educational practices from Hungary, Italy, Spain and Romania for creating outdoor theater performances and workshops. It will include elements of know-how on: ritual theatre , street performing, storytelling for self-representation, theatre of the oppressed, forum theatre, invisible theatre, documentary theatre, verbatim theatre, theatre of experts, outdoor education. It will target youth workers and cultural experts and will also be used by the partners in their work.

Performances – one created by each of the partners, performed multiple times in each country and also recorded for further dissemination purposes. The plays will be written based on stories past or present of Roma communities in the partners’ cities. Young actors and creators will be involved in the creation of outdoor performances in each country. 

Trainings & Workshops. Young Roma and non-Roma peer trainers will receive local and international training and participate in the creation of the methodology for outdoor workshops methodology. Outdoor performance workshops will be organized and will also be used as multiplier events in each partner country. The performance as well as the recordings will be used as a base in these activities to inform young artists from different ethnic backgrounds and genders about the topics of the performances and to change their attitudes towards Roma. Experts in the field of arts , education, outdoor performing etc. will be targeted and will hopefully benefit from the use of new artistic and educational methods.

Toolkits & Case Studies. The videos of the performances, the methodology and toolkit of the realized outdoor workshops and the play (which was the base of the video recorded performance) will be part of the national intellectual outcome brochures. 

All materials and events will be disseminated (physically and digitally) to European experts on the fields of art, culture, youth work and education, various audiences from the countries involved and beneficiaries of the partner organisations. We plan to reach a wide and varied group in order to promote the idea of an intercultural, democratic Europe, built on visibility and active participation of all its communities. 

PLANNED ACTIVITIES IN ROMANIA

Research meetings with young women who will contribute to the documentation of the stories that will be used as a base for the script of the play [October – December 2021]. Half of the participants in these meetings have lived or are still living in Ferentari – the neighbourhood in Bucharest the outdoor performances will be focusing on. They will also be the ones gathering information about the area, the people living there and their stories. The stories used in the performance will emerge in this first stage of the research, when we will start taking interviews with the Roma residents on Ferentari and research the history of the neighborhood and the mediatic content produced on the topic in the last 5 years. 

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A play about the history of the Ferentari neighborhood, the ways in which its image is tightly linked to Roma people, with a focus on the evolution of the locative situation of the Roma community in the area and the ways in which the mainstream press talks about the subject. 

  • The text of the play will be written by Mihaela Drăgan based on the stories collected by youngsters. 

  • We will involve young performers from the youth theatre group Playhood.  Members of our theatre company will guide the research (including interviews with people from the neighbourhood). Together with Playhood teacher Ionuț Oprea, actors from Giuvlipen will work on the artistic methods with the performers, by testing different creative configurations and practices.

  • The outdoor performance will be itinerant and will take place in the Ferentari neighbourhood. It will engage young performers from the Playhood theater group (young Roma teenagers, most of them living in Ferentari) and will be presented to audiences that will benefit from knowing more about the neighbourhood and social issues surrounding it. We expect that the duration of the performance will be around 50 – 60 minutes and that it will take the shape of a city tour. We will try to pin the locations of the events we were told about by the residents and read about in the news and fill them with new, empowering content through the means of the performances.

  • A professional video recording will be created as well based on the play. The performers, together with the director of the play and the video team will work through every scene of the performance and try to find the best scenario for the construction of the video material. English subtitles will be created too.

  • Excerpts of the script will be used by the trainers and peer trainers during workshops following the performances of the resulting play.

Workshops. 

The project will also include the realization of two outdoor workshops that will use the play as a starting point on which the educational methodology developed with the help of the peer trainers and the international partners will be applied. The workshops will be addressed to Roma and non-Roma teenagers or young professionals with an interest in non-formal education and/or performing arts and it will be coordinated by the four peer trainers trained in the project. Similar to the performance, the workshops will take the shape of a walking tour in the neighborhood.

We will use various theatre and outdoor performance methods in order to start discussions about the importance of self-representation, of assuming one’s own identity, culture and values and generating one’s own narratives that tackle these subjects. The stories will also make room for debates regarding agency and passivity, heroes and victims, community and individuality, empathy and ignorance.

International meeting with the partners organized in Bucharest. All organisations involved in the development of the project will participate in a meeting on the topic of finalizing performances and exchanging know-how and good practices on that matter.

THE PARTNERS

Independent Theater Hungary has been operating since 2007. The organisation’s aim is to start a conversation about social issues that touch all of us, this way drawing attention to personal responsibility: what we, as individuals can do to improve the situation. 

Their mission is to help underprivileged Roma and non-Roma people become successful artists, trainers, or professionals in whichever field they work, but, first and foremost, help them become active citizens. The organisation wants to contribute to different groups understanding and accepting each-other as well as creating values together. They want to reach and facilitate those who don’t usually have access to culture, and make those people who are already abandoned by society active citizens. They want the youth of the future to find authentic pieces of art about today’s society. It’s important for them to show how colourful the Roma theatre is, how many different topics are covered and what a wide range of genres are combined in it. The legal and financial representation of the ITH is ensured by the Women for the Future Association.

 

Rampa Prenestina (Italy) is a Cultural Association for Social Promotion (APS), a social work space created in 2013 by a collective of artists, art-educators and therapists. Alongside the artistic production they carry forward a work that promotes artistic languages in socio-educational paths aimed at children, youth and young adults from socially disadvantaged groups. They promote the knowledge of music and other forms of art (theater, circus, dance, visual arts, crafts) through playful-educational courses as a method of inclusive pedagogy.
Their mission is inspired by the concepts of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and his work in favor of the young people of the Brazilian favelas, the youth orchestra of Josè Abreu in Venezuela, Montessori and other alternative non-formal educational concepts. They are a small company, they strongly believe in local action (Glocal) and they have been continuously and constantly active in their area on the eastern outskirts of Rome for years.

 

Giuvlipen (Romania). Giuvlipen means feminism in the Romani language and is the first independent Roma feminist theater company in Romania. Their art is challenging, experimental and highly performative. The themes of their performances are diverse, but they all have something in common: the artists’ collective openly discuss topics that history, mentality and social or political constraints have often silenced. In each show, they seek to reclaim the art, history and cultural identity of Roma, through stories told by Roma artists. Giuvlipen was established in 2014 by actresses Mihaela Dragan and Zita Moldovan.

Following this initiative, in 2015 The Roma Actors Association was set up at the initiative of several Roma actors, artists and cultural experts (including the Giuvlipen collective) in order to form a structure of reflection and action in the field of art as a form of combating exclusion. The objectives of the association are to integrate cultural, artistic and cultural innovations in the arts in general, and theater in particular. At national level, the Association of Roma Actors pursues the creation of the first Roma Theater in Romania, which will also serve as a center of resources and expertise on Roma culture in Romania.

 

AAIÚN Producciones (Spain) and the Asociación Cultural Por La Investigación Y El Desarrollo De Teatro Profesional En Andalucía were established in Sevilla in 1998. The professional performing arts company is an initiative of its director, Sonia Carmona who created it after coming back to Spain after residing for more than five years in the United States where she graduated Magna Cum Laude in dramatic art, specializing in acting. In this long journey, it has realized many different projects that range from producing plays for children (even in other languages) to developing educational projects using theatre of life and experience in adult educational settings.

 

Working with different programs – dealing with theatre, storytelling, education and inclusion – they have tried to reach out innovatively and creatively to empower individuals, improve lives and strengthen communities by developing and delivering creative, participatory arts based interventions that bring about positive social impact, build self esteem and promote social inclusion and employability.

Here is more information about the previous project developed together with the same partners – „(Roma) Heroes in Theater Education and Everyday Life”

 

ROMA HEROES IN THE STREETS OF EUROPEAN CITIES

is an Erasmus+ project created under KA2 – Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices,  KA227 – Partnerships for Creativity