The Roma are the largest ethnic minority in Europe. However, the attitude of EU citizens towards the Roma is, as reported by the Eurobarometer, among the most negative. Although we are present in many countries, Roma self-representation is missing from mainstream culture and education. 

"Roma Heroes on the Streets of European Cities" will highlight, at the same time:

  1. The cultural values and roles, challenges and activities of Roma communities and their members in the past; 
  2. 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. 

  1. 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..
  2. We will collect stories care scot la lumină rolurile comunităților rome în trecutul și prezentul orașelor noastre și importanța societăților inclusive, diversificate, democratice și pericolul segregării și a regimurilor autoritare.
  3. Based on those stories we will create theater plays , which will be presented in outdoor performances in public spaces relevant to the given stories.
  4. 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..
  5. We will summarize educational methods together with our plays, videos about performances and digital tools in brochures that will serve as 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.

Results

The Foundation Bricks Brochure A collection of artistic, non-formal and educational practices for creating theater performances and workshops in open spaces from Hungary, Italy, Spain and Romania. Includes elements of know-how about: ritual-theatre, street shows, storytelling of self-representation, theater of the oppressed, forum theater, invisible theater, documentary theater, verbatim theater, expert theater, outdoor education. Its target group is youth workers and cultural experts and it is a material used also in the activity of the project partners.

Shows - 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.

          > Romania – Safari Fetiș (w. EN subs)         
          > Italy: Aspettando da Bo (Waiting for Bo) (w. EN subs)
          > Hungary: (Mi vagyunk ’56) (We are '56)  (w. EN subs)
          > Spain: The Falah-menco-stories (collection of footage of the stories used in the traveling show)

Trainings & Workshops -Roma and non-Roma youth received local and international training and took part in the creation of an outdoor workshop methodology. In Romania, the training served to prepare young people to deliver a series of workshops based on the performance to other young people Safari Fetiș. Both the performance and its recordings were used as a basis in these activities to inform young artists of different genres and coming from diverse ethnic backgrounds on themes related to the performances, with the aim of changing their attitude towards Roma people. We also targeted experts in the field of art, education, street performances who we hope will benefit from the use of new artistic and educational methods.

Toolkits & Case-Studies

The footage of the performances, the methodology and toolkit used in the outdoor theater workshops, as well as the script of the play (which was the basis of the filmed performance) are part of a brochure presenting the results at the level of each country. The case study SAFARI FETIȘ made by Giuvlipen is available in Romanian and English.

All materials and events were disseminated to European experts in the field of art, culture, youth projects and education, to various audiences in the involved countries as well as to the beneficiaries of the partner organizations. We aim to reach a wide and varied group with the aim of promoting the idea of an intercultural and democratic Europe, built on the visibility and active participation of all the communities that are part of it.

ACTIVITIES IN ROMANIA

Exploration meetings with young women who will contribute to documenting the stories that will be used as the foundation for the script of the play [October – December 2021]. Half of the participants in these meetings lived or still live in Ferentari - the neighborhood in Bucharest where the street performances will be concentrated. They will also be the ones who will gather information about the area, about the people who live there and about their stories. The stories used in the show will result in this first stage of research, when we will start interviewing Romax residents of Ferentari and documenting the history of the neighborhood and the media content produced on this topic in the last 5 years.

A play about the history of the Ferentari neighborhood, the ways in which its image is closely related to Roma people, with a focus on the evolution of the housing situation of the Roma community in the area and the ways in which the mainstream press discusses this topic.

 

  1. The text of the piece is written by Ionuț Oprea and the artistic concept is signed by Mihaela Drăgan based on the stories collected by the young artists. 
  2. I involved young artists from the youngster's theater group named Playhood. Members of our theater company guided the research process (including interviews with people in the neighborhood). Together with the teacher of the Playhood band - Ionuț Oprea - actors/esses from Giuvlipen used artistic methods with artists, by testing various configurations and creative practices.
  3. The street show is an itinerant one and took place in the Ferentari district. It involved tinerx artistix from the Playhood Theater troupe (tinerx adolescentx romx, most of whom live in Ferentari) and was presented to audiences interested in learning more about the neighborhood and the social aspects that surround it. The duration of the show was about 50-60 minutes and took the form of a guided tour of the city. We marked the key places of events mentioned by the residents of the neighborhood, but also those that we read about in the press, and we intended to fill them, with the help of the show, with a new and mobilizing charge.
  4. We also created a professional video recording of the show. The play's artistic and production team together with the video team filmed and edited the video material so that the performance could be watched after its live presentation and could be used nationally and internationally (with the help of English subtitles) in working with young people.
  5. Passages from the script were used by the trainers and the young trainers in the workshops organized after the performances of the play.

Workshops
This project also includes two workshops that used the play as a starting point and that use the educational methodology developed with the help of the youth trainers and international partners in the project. The workshops are aimed at teenagers and young Roma and non-Roma professionals interested in non-formal education and/or performing arts and were coordinated by the 4 young trainers trained within the project. 

We used various theater and street theater methods to spark conversations about the importance of self-representation, owning one's own identities, cultures and values, and generating one's own narrative to address these topics. The stories also gave way to debates about self-governance and passivity, heroes and victims, community and individuality, empathy and ignorance.

Meeting the international partners of the project, organized in Bucharest . ll the organizations involved in the development of the project participated in a meeting whose subject was the completion of the performances and the exchange of know-how and good practices on this topic.

PARTNERS

Independent Theater Hungary has been operating since 2007. The organization's goal is to start conversations about social issues that impact us all, thus drawing attention to personal responsibility and what we as individuals can do to improve certain situations.
Their mission is to help disadvantaged Roma and non-Roma people to become successful artists, trainers and professionals in whatever field they want, and above all, to become active citizens. The organization aims to contribute to better understanding and acceptance between different groups of people and to encourage them to create value together. They want to reach those individuals who do not normally have access to culture and facilitate their access to it and make those who have been abandoned by society active citizens. They want the youth of the future to find authentic artwork about today's society. It is important for them to show how colorful Roma theater is, how many topics it covers and how many genres are addressed. Financial and legal representation of ITH is provided by 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. In parallel with artistic production, they carry on work that promotes artistic languages in the routes socio-educational of children, young people and young adults from socially disadvantaged groups. It promotes musical knowledge as well as other art forms (theatre, circus, dance, visual arts, crafts) through educational play courses as a method of inclusive pedagogy.
Their mission is inspired by the concepts of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed (a concept developed by Paulo Freire) and his work in favor of young people in the Brazilian favelas, by José Abreu's youth orchestra in Venezuela, by the Montessori method and other concepts of non-formal education. They are a small company, strongly believe in local action and the concept of Glocal (Global+local) and have been active since the foundation until now in the eastern outskirts of Rome.

AAIÚN Producciones (Spain) and Asociación Cultural Por La Investigación Y El Desarrollo De Teatro Profesional En Andalucía were founded in Seville in 1998. This professional artistic company is an initiative of its director, Sonia Carmona, who created it upon returning to Spain after of 5 years spent in the USA (where he graduated Magna Cum Laude in dramatic art, majoring in acting). Along this long journey from its foundation to the present, it has realized multiple projects, from plays for children (in various languages) to the development of projects in which it used the method of the theater of life and experience in educational contexts for adults.
Working as part of various programs - which focused on theater, storytelling, education, inclusion - the organization tried to meet those people who needed empowerment through creative and innovative methods, to improve lives and strengthen communities through development and delivering participatory arts-based interventions that deliver positive social impact, build self-confidence and promote social inclusion and increase employability.

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

RO Cofinanțat de Uniunea Europeană_POS

Roma heroes on 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

*​The Romanian text uses a neutral pronoun form to support the fact that some of the persons mentioned identify themselves outside the gender binary.
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