Project:  (RE)DISCOVERING EUROPE

Description: (RE)DISCOVERING EUROPE is a project dealing with contemporary Europe and challenges it faces today. It is an attempt to speak about Europe from a minority perspective – how different minorities participate in the creation of the identity of contemporary Europe and whether theatre can offer the new perspective on Europe through this kind of discourse. Project partners are minority theatres from 5 different cities: HNK I.pl. Zajca (Italian Drama ensemble) Rijeka,Croatia, coordinator; Deutsches Staatstheater in Timisoara (German minority Theatre), Romania; Slovensko stalno gledališče in Trieste (Slovenian minority theatre), Italy; Pozorište "Kosztolányi Dezső" Színház in Subotica (Hungarian minority theatre), Serbia; Albanski teatar in Skopje, (Albanian theatre), Macedonia.
Within the 16 month project (RE)DISCOVERING EUROPE there was a wide spectrum of different activities from Theatrical co-production based on Luigi Pirandello's play ˝The Mountain Giants˝, audience development programme: ˝Performative Kitchen - Cooking Diversity˝, interdisciplinary workshop for actors ˝From Pirandello to Brexit˝ by director Paolo Magelli, Scientific research about (non)inclusion of minorities into cultural life and evaluation of the project educational programme ˝Theatre Knowledge Incubators˝ in cooperation with regional art schools divided into 3 sub-programmes: 1)Workshop How to Watch - for actors, students of drama faculties, performers and coordinators for contemporary dance and theatre. 2)Informal educational programme for audience Flea Market of Theatrical Knowledge; 3)(Euro)perform-workshops for students of drama schools.
The most important objectives of the activities are: to raise awareness of the importance of pluralism in contemporary Europe and equality of all of its identities; to create an audience that will be sensitized to diversity, audience that will not only tolerate other and different, but accept it as equal; to make more visible, beside minorities included in this project, other underrepresented social groups as well and engage them actively in the cultural life; to enable minority artists and their organizations to network on European level, to give them opportunity to exchange and improve their work; to enable access to European market to minority theatre ensembles; to go beyond the local framework, to create a self-sustaining platform, as well as to provide its participants with the knowledge applicable in a much broader context than the one in which the project is initiated and carried out; to show that the European Union is a field of both the exchange and the production of new knowledge: that can be extended beyond EU borders – to the countries that are still not its members, but are determined in their intention to become EU members; to enable audiences to better understand contemporary theatre; to increase interest of the audience in the theatre.
The idea to choose the last (unfinished) play by Luigi Pirandello was because of his anticipation of the contemporary world which lacks empathy or interest for any kind of art. This problem of the new European barbarism has been spreading enormously in the past years in implicit ways, excluding everything that does not belong to the corporate or dominant matrixes. Theatre has become the media of privileged elite that generates theatrical codes by itself and surrounds itself with a barrier. This is the answer to WHY THIS MULTICULTURAL AND MULTILINGUAL PERFORMANCE: to overcome the discrimination present in European art market and to sensitize audience to diverse theatrical language.
This is a project that has the capacity to create a permanent platform for the cooperation of national minority ensembles, or their members on the European level. Besides promoting intercultural dialogue, these ensembles would be given the opportunity to present themselves on the markets that were previously inaccessible to them, due to cultural and language barriers.