Interview with Bashar Al-Kishawi Bashar Al-Kishawi is a medical school graduate and a journalist. He left Kuwait when he was 18. He is Palestinian and for this reason, his right to benefit from higher education was denied in Kuwait. In 1990 he came to Romania to study medicine. Due to the Romanian legislation, Bashar had to choose reskilling after graduation. He became a journalist and currently works for Radio Romania. He is one of the five “voices of migration” from the performance Born in the Wrong Place. Since I am the one who tells his story and he is the…
Interview with Alice Monica Marinescu, Katia Pascariu, Alexandru Potocean and Andrei Serban UnderGround. The Jiu Valley after 1989 is a project of observation and analysis of the everyday lives of several communities affected by the political and social changes which began in the 1990s. The project aims to document the economic status, the lives and work of the miners in Post-Socialism. UnderGround is a project of performative reconstruction of the stories which fuel the history of the Jiu Valley communities, communities which find themselves on the border of survival, migration, extinction and possible reconstruction. The performance is based on research…
by Mihaela Michailov I keep hearing comments such as “we need educated viewers who understand our art” and two questions spring into my mind: educated for what, exactly? And what kind of art? If we need viewers who are tamed and educated to gobble up heaps of exclusivist art which might give them the feeling of belonging to the category of “values inaccessible to the inane multitude”, then education misses its main critical stake and becomes a sort of high-class training. Thanks, but no thanks. The radical change which theater brings to marginal groups and communities pertains to the reformation…
by Jan Cohen-Cruz[1] The very act of speaking one’s story publicly is a move toward subjecthood, toward agency, with political implications. The story circle is one of the most pervasive forms of workshopping and playbuilding in community-based performance. Although there are many variations, circles typically involve from five to twenty-five people who choose a theme and then, one by one, tell a tale. Each story is welcome no matter what its style. In accordance with the Appalachia-based Roadside Theater for example, stories might recount family history, local history, folklore, ghost lore, a personal experience, or even riddles or jokes passed…
The theme of issue 4 of G.A.P. is Art with/for Excluded Groups and it is comprised of a series of articles, interviews and theoretical texts which analyze the ways in which excluded/marginal communities, groups and individuals take part and are (re)presented in various artistic forms in the public sphere. Hence, we propose identifying and debating forms of participatory and documentary art – in Romania, as well as in the Republic of Moldova, Hungary, the US, Kenya, Uganda – which address issues confronting ignored social groups. Such socio-political acts trigger a process of translation from “the center” towards “the margins”, from…
by Mihaela Michailov Two years ago, after a performance I saw at the Țăndărică Theater, a little boy told his mother: “I’ve seen this show before”. His mother asked: “Did granny take you?”. “No”, said the little boy. “Did the school take you?” “No”. “Then you couldn’t have seen it”. “But I did”, the boy insisted. “Who did you see it with?” “With you”. Slightly confused, his mother said: “You couldn’t have seen it with me”. “Yes, I saw it last week”. “No, last week we saw something different”. After a couple of seconds, the boy said: “This was the…
Interview with Mona Nicoară I saw Our School for the first time at the One World Romania documentary film festival in 2012. After the screening, there was a debate where Roma rights activists highlighted the disastrous effects of segregation and structural racism in the Romanian education system. The then-Minister of Education, Cătălin Baba, claimed that Our School was an isolated case which was not relevant for education in Romania. He said he would look into the matter and take all necessary action. But what happens when one case becomes endemic to the teaching reality of Romania, a reality which privileges…