CROSSROADS

2022 - 2024

Exchange of good cultural practices for the integration of migrants and asylum seekers

 

Teatro Magro launches CROSSROADS, a program to share cultural practices for the integration of migrants and asylum seekers. Started in July 2022 and ending in February 2024, the project is created by a partneship of six European entities: Teatro Magro (Mantua, Italy); Asinitas (Rome, Italy); Progetto Amunì/Babel Crew (Palermo, Italy); Medeber Teatro (Brussels, Belgium); Sozial Label (Berlin, Germany); S.Mou.Th – Synergy of Music Theatre (Larissa, Greece).

The initiative comes after the success of INCROCI, a previous experience carried out at the national level, which involved the three Italian partners in a series of activities to exchange good cultural practices including theater workshops, participation in prestigious festivals (Santarcangelo Festival) and conferences on issues of social inclusion through theater. Following the structure of this predecessor, CROSSROADS has expanded the exchange to the European scene, with the belief that greater complexity can enrich cultural dialogue and in the direction of a new, more open European society.

The project revolves around a number of theatrical workshop activities in a broad sense, carried out individually by each reality according to its own aptitudes and creative needs: some insisted on training for citizenship, some on creative encounters as an end in themselves, some on the creation of a real theatrical production. In addition to the workshops, there were some that allowed for encounters and exchanges between practitioners and between users, thanks to common activities and the staging of excerpts of the work done in the target country.
The work resulted in a documentary and a toolkit, which showed the path taken and added documentative and theoretical value to the initiative. These two products were displayed to the public at a final conference in Brussels, which was attended by local institutions and a good audience of cultural workers of the city.

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Objectives

The project pursues a number of objectives, which refer to the local, national and European context.

  • Fostering the mobility of artists and project beneficiaries to learn about new contexts and graft new relationships;
  • Getting to know, informing and sharing strategies, methods, content and professionalism deployed in individual projects;
  • Contaminating artistic working approaches and methodologies to always find better solutions to achieve objectives;
  • Creating new relationships and imagine possible future developments of networked projects.

With respect to the European objectives, the project reflects the Union guidelines as follows:

  • Literacy (“literacy”): work, directly or indirectly formative, with users of different nationalities;
  • Social inclusion (“social inclusion”): cultural actions aimed at integrating users into the local landscape through unconventional methods;
  • Diversity (“diversity”): enhancement of diversity through dialogue between different cultures, highlighted by creative work;
  • International dimension (“international dimension”): differentiation of the phenomenon of immigration in the different realities of the participating countries;
  • Fight against climate change (“battle against climate change”): theoretical-practical reflection on wide-ranging “Sustainability”;
  • Innovation (“innovation”): facilitating access to cultural and European content and building a formulary of good practices.
  • Allow the recovery (“facilitate the recovery”): international networking facilitating the recovery of cultural workers from the crisis by COVID-19.

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Activities

Introductory activities, Larissa (Greece)
A meeting between cultural workers in which each set out their target context, the type of users they intended to involve, and the resources to be deployed. The meeting allowed to establish specific courses of action and desired outputs, as well as to share materials and contacts useful for building the work.

Theater workshops and digital interchange activities
Each reality structured specific work with its users, differentiated according to their aptitudes and needs. The work addressed the theme of “Sustainability” broadly understood. The environment is where migration occurs and sometimes one of the triggers: it is therefore rooted in man’s being in the world. “Sustainability” can thus be understood both as an environmental vocation and as social reasoning about the feasibility of migration nowadays, about the actual livability of human life.
At the end of each workshop, each entity organized a locally relevant event in which to show the results of the work to the local public.

In particular, the partners worked on the following specific topics:
Teatro Magro: History and Prehistory, language and language, definite and natural time;
Asinitas – Bartolini/Baronio: The Human Voice – learning a new language through body, emotions, memories;
Medeber Theatre: Urbanism, space and relational phonetics as a function of achieving an experience of freedom;
Progetto Amunì/Babel Crew: The concept of the Boundary from Marina by Edward Albee;
S.Mou.Th.: Mobility as a congenital feature of humanity;
Sozial Label: “In Between,” a work on storytelling with disadvantaged migrant women as a message for a new society.

In addition to in-person work, digital exchange activities were also carried out through the creation of a number of virtual “rooms,” which users were invited to fill with content contextual to the title of each room. The materials were viewed and further processed by participants from other countries, and sometimes included in the final workshop outputs. Online meetings were also organized, in which partners took turns experimenting with different ways of working through proposed remote exercises.

Theaatre workers Exchange, Mantua (Italy)
Practitioners met in person in Mantua to share practices and develop common reflections. Through exercise sessions and feedback, useful content and methods emerged to improve individual work with participants in their own countries.

Public Artistic Exchange, Palermo (Italy)
At the end of the workshops, each organization brought some participants to Palermo where they got to know each other and participate in common activities such as workshops, visits and discussions. These activities were the prelude to the Mercurio Festival, an international live arts festival organized by Babel Crew. The first day of the festival was in fact dedicated to staging excerpts of the work completed during the individual workshops, allowing the participants to engage with an audience other than their local community of origin.

Production of results
The activities ended with the production of a documentary and a toolkit.
The documentary was based on the documentative videos taken during the meetings and in the previous months of work.
The toolkit is a handbook-like multimedia tool that collects the most significant materials produced during the project: lists and descriptions of exercises and working practices, links to relevant videos, theoretical elements for reflection, specialized statistics and analysis, interviews, and any other kind of contribution. This tool is aimed not only at bearing witness to the project, but more importantly at creating the foundation for “best practices” related to social inclusion, equality, education and literacy, and spectatorship education, to which the European Union is strongly linked. The tool-kit took the form of a PDF document, appropriately formatted, which can be downloaded within the project website.

Credits

project by | Teatro Magro, Asinitas, Progetto Amunì/Babel Crew, Medeber Teatro, Sozial Label, S.Mou.Th.
co-financed by | European Union (CREA-CULT-2021-COOP), Alta Mane Foundation Italy

 

Teatro Magro (IT)

Teatro Magro was founded in Mantua under the artistic direction of director Flavio Cortellazzi. Attentive to contemporary issues, the team has developed a multidisciplinary, popular, social and educational cultural offer. Its activity moves between theatrical shows and performances; performances for public bodies and private companies, as an evolved spectacular form conforming to the specific needs of the client; theatrical workshops in schools of all levels, for adults, amateurs and professionals, people with disabilities; territorial projects in coordination with national and international bodies. Each creation is the result of teamwork in which members and collaborators combine artistic skills and educational backgrounds, resulting in a product characterized by attention to detail, constant innovation, attention to contemporaneity, combined with the ability to maintain its own style.

 

Asinitas (IT)
Asinitas works in education and social intervention to promote activities aimed at the care, education-training, reception and witnessing of minors and adults, Italians and foreigners. The activities are aimed in particular at asylum seekers, migrants, foreign women with children and Italians, and include: experimental Italian L2 courses, expressive manual workshops, a listening space for Italian and foreign women and families, theater workshops, socio-health and legal, training and vocational orientation paths, and training courses for teachers, operators and educators. Asinitas was born from the conviction that in our cities today there is a need to create shared contexts with people from other countries. Even before a physical space, we imagined the Italian language, as the language of a host country, the territory to be conquered and shared.

 

Amunì Project / Babel Crew (IT)

Babel Association was founded in 2011 to create an associative and cultural environment that promotes different languages, professionalism, perspectives and planning. Babel is an innovation theater production company in the field of experimentation recognized by the Ministry of CULTURE under the F.U.S. (Fondo Unico Spettacolo). In addition to the 5 members of the Board of Directors, there are about 20 actors, dancers, musicians and other live performance practitioners working in theater, drama, film, documentary, dance, live music, organization of cultural events, artistic training, communication, and artistic projects in the social sphere.It is a crew of artists and professionals from different areas of culture, who, taking responsibility for their area of intervention, aim for the most diverse creation of cultural initiatives.

 

Medeber Theatre (NL)

Medeber Teatro is a performative, pedagogical and theoretical research project on theater and poetry. The theater company’s activity is multi-layered, offering performances, participatory shows and weekly, as well as occasional, workshops in theater, movement and poetry.Through poetry, the company aims to stimulate the audience’s appropriation of its creativity and imagination to transform reality, or at least look at it from another perspective. The name “Medeber” comes from a caravanserai in the city of Asmara in Eritrea where, every day, waste is transformed and put to a new use through the collective labor and creation of the market community.

 

Sozial Label (DE)

Sozial Label is a small group of experienced people from a variety of fields who seek to realize common ideas with a lot of heart, commitment and few resources. Through their work they aim to encourage social and cultural exchange, and mutual learning in Europe. Their projects, events and educational activities, provide concrete and thematic opportunities for encounters, from which long-term collaborations and friendships can grow. The association participates in the design and implementation of projects in the social and youth fields, including at the European level.

 

S.Mou.Th. (GR)

Synergy of Music Theatre (S.Mou.Th.) is an organization composed a group of dedicated, experienced and emerging artists. Founded in Larissa in 2001 by Costas Lamproulis (writer, director), Christos Ktistakis (music director, composer) and Sophia Koustas (musicologist, national relations), S.Mou.Th. has as its fundamental goal the possibility of providing young people and adults with opportunities for initiation, training, education, creation, inclusion, research and professionalization, in the performing and audiovisual arts and, through this process, reinventing the means of artistic expression. The work, both locally and at the European level, includes trainings, cultural activities and events with a focus on social aspects, professional productions of theater, musical theater, and opera, and the annual organization of two festivals: Mill of Performing Arts and the European Day of Music in Larissa.

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CROSSROADS

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