DICTAT
2012-2013
“DICTAT – Performative Culture Cooperation for awareness on past European DICTATorships” project, devised by Teatro Magro, was presented by the European Union on the Culture application 2007-2013 and it was considered eligible for funding in March 2012.
“DICTAT” was an 18-months project (July 2012 – December 2013) planning the creation of a transnational network of European organisations located in Italy, Spain, Romania and Poland aimed to the realisation of a show to be replayed in the related EU countries.
The project partners – Fundatia Parada for Romania, Miejskie Centrum Kultury w Belchatowie for Poland, Asociación Granadina para la Información, Formación y Desarrollo de las Nuevas Tecnologías for Spain – incarnated countries that lived dictatorial periods in their recent history, and therefore shared with Teatro Magro the need for planning communal actions, directed to identify, analyse and re-elaborate a shared identity, to be read as a shared historical heritage. The numerous dictatorships that portrayed the previous century, although with different manners and features, have a common denominator, and they express the way shared awareness is getting progressively weaker. Teatro Magro’s project and the related research wanted to give an interpretation of a history that isn’t completely far away from our everyday reality. Dictatorships are, indeed, ghosts that can show up again in any moment, if the community isn’t careful and aware.
The use of theatre as a tool and the production of a show helped reaching a more precise analysis and reading of what happened in Europe in the last 60 years. Specifically, this happened through an initial research and a shared study on each own historic heritage about dictatorship, that were put into practice with production periods in the countries of the various partners, starting in September 2012. The results became the basis for writing and producing a unite theatre show, to be represented in the four interested countries. The show involved two actors and a director per partner, debuted in Italy in September 2013, and then replayed in the various European countries.
The experience wasn’t limited only to stay within theatres, but it also reached the population, though specific cultural workshops and an international conference that clearly explained how theatre representation can be a valid tool for intercultural dialogue, in particular to deepen the subject matters belonging to the common European historic and cultural heritage.
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