EVERYDAY LIFE DRAMA: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY PROJECT IN PROGRESS
EVERYDAY LIFE DRAMA: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY PROJECT IN PROGRESS

Summary/Abstract: How do young people react and represent themselves in the actual postcommunist society? What kind of images do they have about the recent past, especially related to the socialist era? The field of political and social representations of youngsters seems blurred, and the so called refutal of civic implication of the new generations became a stereotype of daily conversations between adults, school teachers and media anchors. In real life experiences, this stereotype suffers profound corrections: a strange interest for religious experiences tends to fill the gap of the political distaste; the urban groups of teenagers in Romania, especially the male ones, reveal a flexible universe of representations and a particular rhetoric of discourses, built on fragmentary quotations from popular culture, parody of media clichés and a lot of paradoxical sadness related to the recent past – including their intra familial experiences. But, this uncomfortable combination – “Kill Bill”-like – is not entirely escapist and does not exclude the accuracy of social observations. The research and creation program Everyday Life Drama was born in 2004, as an interdisciplinary project with two immediate and even urgent dimensions: the first one was to re-link the playwriting practices to the social and political context, after more than one decade of aesthetical escapism and symbolical dominance of the theatre directing in Romania; the second one was the need of renewal in educational methods, by joining together the students from different programs, in a common effort of rebuilding a coherent perspective about their lives and their discourses. The program combines the workshops for video-journalism, creative writing in media and theatre, and photo-journalism, but also direct anthropological field research, in a research camp of ten days, each of the last five years. The importance of the program is that it offers each year a new bunch of artistic products: video-productions and documentaries, plays and film scenarios, written reports and interviews, photo exhibitions. The last two years, the program was awarded two consecutive grants for Cultural Intervention from the Ministry of Culture in Romania. From 2007, the theme is “X-Men & Women Generation”. Next year, the interest of the team will focus on the ways recent history - and especially the communist period – was absorbed by the young people representations. The paper will resume some of the actual conclusions of this work in progress, and will present a small part of the plays and scenarios founded on recent history and everyday life stories...

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