American Actors Visiting Slovakia´s Settlements – Connected By Uniqueness

This year marks the fifth time the American actors of the Dramatic Adventure Theatre (DAT) from New York accepted the invitation of ETP Slovakia (ETP) to visit Roma settlements and support the personality development of children, young people and adults from marginalized Roma communities through a series of interactive artistic workshops.

The actors of DAT were first impressed by Eastern Slovakia in 2011, when they partnered with ETP to organize the first interactive drama workshop for children and young people from Podsadek in Stará Ľubovňa. Since then, the DAT artists have been returning to Slovakia each year. The workshops of the previous years had a unique social and artistic influence on the participants. DAT has, so far, cooperated with Roma children and young people from three localities in Slovakia (Stará Ľubovňa, Moldava nad Bodvou and Košice-Šaca). Similar DAT activities are popular in other parts of the world too, including Zimbabwe, Ecuador and Tanzania.

From 22 July until 28 July 2015 forty one DAT artists are going to work with children and young people in three ETP Community Centres in Rankovce, Stará Ľubovňa and Veľká Ida, carrying out both individual and group activities. Their aim is to inspire the workshop participants to express their feelings through art, reflect on the positive and negative events in their lives and be able to carry their experiences over onto the stage. The children and young people thus gain self-confidence, learn to respect and cooperate with each other, and realize their unique roots and to be proud of the Roma culture. The workshop participants decide on the stories and the conflicts of the plays themselves. They are the ones to choose the characters and create dialogues, often based on their personal experience. Thanks to these techniques the children and young people freely express their thoughts, feelings and perceptions of what is going on around them. Each performance is unique, reflecting emotions and live stories of the actors themselves.

Last month, New York‘s Dramatic Adventure Theatre, in cooperation with professional Slovak actors, introduced a successful performance inspired by ETP experience with the Roma communities at the Andrej Bagar Theatre in Nitra. The performance also featured the musicians of the Slumdog Theatre from Moldava nad Bodvou, which was established by ETP in 2010 as a continuation of the activities of the Community Centre on Budulovská Street. We believe that, again this year, we will manage to discover a couple of new hidden talents as we did in the previous years.

Part of the DAT´s seven-day stay in Slovakia is going to be dedicated to helping local inhabitants improve the environment of their settlements. On 24 July, starting at 9 a.m., a team of the American actors, together with volunteers from Habitat for Humanity, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Slovakia and ETP Slovakia is going to help the builders in Rankovce with their self-help construction of family homes, which they are building themselves, using ETP microloans. We kindly invite media representatives to come on Friday and cover the Building Day in Rankovce.

We are pleased to invite you to the final theatre performances, which are going to premiere on:

28 July at 2:30 p.m. at the Cultural Centre in Rankovce

28 July at 4 p.m. at the Community Centre in Stará Ľubovňa

28 July at 4:30 p.m. at the Amphiteatre in Veľká Ida.

 

For more information on the drama workshops, please contact Lenka Orságová: orsagova@ke.etp.sk, tel. 0917 179 639

For more information on the Building Day in Rankovce, please contact Eva Zelizňaková: zeliznakova@ke.etp.sk, 0917 179 639