In loving memory of douard Glissant (1928-2011)

migration creolisation creation

playing identities

france hungary italy poland portugal romania

Playing Identities A diary

Copyright 2011
All rights reserved. No part of both the book and the video may be reproduced by any means,
nor trasmitted without the written permission of the authors.
Texts: Gianni Berardino, Angelo Romagnoli, Raffaella Ilari, Tommaso Sbriccoli,
Francesca Montanino, Stefano Jacoviello, Balletto Civile
Lay out: Marta Mantovani, Viola Pinzi
Photos and video: Daniela Neri
Video editing: Sergio Licatalosi
Music: Stefano Jacoviello
Printed in Italy, december 2011
by Tipografia Il Torchio
Monteriggioni (Siena)

A drawing by douard Glissant for the project Playing Iddentities

Le Tout-Monde, cest le monde actuel tel quil est dans sa diversit et dans son chaos.
Pour moi, le chaos nest pas seulement le dsordre, mais cest aussi limpossibilit
de prvoir et de rgir le monde.
La relation signifie un rapport de transversalit et non pas de causes effets.
douard Glissant

Coordinator
University of Siena

Co-organizers
Universidade de Lisboa

Associated partners

University of Ljubljana, Monash University of Melbourne, Consejo

Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas, Fondazione Teatro Due Parma,
Regione Toscana,Teatrul Imposibil, Maire de Conques, National Theatre
Cluj, Gdr Klub Budapest, Festival Temps dImages.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission.
This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission
cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the
information contained therein.

Playing Identities

Migration, Creolisation, Creation

Project Officer Eugenio Delfino (EACEA)
Project Supervisors Ugo Pagano, Chiara Roscino (SSSC, Universit di Siena)
Project Coordinator Giovanni Berardino (SSSC, Universit di Siena)
Scientific and Artistic Committee Fernando Bayon, Elizabeth Burns Coleman, Laura Caretti, Helena
Carvalho Buescu, Agata Dawidowicz, Paola Donati, Marcello Flores DArcais, Mimma Gallina,
Andrej Kurnik, Sandro Nannini,Tomasz Sobczak, Pier Giorgio Solinas, Jerzy Stuhr (advisory board)
Steering Committee Giovanni Berardino, Helena Carvalho Buescu, Dniel Andrs Br, Filippo De
Dominicis, Maria Goldstein, Antonio De Martinis, Marta Mantovani, Ioana Moca, Anne Pinson, Viola
Pinzi, Donatella Pollini, Justyna Rodej, Magorzata Uptas
Artistic Coordinator Anne Pinson
Scientific Coordinator Tommaso Sbriccoli
Scientific Tutor Stefano Jacoviello
Artistic and Scientific Advisor Angelo Romagnoli
Emigranti Director Jerzy Sthur
Creole Performance Cycle Direction Balletto Civile
Photography Director Daniela Neri
Research Team Susana Araujo, Barbara Beznec, Michele Campanini, Eva Dinis, Kristian van
Haesendonck, Stefano Jacoviello, Andrej Kurnik, Francesca Montanino, Angelo Romagnoli, Nicola
Perugini, Tommaso Sbriccoli
Project Staff Marta Mantovani, Rossana Esposito
Administration support Massimo Ferri, Donatella Pucci, Lucilla Palmieri, Tina Lorusso
Communication and Press Office Raffaella Ilari
Graphic Viola Pinzi, Marta Mantovani
Web Communication Tommaso Sbriccoli, Viola Pinzi, Marta Mantovani

Introduction
In year 2007, when we started to define the conceptual framework of this Project, Creolisation as
we now define it was still a blurred concept. Nevertheless, its fecundity and usefulness both as a
political and cultural notion was intuitively very clear to us all.
So, a manifold team - young researchers from the Graduate School S. Chiara of the University
of Siena, the staff of the Festival Voci di Fonte, and artistes from laLut and Errances - decided to
proceed in the endeavour, and to involve a significant number of Partners from many European
countries.
It has been a complex work of academics and artists working in parallel, everyone owing a great
debt to the poetic and philosophical visions of Edouard Glissant and his own notion of creolisation.
For this reason, and for Mr. Glissant's untimely departure in March 2011, we thought that this
Project had to be dedicated to his memory. When we met Mr. Glissant in Mantua in 2008, he gave
us the drawing that you can see in the preceding page.
Jerzy Stuhr was the other fundamental encounter of year 2008. A magnificent actor and a true
gentleman, with whom we have discussed at length on Migration, a social phenomenon so deeply
interconnected with Creolisation and with one's encountering with the 'Other'.
When the Project eventually commenced in October 2009, a good amount of conceptual work had
already been done, which allowed us to develop project activities in the best possible way.
We are satisfied with the achievements of the Project, but most of all we are truly happy with the
seminal capabilities of the cultural framework of Playing Identities. The University of Siena has
activated an international Summer School called Playing Identities: Acting, The Self and Society,
to take place in June-July 2012; the scientific outcomes of the Project have received attention by an
important British publisher; the initial intuitions about Creolisation have found more robust conceptual
grounding, and have therefore pushed us to submit a new and more ambitious project application
under Strand 1.1 of the Culture Programme (Multiannual Cooperation), titled Creolisation and the
Common. Towards a sustainable European Citizenship, which aims at highlighting the conditions
for new forms of belonging and for a truly inclusive European Citizenship. In this new Project we will
investigate how processes of creolisation, as processes enabling the establishment of new shared
and collective identities, allow for the creation or the reproduction of original and innovative forms
of Commons - both tangible and intangible - in the European space.

In a continent hosting numberless cultures and identities, the understanding of creolisation

processes may offer some important contribution to better grasp the constitution of new patterns
of values and belonging in Europe.
The next goal we wish to accomplish with the new project is to provide policy-makers with original
tools for better understanding the forthcoming forms of identity and citizenship which are going to
rise within European Societies.
We wish to thank the EU Commission, the EACEA agency, and everyone who has helped,
supported, and believed in this Project. Particular thanks are due to Prof. Ulf Hannerz, Jerzy Stuhr,
Chiara Roscino, Ioana Moca - and Prof. Laura Caretti, whose committment and support throughout
the whole project have been fundamental.
Giovanni Berardino
Playing Identities Project Coordinator
Graduate School S. Chiara
University of Siena

The Project
The European Project Playing Identities: Migration, Creolisation, Creation intended to inquire,
both on the stage and through the means of scientific research, the concept of creolisation: a
specific mode of socio-cultural transformation in which different identities are put at stake.
Today, immigration is more and more felt as a menace for social security: thus, identity becomes a
political and social exclusive capital, like something that is at stake both for the native and for the
migrants. According to our own perspective, migration and its consequences should not be merely
tackled as mechanical phenomena, but as processes, driven by the subjectivity of the involved
actors and bringing to the creation of a new cultural landscape.
The project, following the suggestions provided by douard Glissant's thought and poetics,
aimed thus to read contemporary society as a 'Tout-Monde', a dynamic system in which complex
interactions bring to unforeseeable results. In this sense, the value of the encounter with the Other
lies in the process through which identities are taken apart and reconstructed, rather than in a mere
exchange of knowledge.
This vision has been applied to two different processes of creation: on one side Theatre, where
artists from diverse origins and backgrounds were forced to the negotiation of expressive codes,
practices and meanings; on the other side, research in Humanities and Social Sciences, in
which scholars from different disciplines worked together in order to develop new conceptual and
methodological tools for the analysis of migration phenomena. By pairing the features of the two
processes of creation, we expected to indicate the potentialities of a creolised approach to a better
grasping of intercultural dynamics, and so to favour European cultural and social integration.
The main focus of Playing Identities was the production of a Creole Performance Cycle, an
itinerant theatrical performance created by artists from various and different backgrounds. It took
shape during the short periods of artistic residence that were spent in five of the partner countries,
according to the specific conditions of each venue: the encounter with locals, the diverse languages,
the artists and their poetics. The artists that conducted the setting up of the performances all along
the five venues worked together with groups of local artists selected by the partners of the project
in each European Country where the performance was held. So, they were always forced to the
negotiation of expressive practices within an open process of creolisation, which brought them to
go through many different creative processes.
The Creole Performance Cycle was conducted by the Italian company Balletto Civile, on the
grounds of their project L'Ala ("The Wing"), winner of the International Creole Performance Cycle

prize, to which more than 20 European companies have applied.

Balletto Civile, a theatre and dance company directed by Michela Lucenti, together with Maurizio
Camilli, Emanuela Serra and Emanuele Braga, has been working from the outset of their theatrical
experience with a methodology based on the relation and balance among bodies on the stage. The
goal of the project LAla was to undertake a collective writing with the other artists involved in the
project about work and a Europe of workers.
The production of The Emigrants by Sawomir Mroek has been another important step of the
project. Jerzy Stuhr, the Polish actor and director who is well known for movie roles with directors
such as A. Wajda and K. Kieslowski, accepted the invitation to read again the famous Polish play,
thirty-five years after its first performance. The two characters have been played by Massimiliano
Poli and Angelo Romagnoli.
Scholars coming from various European Universities constituted an interdiscliplinary research
team, which worked on the concept of identity in relation to creolisation and creation
processes. The scientific approach of anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, semiologists
and scholars involved in comparative literature studies was to be complementary to the theatrical
research activity. One of the peculiar features of this investigation was that the analysis of creolisation
processes in contexts of migration proceeded hand in hand with the "creolisation" of theoretical
and methodological tools in a real interdisciplinary effort. It is indeed through a transdisciplinary
outlook, in conjunction with contributions from visual arts as photography and video-making, that
the complexity of such phenomena could be better grasped. The research process has been sided
by a series of seminars held by humanities and social sciences scholars, writers, musicians, and by
the researchers involved in the project, who disseminated the progress and results of their work.
A Visiting Chair in "Studies on Creolisation" has been instituted at the Graduate School Santa
Chiara of Siena. It was held by the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz.
During the project, two general meetings took place to which all partners in the project have
participated: the first was held in Siena in January 2010, the second in Cluj - Napoca, Romania, in
October 2010. These meetings have been focused both on the planning of project activities, and
on general evaluations about activities progress, critical issues, and strategies for the fulfilment of
project aims.
The direct involvement of all partners on these questions has borne excellent results in terms of
task allocation and practical collaboration on the activities to be realised. As far as it concerns
the scientific side of the project, the three principal participants (University of Siena, University of
Lisbon, and University of Ljubljana) have actively collaborated in the elaboration of theoretical and
methodological guidelines and in the formation of the interdisciplinary and international research team.

During the first workshop held in Siena at S.Chiara Graduate School in November 2010, all
researchers presented their individual projects. In the second workshop, held always in Siena in
June 2011, results of the individual researches were presented and participants developed together
the general framework of the book Shifting Borders European Perspectives on Creolisation,
which will be soon published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK.
The first artistic step, that took place in Cluj - Napoca (Romania), has allowed to develop many
collaborations in the field, which have led to promising developments in terms of an active
partnership. Beside the involvement of a local festival (Festival Temps dImages) and of the local
official partner (Centre Culturel Franais de Cluj-Napoca), the best outcomes have been achieved
in two directions. On one hand, the National Theatre of Cluj-Napoca has decided to insert the
Romanian step of the Creole Performance on the playbill for the next year. On the other hand, the
Faculty of Theatre and Television of Cluj University (Universitatea Babes-Bolyai) has been directly
involved both at the local elaboration of the Creole Performance, and in the future progress of the
project.
These events have demonstrated the potentialities of Playing Identities organisational and
conceptual approach in terms of middle term and long period synergies between European artistic
and scientific institutions. Indeed, the project modalities of action that is, the ongoing dialogue
between scientific and artistic sides of the project, and the effort to make explode on the place, at
each step, original synergies and unexpected collaborations starting from the practical organisation
of the Creole Performance have proved to be the best way in order to establish an effective cooperation both on the short period for the fulfilment of projects objectives and, at the same time,
for European collaboration which are sustainable in the long period and able to lead to further future
developments. Thus, at the organisational level too, a creolising approach has proved itself to be
a fruitful and productive one.
At a first glance Playing Identities activities could appear as addressed mainly to theatre experts and
scholars in Human and Social Sciences. Instead, the results of this cultural project have been offered
to a much wider audience. Playing identities, thanks to its involvment in many Festivals throughout
Europe, both allowed a big amount of people to enjoy its productions and provided them with the
tools developed on the stage and by scientific research to reflect on our contemporary societies.
Among the professionals directly involved in the project, we can list university professors,
researchers, university students, dancers, actors, musicians, stage designers, costume designers,
photographers, video-makers, theatrical and festival operators, journalists.

Calendar
(2009-2011) PLAYING IDENTITIES ACTIVITIES
October 31-November 8 (2009)
The Emigrants (preview), directed by Jerzy Stuhr
November 1st Repeat performance and meeting with University Students
at the presence of Jerzy Stuhr
Parma (IT), Fondazione Teatro Due
January 7-9 (2010)
1st Partners meeting
Siena (IT), Graduate School Santa Chiara
January (2010)
Creole Performance Cycle Prize
Establishment of an International Commission for the evaluation of the proposals to be submitted
February 12 (2010)
Playing Identities: Creolizzare la pratica teatrale
Conference and Public presentation of the Creole Performance Cycle Prize
Teatro ITC S.Lazzaro, Savena, Bologna (IT)
February 15 (2010)
Creole Performance Cycle Prize Publication of the Call for Proposals
March 30 and 31 (2010)
The Emigrants (debut), directed by Jerzy Stuhr
Siena (IT), Teatro dei Rinnovati
March 31 (2010)
The Emigrants Seminar
at the presence of the actors, coordinated by Prof. Laura Caretti and Stefano Jacoviello

Siena (IT), Teatro dei Rinnovati

April 1 (2010)
Creole Performance Cycle Prize Call for Proposals Deadline
Assessment of projects and final decision
April 20 (2010)
Project Playing Identities - Seminar Financing Tools for territorial projects
Siena (IT), Santa Maria della Scala Museum
June 10 (2010)
Project Playing Identities - National presentation of the project
Rome (IT), in collaboration with Ministero per le Attivit Culturali and Cultural Contact Point, Italy
June 20 (2010)
Creole Performance Cycle Prize Public presentation of the winner project LALA by Balletto Civile
Siena (IT), Festival Voci di Fonte
September / November (2010)
Creole Performance Cycle Preliminary Meetings
ROMANIA Meeting between Balletto Civile and Romanian artists - Cluj-Napoca (RO)
ITALY Meeting between Balletto Civile and Italian artists - Siena (IT)
HUNGARY Meeting between Balletto Civile and Hungarian artists - Budapest (HU)
FRANCE Meeting between Balletto Civile and French artists - Conques(FR)
POLAND Meeting between Balletto Civile and Polish artists - d (PL)
October 19-20 (2010)
2nd Partners Meeting
Cluj-Napoca (RO), Centre Culturel Franais
The Emigrants Performance by Angelo Romagnoli
Cluj-Napoca (RO)
Conference/Meeting Playing Identities Project
Cluj-Napoca (RO), Babes-Bolyai University and National Theatre
October 20 (2010)
Creole Performance Cycle Romanian Residence
STEP 1 Made in Romania

Cluj-Napoca (RO), National Theatre, Festival Temps dImages

The performance was realized at the end of a 15 days theatrical residence.

November 19 (2010)
Scientific Research Seminar
Siena (IT), Fiera del libro, curated by Provincia di Siena
November 25-26 (2010)
International Workshop on Creolisation
Siena (IT), Graduate School Santa Chiara
December 18 (2010)
Creole Performance Cycle French Residence
STEP 2 Archive dun trsor vivant
Conques (FR), Festival Errances
The performance was realized at the end of a 15 days theatrical residence.

January 23 (2011)
Creole Performance Cycle Hungarian Residence
STEP 3 Budapest_Nulls vek
Budapest (HU), Gdr Klub
The performance was realized at the end of a 15 days theatrical residence.

March 25 -26 (2011)

The Emigrants Video Projection
d (PL), Poleskim Orodku Sztuki
March 26 (2011)
Creole Performance Cycle Polish Residence
STEP 4 Broken Promises / Zamane Obietnjce
d (PL), Touching Theatre/International Day of Theatre - Poleskim Orodku Sztuki
The performance was realized at the end of a 15 days theatrical residence.

April (2011)
5/9 April Chair of Prof. Ulf Hannerz
19 April Seminar of Prof. Livia Holden
Siena (IT), Graduate School Santa Chiara

June (2011)
Creole Performance Cycle Italian Residence
STEP 5 BeiBeiBank
Siena (IT), Festival Voci di Fonte
The performance was realized at the end of a 15 days theatrical residence.

June (2011) PLAYING IDENTITIES FINAL EVENT

SIENA / Festival VOCI DI FONTE
June 18July 5
Creolimage photos by Daniela Neri from the Creole Performance Cycle

Exhibition curated by Daniela Neri and Stefano Jacoviello, set up by Luca Baldini; realized within the Project
Playing Identites.

Transmediterranea photos by Mattia Insolera

Exhibition curated by Mattia Insolera and Ada Sbriccoli, set up by Luca Baldini; realized by The Private Space
and CoNCA-Consell Nacional de la Cultura i les Artes (Barcelona).

Santa Maria della Scala Museum

June 20 and 21
The Creole Performance Cycle

Within the Festival the entire Creole Performance Cycle has been staged, through an itinerant show at the
museum Santa Maria della Scala. The artists participating to the Cycle rehearsed all together on 19, 20 and
21 of June.

June 22
The Americans Sandro Iovine reads the The Americans by Robert Frank
Curated by Il Lavoro Culturale

Graduate School Santa Chiara

June 22
Final International Scientific Workshop
Graduate School Santa Chiara
July 23-30 (2010)
Meetings on Creolisation - with the participation of Mario Canonge, Linley Marthe et Chander Sardjoe.
Concert du trio Rhizome, hommage Edouard Glissant.

Conques (FR)

10

October (2011) PLAYING IDENTITIES DISSEMINATION

October 26
The Emigrants: Reading and Conference by Filippo De Dominicis
Conques (FR), Centre Europen dArt et de Civilisation Mdivale
October 27
Speaking about the migration in Europe through The Emigrants of Mroek
Budapest (HU), Klcsey Ferenc Secondary School

Speakers: Daniel Biro - Laterna Magica, Norbert Szari - historian/teacher, Sandor Zsuzsa - drama pedagogic

October 28-30
The Emigrants: Reading and Conference by Filippo De Dominicis
Presentation of Scientific Research Results by Stefano Jacoviello
Presentation of the Multimedia Reportage curated by Daniela Neri
Siena (IT), Universit di Siena
The Multimedia Reportage has been presented in all venues of the project

(2011-2012) PLAYING IDENTITIES SUSTAINABILITY

October 2011
Playing Identities Creolisation, Creation and the Commons. Towards a sustainable
European Citizenship.
Establishment of a European Network of Theatres and Universities for the presentation of a new
project within Strand 1.1 Multiannual Cooperation Project
April 2012
Shifting Borders: European Perspectives on Creolisation
Publication of the scientific research by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (UK)
June and July 2012 (Siena)
Playing Identities. Acting, the Self and Society - International Summer School

Coordinated by Graduate School Santa Chiara Siena (IT); Partners: Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca
(RO), University of Theatre and Film Budapest (HU).

11

The Scientific Research: an Overview

Tommaso Sbriccoli

The ways in which processes of cultural change and creativity are triggered and work has been
widely debated in social and human sciences. Many models have been proposed, and some of
them even socially and politically tested. Furthermore, the debate regarding cultural encounter and
cultural change has greatly increased and has been put at the centre of European political agenda
after the incredible explosion of human mobility and multi-cultural cohabitation that contemporary
societies are experiencing in what is now mostly referred to as globalisation.
The scientific aim of Playing Identities research team was indeed to provide an analytical overview
of such frameworks, and develop them toward new innovative directions by referring to, and
revising, existing paradigms based on the concept of creolisation.
The genealogy of this concept is complex, and its semantic field varies greatly according to different
historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. Since its transit from a disciplinary field, i.e. that
of linguistics, to social and cultural theory of the contemporary world, by partly disentangling it
from its places of origin and its peculiar links to colonialism, mass displacement, and plantations,
creolisation has thus become a widely utilised concept in the social and human sciences.
Under this respect, it has paralleled the trajectories of other terms, like hybridization, as metaphors
good to think with about the complex cultural global dynamics. Indeed, the concept of creolisation,
as an analytical tool, conveys a particular theoretical fascination. It seems able both to grasp those
subtle processes of production of a third space in the field of cultural encounter, as well as to
explain the creation of new cultural constellations. As such, since its utilisation by douard Glissant
the inspirer of our project and Ulf Hannerz who has participated to it by chairing a series
of seminars its utility as an analytical tool has been widely discussed, and it has become an
important and controversial concept in the works of many scholars.
It is thus by drawing on such literature and theoretical frameworks that the researchers involved in
our project have tried both to offer insights into contemporary phenomena of cultural encounter
from an European multidisciplinary perspective, and to test creolisation as an analytical tool and a
methodological practice in order to address specific problems through the analysis of diverse case
studies.
As a team composed by researchers in many different disciplines (anthropology, semiotics,
comparative literature, sociology, cognitive sciences, political sciences) and from different
national backgrounds (Italy, Portugal and Slovenia were the three countries involved) we found a

12

common theoretical ground by understanding creolisation, as suggested by Charles Stewart,

as a restructuring of previous codes and meanings. We have thus look toward what Hannerz has
defined the organisation of difference, rather than toward a global cultural homogenisation, as
many analysis of contemporary globalisation do. In this perspective, we have looked at centreperiphery relations at the same time as constitutive of a global discourse on which constructions of
the Other/Alien are built, and as the continuum along which new spaces (cultural, social, political
and artistic ones) are produced by the experiences of social actors.
Common reflections on migration and mobility, both of human beings and of meanings, have thus
been the starting point for the researchers in order to elaborate a shared framework of analysis.
In this way, migration and mobility have become the background upon which the production of new
cultural and social spaces through the continuous reorganization of borders has been looked for.
Real or symbolic borders are significantly at the centre of most of the researchers works.
In fact, it is exactly through the re-configuration of their position that the possibility for the emersion
of new identities and subjectivities becomes concrete. According to such perspective, the strategic
shifting and stretching of borders allow individual or collective actors to reconfigure spaces of
action, borderlands, where to establish new rules, new roles and new identities, either for better or
for worse.
Following such theoretical premises, we have been working on our respective topics always keeping
in mind the insights and suggestions provided by the colleagues during the project workshops
where our researches were presented and discussed. Therefore, methodology itself has become
an important field where to confront and elaborate the different disciplinary backgrounds in what
can be prospected as a creolised approach to creolisation.
Furthermore, the on-going attention to the theatrical part of the project and to the performances
produced in the various countries involved, has allowed us to bridge the often neglected gap
between processes of social and cultural change and the individual or collective experimentations
of new common spaces of creativity.
As a collective research enterprise, our work has been based on the one hand on multisided
fieldwork and participant observation carried out in Slovenia, Israel/Palestine and Italy often
with the collaboration of migration officers, lawyers, architects, social workers, and activists in
associations for labourers and migrants, law courts, work places, and contested sites.
On the other hand, some of the studies draw on data obtained by the critical analysis of documents
and literary and artistic objects whose thematic focus provides insights into dynamics of potential
creolisation.
The scientific results of the project will be published with Cambridge Scholar Publishing in a collected
work titled Shifting Borders. European Perspectives on Creolisation, edited by Tommaso Sbriccoli
and Stefano Jacoviello.

13

Changing Borders, Playing Identities.

Studies in transnational cultures and creolisation - Universit degli Studi di Siena

Playing Identities Visiting Chair

Course Director: Ulf Hannerz
If we consider creolisation broadly as a restructuring of previous codes and meanings, and as the
outcome of a never-ending process of strategic interaction, we should look toward what Ulf Hannerz
has defined the organisation of difference, rather than toward a global cultural homogenisation, as
many perspectives on contemporary globalisation do.
The scope of this series of seminar was thus to discuss cultural encounter in terms of what happens
with the creation of new codes of communication, focusing on contexts where people move away
from its original places in our more and more interconnected world.
Ulf Hannerz is Emeritus professor in Social Anthropology at Stockholm University and Dr. Honoris
Causa in Philosophia at the University of Oslo.
His research includes urban societies, local media cultures, transnational cultural processes, and
globalization. He has taught at several universities in Europe, the United States, Asia and Australia,
and has been the Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). His work
has been published in original or translation in 14 languages.

Chair Events of Prof. Ulf Hannerz

5 april 2011 Global Culture: Frameworks of Change
Opening Lesson
6 april 2011 Anthropologys World: Life in twenty-First Century Discipline
Seminar in collaboration with Il Lavoro Culturale
7 april 2011 Writing and Reading World Features:
Global Scenarios as Text and Transnational Cutural Phenomena
Closure Seminar
8 april 2011 Global Culture: Frameworks of Change
Open Round Table

14

Playing Identities Seminars and Workshops

Seminar of Prof. Livia Holden

9 april 2011 Divorzio a iniziativa della donna: India, Pakistan e itinerari trasnazionali
Livia Holden is an anthropologist of law at LUMS (Pakistan) and Associate Research Fellow at the
French Institute of Pondicherry.
She carries out extensive and longitudinal fieldwork in South Asia, in Southern Italy and in North
America with a specific stress on collaborative approaches. At present she is extending her focus
to Pakistan regarding the analysis of the legal discourse in criminal cases.

Seminar of Tommaso Sbriccoli and Stefano Jacoviello

Le parole chiave dellincontro culturale
19 November 2010

First International Scientific Workshop on Creolisation

25-26 November 2010

Second International Scientific Workshop on Creolisation

22 June 2010

15

16

The Emigrants
by Sawomir Mroek
translated by Silvano De Fanti
directed by Jerzy Stuhr
starring Massimiliano Poli e Angelo Romagnoli
music and sound Stefano Jacoviello
lighting Luca Bronzo
set design Mario Fontanini
a project by laLut - Centro di Ricerca e Produzione Teatrale
with the support of Regione Toscana / Sistema Regionale dello Spettacolo
co-produced by Fondazione Teatro Due / Comune di Siena / laLut / Festival Voci di Fonte
After thirtyfive years from the first represantation, Jerzy Stuhr directs a new staging of the famous
play by Mroek, Emigrants. Stuhr himself was one of the actors of Andrzej Wajdas celebrated
adaptation for the stage of Mroeks work. Jerzy Stuhr is a polish actor and director, famous for his
performances both in theatre and cinema: directed by the most popular directors of his country,
such as Holland and Kieslowski (he was Kieslowskis favourite actor and artistic heir), we remember
him in Double Bass by Patrick Sskind and in the italian version of Pinters Ashes to Ashes.
In this new work upon Mroeks play, Jerzy Stuhr directs the two italian actors Massimiliano Poli
and Angelo Romagnoli. A farmer and an intellectual, XX and AA, are stuck underground, in a place
crossed by sewer pipes. Each of them has his own story and troubles, both emigrants from a
country where theres no democracy. Here, the play takes place, based on a fast-paced dialogue
and subtle cruelties, within a continuous fighting between the two men.
While the entire world celebrates New Years Eve, XX and AA keep struggling for thier life and
identity through their quarrels, even though they are perfectly aware of their common condition and
destiny, marked by escape and fear. The debut was in october 2009 at Fondazione Teatro Due
(Parma); two repeat performances took place in Siena at the end of March 2010.

17

The Emigrants: the desire to be free

Raffaella Ilari interviews Jerzy Stuhr

Whats the importance of staging Mroeks The Emigrants in 2009?

Though I have always deemed the masterpieces of World literature such as Shakespeares plays as
extremely important, my main interest remains indeed with contemporary literature.
I have always asked myself What does the audience need today? What sociological, psychological
and human problems remain unaddressed today?
Migration is one of the most urgent issues to Europe, and Italy is experiencing the hard problems
that migration carries along. Whenever you have a border and a better quality of life on one of the
sides, there you have migration and all the alleged issues.
Newcomers have two possibilities: either to forget their past (childhood, family, sentimental ties,
school, education) and get a brand new start in their new country (maybe their best option), or,
more tragically, to treasure the dream of their return to home.
This is the case of The Emigrants, in which characters deal with their going back home.
Their nostalgia becomes some sort of disease.
For how long shall we keep being tolerant towards the Other?
I have made a successful movie from a Kieslowskis script, The Big Animal. It tells the story of a man
which finds a camel and chooses to take care of it as if it were a pet.
His behaviour creates a big confusion in his small village. People dont understand his conduct,
they soon grow scared and aggressive towards him. Its hard to say how long we shall keep being
tolerant I feel I am a tolerant man, but I guess that if gypsies should camp right before my house,
my tolerance would be put on a strain. And the new guests would be well aware of it, though they
lead their lives in a constant insecurity and instability.
The Emigrants is based as well on two characters that lead their suspended lives, foreign to each
other but indeed unite.

18

Which are the differences between the well-known mise-en-scene directed by Andrzej
Wajda in 1977 (in which you played AA) and your present direction?
Mroek wrote the play in 1976. We debuted in 1977 at the Stary Theatre in Krakow.
It was my first leading role. Todays audience is so much different from the Polish audience in the
80s. At that time we were behind the Iron Curtain, the Western world was completely alien to us.
Although some luckier people may have known better of the West, our lives were spent in Poland.
I believe that The Emigrants must lose every reference to the political situation of Poland in the early
80s. What remains, and vivid, is the desire to be free.
Who are AA ans XX?
They can be either two Italians abroad or two emigrants in Italy, I guess we are closer to the second
option. AA represents the intelligentsia of his own country, while XX is a countryman.
They are the same age, they come from the same generation.
They spend New Year's Eve together, and yet secluded from the rest of the cheering crowd.
They fall into a harsh psychodrama in which they treat each other with cruelty and lose their human
dignity, but eventually they save themselves when they understand that they need each other.
AA and XX understand that staying together, fighting, humiliating each other is their sole chance of
remaining in touch with somebody akin.
(Excerpt from Teatro Festival, magazine of Fondazione Teatro Due, 2009)

19

The Creole Performance Cycle

The Creole Performance Cycle has been staged in Romania, France, Hungary, Poland and Italy.
The performance was expected to develop and change at each stage through the encounter with
different places, languages and artists whose theatrical backgrounds was linked to diverse creative
processes and poetics.
Thus, the purpose of the Creole Performance Cycle was to provide the ground for investigating the
multiple processes of creation.
The final performance, that has been staged at the end of the project development, was not as
important as the process by which it was created. Intercultural and international collaborations are
common practices; the Creole Performance Cycle was not made up in order to demonstrate that
artists from diverse countries can work together by virtue of the shared language of arts.
Our aim was to play the processes by which creolised languages are created.
These languages always develop spontaneously and rapidly in the wake of social and political
need. Similarly, the creative process of each Creole Perfomance involved both a necessary relation
and a challenge between different poetics in a context of urgency.
The Creole Performance Cycle has been conducted by the Italian Company Balletto Civile,
winner of the International Prize published by Playing Identities, whose jury was composed by
Jerzy Sthur, Laura Caretti, Mimma Gallina, Angelo Romagnoli, Malgorzata Andrzejewska, Krisztian
Kovcs, Mireille Larrouy and Paola Donati.
The goal of the project Lala submitted by Balletto Civile was to was to undertake a collective
writing with the other artists involved in the project about work and a Europe of workers.
Lala looks for a common ground between cultures, languages and histories, and tries to go over
traditional policies of integration, which look toward omologation of cultural differences.
The fundamental question is whether contradictions and differences in Europe can come together
into a common expression without melting.

20

In authors words:
Imagine to start from a construction site.
According to our opinion, culture has to look like a construction site. We mean a working place
where men and women, workers, complete an action that they know, that they are used to do.
They all cooperate in building something bigger then them, beyond their own expectations.
Imagine skilled workers quietly building up something.
This something will become an object, something real to be built on the scene: we imagined a wing,
which symbolizes the possibility to fly that sprouts from mens work.
This prosaic action, the construction of a real scenic object, allows us to create an enigmatic event,
a simple interaction, but full of meanings and told through plain dialogues.
Whenever this action will be different, this will point out a different way of building and conceiving.
Workers are talking and exchanging opinions while they keep building up their big wing.
The performance will thus consist in an action in which the workers of the show - dancers,
musicians, stage engineers, actors, designers will really create an object on the stage, each one
of them using their skill and experience.
The dance will come out from normal workers daily actions. It is a dance that talks about us, about
the story we are living.
It is a theatre rooted in the deep relationships between creatures.
Before the dark of the curtain, just before the end, the simple and devout magnificent art.
(Balletto Civile)
In each venue, the performance consisted of a peculiar staging of the encounter of all its elements,
creating an original writing for each step of the cycle.

21

Balletto Civile
Balletto Civile is a nomadic collaborative performance group. The core members are Emanuele
Braga, Maurizio Camilli, Michela Lucenti (director), Emanuela Serra, which contribute to the
conception, research, writing, choreography, documentation, and educational demands of the
company work.
The Balletto Civiles project budded in 2003 from the previous experience of the theatrical group
LImpasto. Comunit teatrale nomade.
The new company was born on Michela Lucentis (La Spezia, 1971) own initiative, in order to
develop her own idea of a total theatre, which favours live singing and roots movement in a deep
relationship between interpreters. Michela Lucenti has studied at the school of Teatro di Genova.
She worked and collaborated with the dancers Beatrice Libonati and Jan Minarik, members of
Pina Bauschs company. (Michela has also interpreted Pina Bauschs Caf Paris at the Theatre
de Recherche, Paris). Moreover, she has studied Jerzy Grotowsky through the teachings of his
pupil Thomas Richards and has worked with important artists such as Massimo Navone, Bruno
d Franceschi, Enrico Bonavera, Raffaella Giordano, Giorgio Rossi, Michele Abbondanza, Adriana
Boriello, Julien Anzilotti, Nezdad Maksumic, Pietra Selva Nicolicchia, Moni Ovadia, Roberto And,
Ismael Ivo, Valter Malosti.
Balletto Civile, with the support of CSS Theatre Innovation of Friuli Venezia Giulia (IT), has created
many shows, including ll Corpo Sociale, I Topi, I Sette a Tebe, and Ccelera!. As author and
performer in the latter, Maurizio Camilli won the Dante Cappelletti Award.
In 2008 Balletto Civile debuted at the Venice Biennale Dance Festival with the show Creatura,
choreographed by Michela Lucenti. In June 2010 the show Col Sole in Fronte, written and performed
by Maurizio Camilli with the physical writing of Michela Lucenti, received the italian National Critics
Award for Theatre ANCT.
Michela Lucenti was awarded with the Washington Ballet Choreographic Fellowship by the
international jury of Premio Roma Danza 2011.
Since 2009 Balletto Civile is artist-in-residence at Teatro Due Art Foundation in Parma.
The idea of Lala project is consistent with the increasing interest of Balletto Civile in working
on the expressive language of performing arts, that is related to the experiences they had during
the previous years. Balletto Civile always tried, mostly through the use of singing and dancing, to
create an original way of expression which was somehow simple, direct and popular. According
to this direction, Balletto Civile has always given a particular attention to the experiences of cultural
exchange.

22

These include:
participation in the 2003-2004 project promoted by Seas Intercult (Stockholm), where
companies from different Baltic Sea States were engaged in a process of meeting and exchange
with companies coming from the Adriatic Sea;
the relationship with the city of Cairo in Egypt, where - in 2005 and 2006 -, thanks to the
Institute for Italian Culture, Balletto Civile brought his shows and proposed workshops;
participation in the Noorderzon Festival in Groningen, Netherlands;
collaboration with the company Cahin-Caha Daniel Gulko from France, the artist Jules Backman
from San Francisco (US), Yui Kawaguci from Japan, or the funambulist Ramon Kelvink Jr;
the creation of the show Creatura (2008), commissioned by La Biennale di Venezia/Danza,
inspired on the theme of beauty of our western culture. In this show the company involved a
group of African acrobats from Nairobi, grown up in Africa slums in the Kenyan capital;
in 2009, a big project budded from the experience of Creatura: the project, coordinated by
Balletto Civile and Artificio23, gave birth to a film documentary by the Video Maker collective
UOVOQUADRATO, about Nairobi, life in the slums and the acrobats work. The project provided
for a path of experimentation and interaction with the African acrobatic dance (both in Italy and
in Africa), which turned out to be the production of a contemporary dance show - I prodotti -,
concerning the not so easy context of the Italian show-market.

23

24

STEP 1 Made in Romania

Balletto Civile and Teatrul Imposibil

direction and choreography Emanuele Braga, Emanuela Serra

artists/interpretation Ramona Dumitrean, Romina Merei, Bogdan Rdulescu
dramaturgy Balletto Civile and Cristinel Marian Nedea
scenography Balletto Civile
video Balletto Civile and Daniela Neri
photos Daniela Neri
production/co-production Scuola Superiore Santa Chiara/Universit di Siena, Centre Culturel
Franais de Cluj-Napoca (Romania), laLut/Festival Voci di Fonte (Siena, Italy), Festival Errances
(Conques, France), Laterna Magica (Budapest,Hungary), Poleski Art Center and AHE (d,
Poland)
in collaboration with National Theater (Cluj-Napoca)
debut 20 October 2010, Cluj-Napoca National Theatre, Festival Temps d'Images (Romania)

The Arts of the Future will be radical transformations of situations, or they will be nothing
Guy Debord
Through this artistic process we tried to establish a dialogue with the concrete reality, by reflecting
on our condition as workers. We discussed with various representatives of the artistic community
of the city of Cluj-Napoca about the situation of the show business in Transylvania.
Finally, we set up a live show in which three Romanian performers dance on a stage, that is insecure
and shaky. Behind the performers, a video projection depicts a fresco on our problems, our critical
thinking, and our desires.

25

26

STEP 2 Archive dun trsor vivant

artists/interpretation Emanuele Braga, Alessandro Berti, Francis Fraizon, Laurence Leyrolles,
Muriel Migayrou
video Balletto Civile and Daniela Neri
photos Daniela Neri
production/co-production Scuola Superiore Santa Chiara/Universit di Siena, Centre Culturel
Franais de Cluj-Napoca (Romania), laLut/Festival Voci di Fonte (Siena, Italy), Festival Errances
(Conques, France), Laterna Magica (Budapest,Hungary), Poleski Art Center and AHE (d,
Poland)
debut 18 December 2010, Centre Europen Conques (France)

Conques, where the French step of the Creole Performance Cycle has been held, is the perfect
place for a research into European identity. This village has a thousand-year history, tons of pilgrims
and visitors have come here from all over Europe. Besides the abbey church - whose stained glass
windows have been created by the contemporary artist Pierre Soulages - Conques hosts the last
intact liturgic treasure of France.
The five artists who worked on the performance decided to study the concept of "treasure".
They investigated the patrimonial aspect of this concept, and also its role in the creation of identity.
They inquired into the relationship between such concept and the inhabitants of Conques, as if
this treasure was still lively. So, during the artistic residence, the artists have met the inhabitants
and interviewed them about their relationship with the village and about what the world "treaseure"
meant for them.
The result of this interview collection merged into to the performance, titled Archive of a living
trasure. The performance includes dance, singing, clownerie, plastic art and video.

27

28

STEP 3 Budapest_Nulls vek

Balletto Civile and Artus Company

direction and choreography Michela Lucenti, Maurizio Camilli, Ambra Chiarello

artists/interpretation Boross Martin, Krmendy Pl, Nagy Csilla, Rti Anna, Tri Gspr, Tucker
Andrs, Maurizio Camilli, Ambra Chiarello
artistic director Goda Gbor
lights Kocsis Gbor
photos Daniela Neri
video Laterna Magica
production/co-production Scuola Superiore Santa Chiara/Universit di Siena, Centre Culturel
Franais de Cluj-Napoca (Romania), laLut/Festival Voci di Fonte (Siena, Italy), Festival Errances
(Conques, France), Laterna Magica (Budapest,Hungary), Poleski Art Center and AHE (d,
Poland)
in collaboration with VilgVeleje Fesztivl/Gdr Klub
with the support of Nemzeti Erforrs Minisztrium/ Nemzeti Kulturlis Alap
debut 22 January 2011, Gdr Klub Budapest (Hungary)

A table, two plants, a group of people dressed in office clothes, a row of old rusty cans.
A workplace in which repetitive and seemingly pointless actions follow one another, and eventually
forge relationships. The characters on the stage either move the tanks or dance. They meet and
interact with each other while they carry out their tasks at the brink of absurdity.
From such a mix, there stems a choreography deeply carved into the practice of work itself.
The action vortex involves the viewer, little by little, and brings him to discover traces of a more
intimate communication flourishing through the serial acts of bureaucratic routine.

29

30

STEP 4 Zamane Obietnjce

Balletto Civile and POS / AHE

direction and choreography Alessandro Berti, Michela Lucenti, Emanuela Serra, Maurizio Camilli
artists/interpretation Iga Zaczna, Julia Jakubowska, ucja Herszkowicz, ukasz Michalak,
Maurizio Camilli
lights Sawomir Szwed, Bogdan Saaciski
video and photos Daniela Neri
production/co-production Scuola Superiore Santa Chiara/Universit di Siena, Centre Culturel
Franais de Cluj-Napoca (Romania), laLut/Festival Voci di Fonte (Siena, Italy), Festival Errances
(Conques, France), Laterna Magica (Budapest,Hungary), Poleski Art Center and AHE (d,
Poland)
debut 27 March 2011 Touching Theatre/International Day of Theatre, d - Poleskim Orodku
Sztuki

It is true that man is an animal. Even if it does not roll in the sand like an animal, always watches
whether anyone is watching him. Perhaps the man is an animal gone mad.
Three young girls and a Polish musician have an audition in front of someone who is supposed to
be the rich owner of a club in Italy, looking for artists to hire.
After the audition, which happens before the eyes of the audience, while artists are waiting for a
response, something breaks. It is not a lack of words for communication, nor the difficulty of an
impossible translation, but the situation itself that leads to an unexpected outcome.

31

32

STEP 5 BeiBeiBank!
Balletto Civile and laLut

direction and choreography Alessandro Berti, Emanuele Braga, Michela Lucenti

artists/interpretation Alessandro Berti, Emanuele Braga, Michela Lucenti, Silvia Franco, Stefano
Jacoviello, Tommaso Sbriccoli
video Emanuele Braga
music direction Stefano Jacoviello
costumes Marco Caboni
photos Daniela Neri
production/co-production Scuola Superiore Santa Chiara/Universit di Siena, Centre Culturel
Franais de Cluj-Napoca (Romania), laLut/Festival Voci di Fonte (Siena, Italy), Festival Errances
(Conques, France), Laterna Magica (Budapest, Hungary), Poleski Art Center and AHE (d,
Poland)
debut 20 and 21 June 2011, Festival Voci di Fonte, Siena (Italy)

There was a time when the value of work was directly proportional to both the time spent to achieve
a result and the effort made to produce it. Nevertheless, the market price of the product is often
governed by the fluctuation of its financial value, which is determined by transactions on a Stock
exchange located who-knows-where-in-the-world.
This apparent paradox is the basis of many labor struggles, and of the depreciation of labor costs
in our country. Is it right that those who plough lands, together with the people who make a pack of
pasta should depend on the fluctuating ephemeral value of the products of their work?

33

34

Chasing the flight

Francesca Montanino

When I began my documentation of the Creole Performance Cycle, traveling as a member of a

thespian company around Europe, I couldnt believe that so many of my presumed convictions
about theatrical practice would have been brought into question.
How- I wondered a theatrical experience can be selected as the object of an anthropological
experiment? What does theatre have to do with Creole phenomena? And, above all, what does
creolisation exactly mean? (I have always been particularly unwitting towards anthropological
issues).
However, I could clearly sense that, thanks to its really mixed and multi-linguistic nature, theatre
might have a lot to share with cultural and trans-cultural dynamics. But how could be possible to
establish a mutual relation between these two different subjects, without generating only a mere
intellectual exercise? As it often happens, I found an answer to my Hamlet-like indecisions in the
practical work. As my journey with Balletto Civile was going on in the fascinating Transilvania or
in the bucolic scenario of Conques, I realised that these monitored and really intensive meetings
between European artists offered an outstanding possibility not only to investigate multicultural
issues through theatre, but also to see in a new light the theatrical dynamics themselves.
The theatrical practice has got indeed a shifting nature: through its instruments, codes of expression
continously redefine their borders, re-setting their syntax and their system of meaning. That is why,
the investigation of a staging in itinere can often reveal transversal relations: when, as it happened in
this case, stage-creation involves people from different cultures and linguistic backgrounds as well
as from different artistic paths, borders radically move and anything can be brought into question.
In this sense, creolisation turns out to be not only a field to be enquired through theatre, but a
concrete tool enacted in the theatrical process itself. For instance, the transversal mobility that
usually characterises creolisation phenomena was here employed in itself as a substantial condition
for the realisation of the performances. Mobility should in this sense be understood here not only
as physical displacement, but also as a continuous re-setting of ones own system of expression.
Furthermore, all the performances showed their nature of cooperative processes: as creolisation,
in fact, performative practice is not an excluding system, but rather a project that legitimates a
complex interrelation.
Although linguistic differences could have probably been expected as the strongest barrier to
cross, the most significant challenge was rather to deal with the different artistic backgrounds
from which the involved artists came: every step implied the effort to mediate between different

35

ways of thinking, living and facing theatrical experience. In this context, an important role was
played by dance as a language, and particularly by Balletto Civiles approach to it. Dance, as a
poetic research of a relationship between bodies, became the Creole language par excellence:
through dance new aggregations were established and another linguistic system was set, as the
tangible result of negotiation and cooperation. Placed on a threshold between the said and the
unsaid, the tangible and the figurative, the gravity and the weightlessness, dance demonstrated
as a privileged place to host mingling identities.
During the whole Cycle, several of the initial assumptions, which could have easily represented
an obstacle to the proceeding of the work, turned out to be strong points of the artistic process.
Urgency, which characterised the work on each of the performances, altered their development
positively, even modifying sensibly the final outcomes, as happened in the cases of Romanian and
French steps.
The pressure of driving the work toward the final outcome always influenced the theatrical process,
contributing to generate that unexpected, which strictly belongs both to theatre as a living
practice and to creolisation as an unpredictable system of relations. Strongly linked to the concept
of urgency was that sort of coefficient of humanity which sometimes overlapped to the artistic
encounter: many of the communication gaps raised due to cultural differences influenced in fact the
final outcomes. But even if in some cases they broke artistic harmony, though they finally enriched
the performances with the signs of human relationships (as happened for instance during the Polish
step).
The presence of all these variants demonstrate how important the process lying behind the final
product can be in an experiment of this kind. It is so to such an extent that the work in progress
itself turned out to be the true subject of the investigation on stage. To stage an action in fieri means
indeed to stage the complex system of connections behind, in, and beyond the performance.
By choosing to represent work as an action in progress, Balletto Civile disclosed the dynamics
that governed artistic creation itself.
The concept of work has been continuously re-defined and re-established in its principles,
according to the ideas generated at each step through the negotiations with local artists.
Thus, in the Romanian step the urgency of dealing with the particular conditions faced by the
artists employed in the National Theatre meant reformulating the focus of the performance: from
a previous idea to a new, collective one. In Conques, instead, the town itself, with his balance
between historical tradition and touristic demands, absorbed the whole artistic process.
In Hungary, work was intended as alienation and de-personalisation, but it was also transformed
into its opposite: cooperative action as a way toward freedom. If in Poland commodified bodies
could at the end reveal the fragile humanity lying behind buy and sell relations, the Italian rural
setting showed the possibility of a return to an ancient and primogenital relation with work.

36

Looking at the whole cycle as a global structure, all the resonances between the various steps
emerge clearly. The idea of work is always weighed between two opposite, even if coexisting,
conceptions of production: on one side, producing things is an alienating, estranging battle, but on
the other one it reveals its inner nature as a cooperative, collective action.
Overturning alienation always means to discover a form of freedom. All performances follow a
similar structure: an estranging action is performed in a more and more pressing way until a climax
is reached, which eventually gives way to the final flight, lAla (lit. The Wing).
A flight that can be embodied by a Romanian actress lifted by her fellows into the air, or by the long
glance that resets the borders of a hierarchical relation; furthermore, the flight can be a wall of tans
destroyed in an act of liberation, or discovering a treasure around a table full of cakes and teacups
shared by a little community.
A flight can be, in the end, a Dionysian dance on a cornfield.

37

Creolimage
photos by Daniela Neri

I saw there
identities playing for a vision.
Stefano Jacoviello

Romania, France, Hungary, Poland, Italy. These are the countries the Creole Performance Cycle
has been travelling across. There, artists of diverse provenances and backgrounds have met on the
stage and have negotiated language, methods, topics, and forms of expression in order to produce
a series of performances.
Balletto Civile - the Italian theatre and dance company winner of the Playing Identities international
call for artistic projects has been the conductor of this creative process. So, its members had the
task to set the rhythm on the path. Balletto Civiles members moved periodically across Europe,
from Cluj to Conques, from Budapest to d, at last reaching Siena. Along the way, they locked
their eyes with those of the people they came across.
The groups luggage was filled with skills and ideas. These in turn became questions, which they
asked to the places and the artists they met. Together with the latters, Balletto Civile was involved
in a role-play, which finally displayed both the hard work of mutual understanding they had gone
through, and the urgent need of thinking about their own identity.
Daniela Neri, photographer, closely observed this process of transformation with the aim of keeping
its traces in a series of shots. Some of the images have been collected in the exhibition Creolimage.
Since she worked side by side with the artists involved on the stage, Daniela Neri could not avoid
projecting the process of creolisation into the photographic image.
On the one hand, this has meant documenting that transformation. Photography was driven
toward adopting the style of the reportage: it assumed the posture of a witness who, through his
gaze, participates to the dynamics of the encounter. The camera slips into the artistic negotiation
to finally observe the moment of creation.
Nevertheless, witnessing is not reporting the truth. It means, instead, to report facts from a point
of view that is necessarily conniving at someone elses one. The photographic shot throws the
beholder in the very middle of the struggle and puts him next to somebody who was there, where
the event took place. By means of providing the standpoint of a witness, the camera asks the
beholder to side with whoever is involved in the creolisation process. Images invite the beholder to
share with the portrayed people the tensions, the attitude and the target of their glance.
On the other hand, to imprint the process of creolisation into the images implied the translation of
the theatrical forms of representation. Photography had thus to be thought of as a language capable

40

of speaking the scene through its peculiar expressive tools. It had to achieve through other means
what the stage realises through the mise-en-scne. In this sense, Daniela Neris photos push the
stage towards the depth of field and take its place in front of the audience. The portion of the world
they crop shifts in this way from the mise-en-scne to the mise-en-cadre.
Thus, if on the one hand the creolisation process is documented, on the other one, photography
directly participates in it, in order to produce visions that bridle all the forces at play in the very
instant of the shot. The surface of the image is made thus appear as a space always on the point
of exploding.
Balletto Civile has played with the imagery of all the diverse communities it came across along the
journey. The Italian company has tried to investigate the logics and the mechanics of the European
imagery in order to translate this imagery into the performances. In this way, any theatrical action
enacted on the stage could really be able to affect it. Once this process has taken place, Daniela
Neris photographic work brings back this reconfigured imagery to the nature of image and returns
it to eyes whose gaze should now be able to reconstruct it. Image thus becomes the ingredient of a
new European memory that is very different from archived collections of beautiful landscapes and
folk stereotypes. The result of this process is also quite distant from the goals of institutional policies
of integration.
Daniela Neris shots look closely at, and keep the traces of, the encounter between different forms
of life. They chase the force released by artistic acts, which unavoidably aim to give to the world
an unexpected order which lies behind appearance: that is, a new picture of reality. However, the
creative act runs along time and escapes from being captured. Consequently, the only possibility
that is left to photography is to recreate the act in order to render it.
Memory of the encounter. Memory of creation. The memory that is kept in the pictures is to be in
turn reactivated by the beholders glance. Chasing the rhymes through the pictures can allow us to
find again the way and reshape the travels route step by step. Thus, the beholder will be absorbed
in the mixture of gestures and in the tangle of viewpoints. It will be possible for him to trace back
each of the events to the places where they occurred. At the end, the beholder will be progressively
able to recognize the identities of each of the artists engaged in the project, and to follow them in
their gradual transformation.
Gaze is driven to perform a double movement. On one side, the indefinite set of relations established
between the images leaves to the beholder the task of linking them through his own interpretative
code, and in this way forces him to join the process of creolisation. On the other side, the way
pictures have been organised in the exhibition points to the trace of an experience, at the same
time as it hands this experience over to memory. Walking around the panels, the observer crosses
his steps with those of the processes of identity, and enters the game of interactions. At the end,
once creation has been made in this way the subject of vision, it becomes available to us as a place
we can finally live in.

41

October 2010, Cluj-Napoca

42

March 2011, d

43

January 2011, Budapest

44

March 2011, d

45

December 2010, Conques

46

June 2011, Siena

47

October 2010, Cluj-Napoca

48

October 2010, Cluj-Napoca

49

January 2011, Budapest

50

June 2011, Siena

51

October 2010, Cluj-Napoca

52

December 2010, Conques

53

December 2010, Conques

54

January 2011, Budapest

55

October 2010, Cluj-Napoca

56

June 2011, Siena

57

December 2010, Conques

58

March 2011, d

59

January 2011, Budapest

60

March 2011, d

61

December 2010, Conques

62

March 2011, d

63

June 2011, Siena

64

December 2010, Conques

65

January 2011, Budapest

66

January 2011, Budapest

67

December 2010, Conques

68

June 2011, Siena

69

January 2011, Budapest

70

October 2010, Cluj-Napoca

71

January 2011, Budapest

72

December 2010, Conques

73

January 2011, Budapest

74

October 2010, Cluj-Napoca

75

March 2011, d

76

March 2011, d

77

October 2010, Cluj-Napoca

78

June 2011, Siena

79

March 2011, d

80

January 2011, Budapest

81

January 2011, Budapest

82

March 2011, d

83

Table of contents
INTRODUCTION

p. 1

THE PROJECT

p. 3

CALENDAR

p. 7

THE SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH: AN OVERVIEW

p. 12

CHANGING BORDERS, PLAYING IDENTITIES

p. 14

THE EMIGRANTS

p. 17

The Emigrants: the desire to be free

p. 18

THE CREOLE PERFORMANCE CYCLE

p. 20

Balletto Civile

p. 23

STEP 1 Made in Romania

p. 25

STEP 2 Archive dun trsor vivant

p. 27

STEP 3 Budapest_Nulls vek

p. 29

STEP 4 Zamane Obietnjce

p. 31

STEP 5 BeiBeiBank!

p. 33

Chasing the flight

p. 37

CREOLIMAGE

p. 39

I saw there identities playing for a vision

p. 40

Photos by Daniela Neri

p. 42