weaving Voices 01.04.2025 issuu - Flipbook - Page 74
Threads of memories, carpet of sounds
Géza Pintér-Németh
The text below summarises a creative, community development
process within the Weaving Voices as Threads of Communities
project, which took place between 7th May and 8 th June in 2024,
in Szalatnak, a village situated in Southwest Hungary, in Baranya
County. Szalatnak has about two hundred inhabitants, whose
average age is around sixty. It is a geographically disadvantaged
rural settlement, from which a large number of the population left in
recent decades to find jobs in bigger cities or abroad. Most of the
remaining population are pensioners or labourers who are working
for the few landowners in the area. Alcohol addiction is very common
among members of the local community. The local social values
in general are in a decreasing tendency like the demography, the
economic power, the availability of cultural and social services, etc.
The base of Sinum Theatre is a barn in Szalatnak, where the Weaving
Voices project activities took place during the springtime of 2024.
This consisted of two artistic residencies with delegated artists from
Tuyo Foundation, and a further week when all the partners came
together to conclude the artistic and pedagogical research of the
project. Before the initiation of the final project activities, the host
organisation drew up the outlines of the programmes. The key terms
of our approach were: intercultural theatre event, collective memory,
and woven patterns as musical score.
The Rural as a place for intercultural encounters
Interculturalism is a key concept of the present chapter. Marco de
Marinis an Italian researcher in the field of Interculturalism, points
out that intercultural and transcultural characteristics are potentially
always present in modern Western theatre performances. He
defines intercultural experience as “the encounter and comparison
of personal, professional and socio-anthropologically different
identities, be they author, actor, director or audience”. Furthermore,
a transcultural characteristic has been described by Marinis as one
which
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