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PLAYING IDENTITIES

The project "Playing Identities. Migration, Creolisation, Creation, funded with the support from EU Culture Programme 2007-2013, aims to interpret migration phenomena as instances of creolisation.
Coordinated by the Santa Chiara Graduate School of Siena University and involving a wide  international partnership, the original aspect of this project stands in the intuition of borrowing Glissant’s poetical vision of creolisation and to apply it to two distinct processes of creation.

On one side we choose Performing Arts, namely theatre, in order to produce a play in which artists from diverse theatrical backgrounds are forced to the negotiation of expressive codes, practices and meanings.

On the other side, we choose to engage with an interdisciplinary research in the Social Sciences and Humanities in order to develop new conceptual tools and an integrated framework for the analysis of migration phenomena, by seeking a deep exchange among disciplines and researchers with diverse theoretical and methodological backgrounds.

 Playing Identities at the Siena Festival Voci di Fonte

From 18 to 24 of June the final event of Playing Identities will be hosted by one of its partners, the Siena Festival "Voci di Fonte".

Many the activities acrivated by the project, as the complet e cycle of the Creole Performances. Moreover, the exhibition of Daniela Neri photographic work, PlayingIdentities/Creolimage, organised within the same spaces, will take the visitors in a journey through images along the project steps, allowing the beholders' gaze to be witness of the processes of creolisation.

Finally, the conference with the presentation of the results of the scientific research will be held on 22nd morning at the College "Santa Chiara".

Here you can find the whole program of the project events hosted by "Voci di Fonte"

 

Creole Performance Cycle

One of the original aspect of the project is the choice to give attention not to the artistic object as such, to its intrinsic qualities as they appear during its performance, but rather to investigate and to analyse the process of its creation and its development. What, for us, is more fascinating and interesting, thus, is the movement through which the original project, "L'Ala" ("The Wing"), winner of the Creole Performance Prize, becomes something else in the very moment when it encounters the different backgrounds and needs of the various theatrical companies which Balletto Civile meets at every different step.
The importance of every step, therefore, doesn't lie in the quality of a performance understood as a final product of a work, but rather is found in the occasion given to us of having access to the laboratory where it is produced, to the encounter/conflict between different instances and cultural backgrounds. For this reason, the Creole Performance Diary (unfortunately available only in Italian), where words and images concur in  telling the process of creation of each performance, is a fundamental tool in order to achieve the artistic and theoretical objectives of the project.

Polish Step of the Creole Performance Cycle (March 2011)

It's not true that man is an animal. Even if he rolls around the sand, he doesn't do that like an animal,
he always watches out to see if someone is observing him. Maybe man is an animal that went mad."

By pairing the features of the two processes of creation - the fi rst understood as an intercultural constitution of identity, the second as an interdisciplinary elaboration of analytic methodology - we expect to indicate the potentialities of a creolised approach to a better grasping of intercultural dynamics.