Crisis and Intervention in Small Places: Nonprofessional Live Theatre as Popular Communication at the Borders of Europe

• In Event: ICA Interactive paper/Poster Session I
  In Interactive Paper Session: Theme Interactive Poster Session: Interventions

Abstract

This paper investigates and discusses the role of grassroots-driven popular communication as a form of intervention, challenging the rigidity of borders in the context of crisis. It focuses on the form of non-professional, live theater festival as a popular communication conjunction that operates across and through the “small places” of a regional community, but with ambitions and reach beyond this space, at the outer borderland of Europe. The theatre festival is examined as a platform that sustains and is sustained for almost two decades on the basis of a. motivation of political concern to intervene in the local cultural and social life; b. bring out and bring in the borderland articulations of transgression and contestation across various borders and c. function as a public service actor in an attempt to counterbalance the violence of deprivation, poverty and exclusion. We explore here the dynamics of its organization, its method and strategies of sustainability and its history within the context of specific pressures and fluidities experienced at the “edge” of Europe. We find that the event is both modest and ambitious, polysemic and polymorphic in its significance and role in sustaining a regular intervention in the rigidity of borders and in particular exclusions.

Authors

• Katharine Sarikakis, U of Vienna

• OLGA Kolokytha, U of Vienna