The drama of remembrance
complex theater, theater pedagogy and fine arts project for high school students
The main aim of our project is to recreate the frames of social remembrance through personal (individual and community) experience and creation.
Káva started it’s program sequence in spring 2013, called The dramas or remembrance, whereby four theatrical performances were created in parallel. The dramas of remembrance works up an episode of the Hungarian history through more points of views with 9th to 13th grade high school students. The performances are mainly not creating new knowledge about history itself with the participants, but about remembrance, as a social action.
As an extension to this program, the Káva created a sequence of occupations built up of three parts, that is focusing on the Holocaust and the remembrance of the Holocaust: this became The drama of remembrance project. The program takes place in five different schools, with the participation of two classes per school, during a spring and an autumn period.
The participating schools applied through an open call to the project; the contact teachers take part in meetings for preparation and also for easing the process of rehashing; the six occupations per school are followed by a social science research; with the cooperation of three classes a documentary is to be made; and the whole project is closed with a common exhibition and film screening in the MU theatre, December 2014.
The theatrical, theatre pedagogic and fine arts elements of the project:
• The Drama in Education performance Seaside takes place in the school,
primarily makes the participants get to know the technique of drama, and at
the same time it helps to think through a contemporary story, what relation
ships we can have, we can create with the nearness of death, what responsi
bility we can have in connection with a stranger’s death.
• The Compensation Theater in Education performance, performed in
theatrical space, focuses on the topic of the transmission of personal
memories in a family or through generations; the performance helps to
re-ask the social frames of the communicative remembrance through the
memories of a survivor of the Shoah.
• The third program is a fine arts workshop, that is based on the theatrical
actions and the attuning/preparing exercises coming after, whereas the
students are able to create their own (common) fine arts object, that
expresses their relationship, their reactions, opinions and thought about
the Holocaust.
The Art Based Research connected to the project takes the art pedagogic method as a diagnostic tool: through the actions and creations of the participating students it is investigating the current frames of the remembrance of Holocaust (meaning the operation of social remembrance and the possibilities of re-creating the frames of social remembrance) among the 16-year-old high school students of Budapest. The research process is school ethnography, where institutional questionnaires, teacher and art teacher background interviews, and (participating) observation through occupations are the methods through which the research undertakes to create process analysis.