EX.TRE.M 2024 – 2026
SMouTh is very excited to be joining and contributing to the new project EX.TRE.M (EXcellence in TheaTRE with Migrants), an Erasmus + project funded by the Belgian national agency, which aims to use theatre as a tool for social integration and personal development for young people with migrant backgrounds in Europe to address the challenges of inclusion and intercultural dialogue. The main objectives of the project:
- Enhancement of skills for youth and theatre workers through a protocol of excellence
- Improvement of the living conditions of marginalized immigrant youth through artistic experiences
- Promotion of intercultural dialogue in European society
Activities include organizing theatre workshops with young migrants in each partner country, followed by sharing workshops. The project also includes the creation of a Video Toolkit and an educational documentary, accompanied by a Protocol of Excellence for theatre companies working with migrants.
These resources will be translated to ensure their accessibility in several European languages.
Expected results include increased soft skills for theatre practitioners, improved living conditions for the beneficiaries involved, and increased effectiveness of theatre companies. In addition, theatre dissemination events are expected to contribute to the development of intercultural dialogue in European society.
EX.TRE.M aims to create a lasting impact through dissemination and sustainability activities, ensuring that the resources and methodologies developed can be used and adapted even after the project ends. This innovative approach to the integration of migrant youth through theatrical art has the potential to become a replicable model in other European contexts, thus contributing to a more inclusive and culturally rich society.
Partners of EX.TRE.M Project
Asinitas deals with education and social intervention with the aim of promoting activities aimed at the care, education-training, reception and witnessing of minors and adults, Italians and foreigners.
The activities put in place are aimed in particular at asylum seekers, migrants, foreign women with children and Italians: experimental Italian L2 courses, expressive manual workshops, a listening space for Italian and foreign women and families, theater workshops, socio-health and legal, training and vocational orientation paths, and training courses for teachers, operators and educators.
Asinitas was born from the conviction that there is a great need in our cities today to create shared contexts with people from other countries. Even before a physical space, we imagined the Italian language, as the language of a host country, the territory to be conquered and shared.
Alrahallah is an Arabic word meaning traveler.
The Alrahallah Theater on Saalestraße 26 is a space and a garden. It is a place where many things happen. People meet, show, watch, stand still, move. Sometimes the activity echoes through the streets, sometimes it bounces around a room. It can be loud and cheerful or quiet and vulnerable or frantic and full of fear. Everyone can draw from it what they want.
Alrahallah Theater Berlin e.V. was founded in 2020 by Maher Draidi and is the successor to Travellers 3 Theatre Group, also founded in Berlin in 2014. He previously gained extensive experience in experimental and intercultural theater in Palestine and Italy and founded a theater group in Arezzo.
He is closely associated with the beginnings of experimental theater in Ramallah, Palestine, which can be traced back to director Jacoub Ismael. The president of Alrahallah Theater, Maher Draidi, studied and worked with this theater from 2000 to 2004 and was strongly influenced by its philosophy and techniques.
When he moved to Italy, he took it back and founded “Il Laboratorio del Teatro dei Viaggiatori 2” in Arezzo, which existed from 2006 to 2013 and during this time made more than 10 intercultural theater productions and 200 visual and intercultural theater and professional theater arts workshops.
In 2014, Draidi moved to Berlin and founded a third workshop called “Travellers 3 Theatre Group.” The group, whose members represent seven different nationalities (Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Germany, Italy, France and Poland), has created more than five cross-cultural productions with migrants. In 2018, it also participated in the international project “Sharing Care” in San Giorgio, Italy through Erasmus+. In 2019, the group worked with more than 700 people, 90 percent of them migrants living in Berlin. In 2020, Travellers 3 Theatre Group merged with Alrahallah Theater Berlin Verein.
The Babel association was founded in 2011 with the aim of creating an associative and cultural environment that compares and promotes different languages, professionalism, perspectives and projects.
Babel is an innovation theater production company in the field of experimentation recognized by the Ministry of CULTURE under the F.U.S. (Fondo Unico Spettacolo) : in addition to the 5 members of the Board of Directors, about 20 actors, dancers, musicians and other live performance operators work there to complete the crew. Production and Artistic, Technical, Organizational, Administrative, Communication and Design Management make up the crew’s know-how.
Babel deals with theater, dramaturgy, film, documentary, dance, live music, organization of cultural events, artistic training, communication, and artistic projects in the social sphere. It is a crew of artists and professionals from different fields of culture, who, taking responsibility for their area of intervention, aim at the most varied creation of cultural initiatives.
Concertation Action Culturelle Bruxelloise is a network of associations based in Brussels. Its members exchange practices and carry out joint actions with the aim of strengthening the cultural rights of all.
Since 2017, an enlargement process has been underway to better reflect the immense richness of human communities operating in our society. Through this approach, our association seeks to build bridges between these different actors, while defending the fundamental principle upheld by our platform: to form a regional structure, a federative network that is uniquely representative of the reality of Brussels.
Our association has developed around the belief that the many associations in the socio-cultural and artistic sector in Brussels share values and issues specific to the urban environment in which they operate.
Thus, the mission of La Concertation ASBL is to define and develop interdisciplinary areas of work that respond to the specific dynamics of the Brussels region and, more broadly, across the country and beyond.
The dynamics of the work are engaged and complementary. They open prospects for territorial cultural development on the scale of the Brussels basin, with the aim of promoting and developing cultural rights, including the right to participate in cultural life.
Medeber Theatre is a performative, pedagogical and theoretical research project on theater and poetry. The theater company’s activity is multi-layered, offering performances, participatory shows and weekly, as well as occasional, workshops on theater, movement and poetry. Through poetry, the company aims to stimulate the audience’s appropriation of its creativity and imagination to transform reality or at least to look at it from another perspective.
The name Medeber comes from a caravanserai in the city of Asmara in Eritrea where, every day, waste is transformed and put to a new use through the collective labor and creation of the market community.
dedicated, experienced and emerging artists.
S.Mou.Th. was founded in Larissa-Greece, in 2001 by Costas Lamproulis (writer, director), Christos Ktistakis (music director, composer) and Sophia Koustas (musicologist, national relations). For about two years it operated under the auspices of the Cultural Board of the Municipality of Larissa and became a legally independent entity in 2004. The basic goals of S.Mou.Th. are to provide youth and adults with opportunities for initiation, training, education, creation, inclusion, research and professionalization, in the performing and audiovisual arts and, through this process, to reinvent the means of artistic expression.
SMouTh’s work, both locally and at the European level, includes trainings, cultural activities and events with a focus on social aspects, professional productions of theater, musical theater, and opera, and the annual organization of two festivals: Mill of Performing Arts and the European Day of Music in Larissa.
Teatro Magro was founded in Mantua under the artistic direction of director Flavio Cortellazzi. Attentive to contemporary issues, the team has created and developed a multidisciplinary, popular, social and educational cultural offer. Its activity moves between theatrical shows and performances; performances for public bodies and private companies, as an evolved spectacular form that conforms to the specific needs of the client and can also be realized in contexts not traditionally devoted to culture and theatrical representation; theatrical workshops, in schools of all levels, for adults, amateurs and professionals, people with disabilities; territorial projects in coordination with both national and international entities.
Each creation of Teatro Magro is the result of a team effort in which members and collaborators combine their artistic skills and educational backgrounds in a synergistic way, resulting in a product that is characterized by high quality and attention to detail, constant deployment of innovation processes, and attention to contemporaneity, combined with the simultaneous ability to maintain and restore its own style.
For more information about the project you can visit the official website: https://www.extrem-project.eu/
