Operators Paola Galassi and Francesca Longo, involved in the #100%plastica project of Cifa Onlus in partnership with SCT Centre, are in Hawassa, Ethiopia. In the following lines, they tell us about the mapping of youth centers to involve potential participants in TSC workshops, the start of the workshops with a large brainstorming on the word “plastic” and the first phases of building the “100% Plastic Show” performance.
The mapping of the Youth Centers was a succession of wonder: we met 10 youth groups, specialized in different disciplines: theater, traditional dance, modern dance and… circus! The quality of their work left us speechless and it was exciting for us to be able to select, among all of them, 30 participants for our TSC workshop.
We immediately realized the potential beauty that we could create together and began to study in detail the subject of our show: plastic, its composition, the risks of its dispersion and combustion in the environment and, in particular, in the city of Hawassa.
Together with our Community Mobilizers first and with the young participants of the workshop later, we designed a large brainstorming starting from the word “PLASTIC”, from which settings and characters began to come to life: the sad bottles abandoned on the street, the innocent lake witnessing the malaise of its fish, the chemical elements dispersed by the fire that, invisible and silent, want to conquer the world…
Thus was born the outline of “100% Plastic Show”, on which we began to improvise with our performers. The training we proposed was modeled on them and we experienced the pleasure of leading two lively and generous groups into action; thanks to their inventiveness, the show quickly took shape.
From a directorial point of view, we wanted to insist on the concept of “rehearsal” as repetition, necessary for the definition of details – because it is the details that create beauty; we then gave them concrete tools to participate in the collective vision of the scenes, that is, in the process of editing the show. This meant that all the participants deeply understood the meaning of the story and could happily take care of the transitions from one scene to another – something not obvious, in a country where the performance is usually structured in a succession of spectacular “numbers”.
At the same time, Hawassa pampered us with a lot of sun and unexpected encounters: without too much planning, virtuous collaborations were born with costume designing students, a young graffiti artist and an equally young and curious artist who builds sculptures with plastic bottles. Their work was a great added value to the commitment of the performers.
