Pace objectives

⇒ To build a network of artistic and pedagogical exchanges, promoting the mobility of trainers as well as trainees between Greece, France, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Sweden.

⇒ To include local institutions (ie: City Halls, House of Citizens Initiatives, Schools, Community Centres…) in a common reflexion increasing their awareness on political and geopolitical topics and to connect their local approach to the larger European context.

⇒ To do research in local communities afflicted by crisis. More specifically using testimony (story telling) from people suffering from social crisis/integrating problems in the process of the workshops in order to enhance a sense of intimacy with new audiences addressed.

⇒ To enable participants to compare their practice, improve communication skills in a chosen language (English) and to learn from other European partners’ practices and points of view by realising a series of workshops.

⇒ To create an open space for the interaction of individuals from different nationalities, gender, generations and social sectors

⇒ To tackle social integration problems due to economical or ethnical difficulties, by involving in the workshops trainers, teachers, trainees chosen from local groups.

⇒ To strengthen the link between art creation and the adult training sector by focusing on the dialogue between artist and public around the common subject of crisis.

political and geopolitical topics

The project wants to address political and geopolitical topics and more specifically the financial crisis subject and its consequences for European people today. The aim is to allow participants to appropriate this topic through an artistic and pedagogical process and to enhance the civic dialogue they may have on such a topic. With the result of the partnership and the dissemination of it, we expect this civic dialogue to be expanded and to be continued locally (bringing the European dimension to the local stage)

The project is designed in a way that each partner welcome the groups from the other partners to share his own way to teach. Every workshop will give the opportunity to discover different approaches, different methods existing in the country.

The European dimension

Far from being an added benefit, the transnational dimension of the project responds to the need to acknowledge that a meeting between politics and performing arts can only be understood within the frame of the current European common house: economy, public debt and national budgets are determinants for an entire European community facing a dramatic crossroad. Therefore to re-imagine a common future we must think and (and act) at a European scale.

This project will enable trainers and trainees to confront new ways of addressing common problems in a European context and will make easier the understanding of the need to adapt in order to stay together.

For the participants sharing their artistic methodologies as well as their respective social points of view, stemming from their belonging to a particular country, will obviously cast a new light on the chosen topics.

It will enable a deeper comprehension of the mechanisms that could endanger the desirable fraternity of European citizens, encouraging friendship, and desire for it.

Participants will be confronted, in a cultural environment other from their own, to different artistic methods, which will lead them to reconsider their own practise and point of view by an European comparison. And this large spectrum will be reinforced by the intergenerational and intersocial aspect of the project, within the groups of trainers and trainees, providing all the participants with a rich baggage of experiences that extends in time (through generations) as much as in space (through geography).

Impact

All the persons participating will enrich their linguistic competences (and interest in language learning itself), artistic approach as well as their communication and technological skill, thus having the chance to exchange best practices. The project will enlarge their artistic visions and the participants will discover new techniques and methods – not only artistic techniques but also pedagogical ones – through the different workshops leaded by different artists.

The project will also raise civic awareness of European cultural diversity and similarities, providing the participants with the adequate frames to a better understanding the contemporary political questions, through a succession of experiences confronting different point of view on the crisis, made in different contexts.

The creative techniques used in this project will relate in a very close way to the social, economical and political situation in each country. This will mean that trainers and trainees travelling abroad will have the chance to deal with how the common problems are being felt and expressed in other European countries. We are then talking about building community, in such a strong focus that “the other” will cease to be “the other” to became “one of us”. And this is definitely building Europe in the sense proposed, 60 years ago, by Robert Schuman.

Considering the institutions, the participation in this project will increase the credibility and visibility in the home countries, facilitating the general work of the institutions and setting a model for future transnational cooperation. The participation will also provide the institutions with appropriate know how concerning the approach to European institutions, cooperation programs and funding.

Each organization will then have the possibility to share its practices with other local institutions enabling the ensemble of partners to spread the methods and knowledge conveyed by this exchange, in a viral dissemination of the work and recognition of the participating institutions.