Focus Atelier is a platform that organizes a marathon-month of workshops and debates in Romania. Make this year’s edition possible, donate!

What will happen at Focus Atelier 2016?

This year we will have four sections:

1. WORKSHOPS

2. DEBATE

3. EXCHANGE

4. TROC – Educational theatre network

In the WORKSHOP sections we’ll have five workshops:

• Theatre of participatory communities –  held by Radu Apostol and Mihalea Michailov is aimed at acquiring knowledge and abilities to develop and implement a project working with a certain community.
•  Knowing your rights and Herstory  –  held by Milena Nikolic is aimed at gaining knowledge, critical approach abilities and working towards finding solutions for the gender inequality problem.
• The Art of Spectatorship –  held by Miruna Runcan focuses on the experience of one’s perception on theatrical and cinematic productions, aiming for the stimulation of the analytic and perceptual abilities.
• The feedback method –  held by Sonja Jokiniemi is designed for artists, as well as amateurs, the workshop provides participants with hints on giving a relevant and productive feedback for individuals involved in the making of a performance or a show.

In the DEBATE section we invite you to talk about:

• Theatrical pedagogy. The theater of children and teens – will examine the scarcity of the performances that focus on childhood and adolescence issues.
• Gender equality. Where do we stand? – will debate on issues such as sexism, lookism and machism, while trying to identify to what extent can we map the gender equality discourse to the Romanian society realities.
• Pedagogy and social equality – a debate that addresses the role pedagogy can have in moulding social dynamics; we will discuss how different pedagogical initiatives or lack of them can perpetuate social imbalance or can be key to solving it.
• Educational urgencies and alternatives – this debate is designed as an attempt to reiterate the necessity, the motivation and the sustainability of the initiative that is Focus Atelier.

In the TROC – Educational theatre network section, 5 performances will travel on the Bucharest – Cluj – Sibiu route:

• In Front of Rights, a Replika Educational Theatre center – Bucharest production – will be performed at the Reactor of creation and experiment, Cluj-Napoca.
• School Age Memories, a production by the A.D.O Association and the Comedy Theater – will be performed at the Reactor of creation and experiment, Cluj-Napoca.
• Bad Kids, a Replika Educational Theatre center – Bucharest production – will be performed at the Gong Theater, Sibiu.
• The Missing, a production by the Reactor of creation and experiment from Cluj-Napoca – will be performed at the Replika Educational Theatre center in Bucharest.
• I guess I’ll never get over it  a production by the Reactor of creation and experiment from Cluj-Napoca – will be performed at the Gong Theatre in Sibiu.

For a detailed view of our sections, what each of them means and why we wanted to make this happen, you can access our Focus Atelier presentation brochure.

Our main strength is the relevance/importance of the subjects approached, as well as the interdisciplinarity and the accessibility of our events for all interested people. We don’t want to let people’s financial situation stand in the way of their participation, free expression and possibility to learn. We propose a process of voluntary education that is based on curiosity and the pleasure of knowing. For these reasons, the attendance to all Focus Atelier events is free of charge. The first edition of Focus Atelier happened last year, during the entire month of March. In 2015, the topic of the workshops and debates was the art-society dynamics. This year we are tackling education.

Read more on our crowdfunding website: https://crestemidei.ro/FocusAtelier2016Educaia?locale=en