When: November 5-8, 2018
Where: Madrid, Spain
Institution: Foro Mundial sobre Violencias Urbanas y Educación para la Convivencia y la Paz
Facilitator: Doris Sommer
Del 5 al 8 de noviembre, facilitamos por primera vez el taller de capacitación en la metodología Pre-Textos en la ciudad de Madrid. Las sesiones fueron programadas en la junta municipal de Vicálvaro donde trabajamos específicamente con 25 agentes sociales de la Cañada Real. El texto leído en las sesiones fue un segmento de Antígona, el cual fue interpretado por un grupo de personas de diferente orígenes que al final convirtió el taller en un espacio multilingüe de creación artística.
Para más información sobre el taller, los invitamos a leer el artículo que el diario del Ayuntamiento de Madrid publicó sobre esta actividad en el siguiente enlace.
Este taller se desarrolló en el marco del II Foro Mundial sobre Violencias Urbanas y Educación para la Convivencia y la Paz. La profesora Doris Sommer dió una charla en la sesión plenaria del Foro centrada en la ‘Violencia por desigualdad urbana y espacio público’.
The II World Forum on Urban Violence and Education for Coexistence and Peace convened in Madrid, “A City of Peace,” from November 5-8 of 2018. I accepted an invitation to participate because the local city government of Vicálvaro would host a training workshop in Pre-Texts for community leaders, teachers, and members of the municipal staff. The 15 hour program over 4 days began, as always, with theater warm-ups lifted from Augusto Boal’s collection of Games for Actors and Non-Actors. Then, two well educated participants of the Pre-Texts workshop in Cañada Real (November 5-8, 2018) prepared to read the chosen text aloud. They were visibly worried and doubted whether I knew where I was. “These people won’t understand Antigone by Sophocles.” I asked them to wait and see.
Other highlights include the moment when an illiterate Gypsy woman asked a companion to help write down the couplets we were all composing from words in the text, and then to whisper reminders so that she could read her creation aloud, taking her turn among the rest of us. Another highlight is learning Romani words in a translation session hosted by the Gypsy participants who could feel their superior command of a language we struggled to learn in bits; and then the lesson in Arabic script to transliterate our favorite – or most challenging – words. We learned, for example, that Madrid is an Arabic name: Ma=water; drid=good. We might never have known this, living in that very city, were it not for sharing expertise and for the generosity of spirit generated in the workshop.
