: The Roma Heroes International Theater Festival, which has made available about twenty performances of Roma plays since 2017, is one of the most important series of events in the past decade related to the social and cultural self-representation of highly marginalized social groups. One of the most important values of the festival is that it makes visible theatre performances, workshops, and other art activities about Roma people, by Roma people.
Friday, November 05, 2021
Roma Women on the Way to Self-Realization
HowlRound Theatre Commons
: The Roma Heroes International Theater Festival, which has made available about twenty performances of Roma plays since 2017, is one of the most important series of events in the past decade related to the social and cultural self-representation of highly marginalized social groups. One of the most important values of the festival is that it makes visible theatre performances, workshops, and other art activities about Roma people, by Roma people.
: The Roma Heroes International Theater Festival, which has made available about twenty performances of Roma plays since 2017, is one of the most important series of events in the past decade related to the social and cultural self-representation of highly marginalized social groups. One of the most important values of the festival is that it makes visible theatre performances, workshops, and other art activities about Roma people, by Roma people.
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The Roma Heroes International Festival amazes me for its social activism in the community of Roma people, and wider, and the possibilities it offers to Roma artists. I think it is more than needed for the Roma artist voices to be finally heard and introduced into the world. I have gone backpacking around most of the Balkans and Romania where there are massive Roma communities, but sadly they are treated awfully by the governments there and often times are treated like second-class citizens. Seemingly every town square has groups of Roma children begging for money, and I’ve even seen in Belgrade Serbia a mass arrest of a group of Roma for simply being in a public park. The Roma people have been oppressed for centuries and still are oppressed to this very day, which is why work like this is vital to humanize there beautiful and amazing culture and to put them on the world stage. Its amazing how after having been oppressed for so long the Roma people have still been able to hold on to their culture despite how many times governments have tried to beat it out of them.
The Romani peoples are an extremely historically marginalized group, traditionally itinerant travelling groups in Europe with diaspora populations in the Americas as well. The Roma Heroes International Theater Festival has made available around twenty performances of Roma plays since 2017. This is extraordinary. The most important and key part of this is that the festival makes visible theatre performances, workshops, etcetera about Roma people and culture, by Romani people. The plays the author of the article, Orsós János Róber, exemplifies and uplifts nuanced aspects of Roma culture. The first play discusses the institution of marriage as a cultural, community activity and how that intersects with the role of women in society, as well as the different access people have to education. The second play reinforces similar themes, based on interviews with Roma students in high school and college--they face discrimination for being Roma and may struggle more due to inherent disadvantage in their “sociocultural background”. The third play shows a successful business woman who is able to start a flower business and is able to engage with her community. This piece also includes traditional Roma music, and in many traditional cultures, the bond between themes of community and music is strong. The final is a piece about rebellious Roma women, a failed experiment to overthrow the white man's world. All the plays are extremely interesting and evocative, all signalling to and representing the power that Roma people and Roma culture has. The theatre festival uplifts their voices so that us as the outer audience have more of an opportunity to open our worldview and hear them.
this is my comment, apologies for messing it up!
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