An initiative by the Mediterranean Citizens’ Assembly Foundation (MCAF) and the support of Anna Lindh Foundation, this project is in collaboration with The Mostra Viva del Mediterrani (MVM) and co-founded by the European Union.
Based on the original idea of professor Miroslav Minic, member of the ACM Montenegro circle, this project includes participants from 5 Euro-Mediterranean countries and 7 ACM circles: Valencia (Spain), Podgorica (Montenegro), Nador, Assilah, and Rabat (Morocco), Oran (Algeria), and Beirut (Lebanon). The project is in cooperation with the following entities: AMEL, Le Petit Lecteur, ASTICUDE, FOMEJE, Café Europa, y MVM.
“Antigone 2.0 Mediterranean” is an innovative educational project that uses theatre and a universal classic to rethink and reflect upon a variety of phenomena with the youths and adolescents participating, to give them a space to reflect on the characters within the work and translate them to modern society. It opens up space for a shared narrative about the society they want to wish, about the heroines and heroes of today’s age, and the universal and Mediterranean values that they defend and that are being negatively affected by the pandemic.
Despite the temporal distance and the original language of the work, Antigone is a heroine with whom one can easily identify, as she represents the universal values that make us human. Young people can easily recognize all the principles upon which this myth is built: universal justice, the tragedy which is represented by the relationship between the heroine and Creon through violence, loneliness, injustice, struggles to maintain principles, humanity, empathy, breaking with stereotypes and social cliches, the values of solidarity and diversity; and participants can then translate this to their current life experiences and to challenges faced by Mediterranean societies that are in turn addressed in dysfunctional ways.
The theatre workshops will be developed in parallel in each of the aforementioned cities throughout 2021. Based on a framework text, the workshops will carry out their own reading, reflection, raising of awareness, and profusion of the following topics: What is it like to be Antigone today: the feeling of confinement, the freedom and right to citizenship, the feelings of national, religious, and sexual intolerance, that should not be present in our times, climate consciousness, and awareness of the cultural and patrimonial legacy, the feeling of solidarity and reflections on forced migrations, from a personal perspective that aims to contribute to building more cohesive and and united societies in light of diversity. The entire project will have an audiovisual element that will be reflected in a documentary and seven works by local theatres, with a special staging in the framework of the Mostra Viva del Mediterrani 2021. The final objective of the project is to have to be replicable and establish a shared work methodology that can be applied in new contexts and with new populations, written in Spanish, Catalan, Arabic, Montenegrin, and French.
Given the current health situation that has resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic, this language exchange will be performed online and in physical meetings. The objective is that, in spite of the restrictions, young people from different Mediterranean countries will be able to meet and express their different points of view in respect to Antigone, but also share their own experiences and promote intercultural dialogue between them.