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Overcoming Shyness
“I was very, very shy,” says 16-year-old Elisa Estera Paraschiv. Self-confidence was zero when she started acting two years ago. “The first performance was a disaster. I was on stage and I spoke so quietly.” The tenth-grader sits in the office of “Roma Trial”, a Berlin association that is committed to cultural education and education about antigypsyism and has helped her.
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Elisa attributes her new self-confidence to the small youth theater group “Wir sind hier”, which was founded in 2020 with the support of the association. Regularly, always at the weekend, five young Romnja and Roma met and worked on a play. They wrote their own texts, decided on the content and worked out choreographies independently. They were supported by theater teacher Christoph Leuch. He had suggested a special way of making theatre.
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Orientation at the “Forumtheater”
Forum theater, a form of “theater of the oppressed” that was developed in South America in the 1960s, is about breaking down the boundaries between actors and audience and calling on them to take concrete action: a forum theater piece always ends with a middle catastrophe, with a state where you say: It can’t go on like this, always includes suggested solutions by the actors themselves and ends with the question, what would you have done in the situation?
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look into history
The young people of the theater group “We are here” are trying to do the same. They impressively tell of the genocide of the Sinti and Roma during the Nazi era, of the difficult and often hopeless struggle for equal rights, of ongoing racist discrimination and recent violent crimes such as the murders in Hanau. The play ends in an argument: the young people cannot agree on what is the best way to improve the situation of the Romnja and Roma.
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let out anger
Elisa explains that doing theater is also a way for her and the other young people to remain politically active: “We can just let our anger out and show it to the people,” she says. “Personally, it’s important to me to give the audience a picture of what’s going on, what’s actually going on.” Her goal is also to invite more young people to watch. “So that we are role models for the new generation.”
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