Starting Point

It began as international workshop facing a harsh reality, provocative for a theatre project. In 2008 and 2009 in Hungarian villages, Roma families have been persecuted and some of the members of these families have been killed. The racial incidents happened in an extremist political context that affected and discriminated Roma communities, imposing violent attitudes as public behavior.
PanoDrama initiated a workshop in December 2010, in which took part actors, directors, playwrights and dramaturges from Hungary, Romania, England, Denmark, Germany. The workshop had as special guest the dramaturge of Rimini Protokoll – Sebastian Brunger.
The main issue of the workshop was the multifarious aspects of discrimination, from expatriating Kosovo Roma families from Germany to killing an old man in front of a mosque in London or to building a fence in order to separate Hungarians from Romanians and Roma population in a village in Romania.
The accent was put on Hungarian racial crimes, the way they were mediated in press and the political interventions that proved abominable in a democratic society.
The questions raised during the workshop are relevant for the dynamics of an extremist context in which the power of controlling entire communities through violence and submission becomes a way of terrorizing and depriving people of freedom. To transform crimes in regular accidents (as the police did in one of the villages) means to corrupt the very idea of fundamental rights and to transform communities in centers of terror.