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PROJECT PROPOSAL: THE STRANGER AND THE CITY MOVING PERFORMANCE

The Babel Theater Project is a Boston-based collective created and run by immigrant artists, and mostly composed by women and people of color. We make artistic and civic interventions at the crossroads of languages, cultures, and disciplines. Through performances and other artistic activities, workshops, trainings, convenings, and educational initiatives, we gather a variety of creative collaborators across disciplines to expand artistic boundaries, engage communities for social change, and promote cross-cultural understanding. Our motto is "performance without boundaries." Our mission is to create provocative new work by establishing collaborations across disciplines; to strengthen voices from minorities and immigrant communities inside and outside the USA; to link the practice of theater and performance to practices of social justice; and to promote global citizenship in the arts and immigrant art, as well as enhance the level of intercultural competence in communities in America and worldwide. 


For this specific project, Ana Candida Carneiro (co-founder and artistic director) is proposing a hybrid team of co-creators who are personally, artistically, and intellectually committed to the question of immigration. Our creative approach comprises the use of workshops as a tool to engage communities, generate materials, explore ideas, and identify aesthetic cues. We don’t work in isolation, but build bridges with potential audiences and participants. We also adopt a workshop dynamics among ourselves to generate artistic materials that speak to each other across disciplines, based on the community engagement workshops. Finally, we give shape to the performance as a group, expanding our individual visions into a collectively owned experience that merges artistic fields and competences.


PROJECT SUMMARY    


The United States is a country of migrants, but recent changes in governmental policies have penalized and criminalized immigrants, raising debates around xenophobia. For example, the recent immigrant caravan coming from Central America was used as a bully pulpit by the former President and many political leaders to incite fear and nationalism, rather than empathy and transnationalism. Also, the separation of children from families at border detention facilities captured the hearts and minds of many Americans, but still the underlying causes of their migration and the paths immigrants have to navigate have not been exposed enough. Because of this, the Babel Theater Project recognizes it is necessary to open a wide discussion on this topic in the civil society, engaging the arts to bring attention to the immigrant experience. Our goal with “The Stranger and the City” is to facilitate empathy and a better understanding of the immigrant condition to relevant audiences.


"The Stranger and the City" will take the shape of a “walking tour” of Boston, in which the audience will become immigrants themselves, migrating in the city through the lens of an immigrant identity that will be given to them in the beginning. The dramaturgy will comprise a soundtrack that will play from the participants’ smartphones, as well as elements of augmented reality, and one or two live performers. We want to build a bridge between the worlds of technology and art to create a real-time simulation of migration. The idea is to subvert the model of the walking tour – used to familiarize people with environments and facilitate touristic consumption – by de-familiarizing the participating audience with the urban landscape, in order to generate radical empathy with the immigrant experience. 


During the itinerary, the participating audience will be faced with underlying questions such as: What is home? What motivates one to leave home? What does it take to have a new home? How do we create a sense of belonging to our surroundings? What are the feelings and challenges that an immigrant has to face, now, in America? Inspired by the work of the German collective Rimini Protokoll (https://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project/remote-x) and other experiences such as United Nations High Commission for Refugees simulations (http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/against-all-odds.html ), this “walking tour” aims at facilitating the maximum level of empathy around questions related to immigration and raise profound awareness about the intricacies of the immigrant condition. The concept of audience is also widened through this project, because the passers-by will have the opportunity to observe and interact with the “caravan.”

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