TRANSIT V
Women's International Theatre Festival and
Meeting
Stories to be Told
Odin Teatret, Holstebro, Denmark
18-28 January 2007
20 years have passed since the start of
The Magdalena Project. Although the first Festival was in 1986 and
the first idea came even earlier, Jill Greenhalgh etablished The
Magdalena Project itself in January 1987. With age comes the desire
to tell and listen to stories, like those we hear from our
grand-mothers or those we enjoy concoctin about the origins of our
families, the relationships within our theatre groups or concerning
the political situation in the world.
Stories need to be told: to give face
and voice to people whose identity would otherwise only be defined
by numbers. They need to be told for us to remember; to refelct and
inspire; to talk about the tragedies and comedies of everyday life
through fiction; to conquer a place for women in history; to emerge
from silence, to give colour, irony and perspective to our actions.
Dramaturgy and narration, story-telling and poetry in space,
sequences of words spoken or sung are all central in the process of
creating contact between performers and spectators in our theatres,
although stories are told in different ways.
The intimate, personal and vulnerable
qualities of story-telling - its closeness and human significance -
are characteristics that women in particular can defend, helping
theatre to keep on being a live art of communication between
individuals, an autonomous space of exchange beyond cultural and
language borders. The difficult task is to protect the spontaneity
of a mother-tongue - the music of an exclusive experience, the
roots of a tradition - while at the same time reaching beyond them.
We open our Pandora's Box of stories to turn the dreams of the
night in the reality of the day.
At Transit 5 "Stories to be
Told", story-telling techniques and different examples of
how theatre performances tell stories will be presented, with
workshops (story-telling training and
workshop stories), lectures, performances, work in
progress and demonstrations (professional
stories). Many have expressed the wish that the women who
started The Magdalena Project should make a performance together:
Women with Big Eyes - Work on a Magdalena Story is
going to be an experiment in inventing a practical structure within
which to work that hopefully can be transported to other events. At
Transit 5, the Magdalena Project's 20th anniversary will also be
marked by the presentation of Chris Fry's book The Way
of Magdalena and by short stories on the theme:
"Origins and aspirations: secrets, water, tears, stones and
laughter". These stories, like others, will allow us to
meet in a place half-way between history and fiction, reality and
imagination, truth and falsehood, presenting events we wished had
not happened and ones we wished had, inventing a future of dreams,
passion, relations, ideals and tangible actions.
Julia Varley
