Leontiou Machaira 9A, 1020
Nicosia
Cyprus
- Arts
TheatrEtc. mission is to encourage and develop the use of theatre and other expressive art forms as educational tools and as vehicles for social change.
It aims towards the bridging of the collaborations between educator, activists and artists and their involvement in developing and implementing projects that address issues that concern people in the Cypriot society and in the global community as well.
It aspires to become an advocate for the use of the arts and especially theatre by young people as a means for communicating a message and making a public statement. For this reason, the main client group of TheatrEtc. are young people and children.
1. Crossroads Youth Camp
Crossroads camp takes place every summer and next summer will be its 4th consecutive year. The project brings together 20 young people aged 15-18 years old from the two divided communities of the island of CYprus, Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots for a 10-day process. The participants all live together in a spirit of collaboration for an intensive 10-day workshops experience on theatre. The camp aims at teaching young people about theatre and other performative arts (music, dance, puppetry etc) but also have dialogue sessions with them in order for them to express their opinions about the current state of the Cypriot problem, the division of their communities and the fact that they do not interact.
2. "Remove the Power" It is a project which has been running in primary schools across the country for the last 1,5 years. It proposes the use of applied theatre techniques in 6-day long workshops in primary school classrooms in order to teach 9-12 year old pupils about bullying, its definition, its characteristics and what we can do to stop it. The project has, until now, been implemented by educators-practitioners across the island in 45 primary schools outreaching to 1200 primary school pupils.
By becoming members of the ALF Network, TheatrEtc immediately comes closer to other organisations which are under the same network in Cyprus. This helps us be more familiar with their work, become more aware of their actions and be more comfortable in contacting them for future collaborations where we can contribute our expertise in the use of the arts as tools for social change as well as gain a lot from their long-term experiences. Furthermore, through its different projects with young people, TheatrEtc. team has a wide network of young people on its contact list who can be urged to become more active by inviting them in to take part in initiatives that occur during collaborations within the Network in Cyprus.
We hope to be able to add TheatrEtc. in the ALF Network, because we believe its activities and initiatives are innovative and sustainable as they are in tuned with the needs of people in the current Cypriot society. We aspire to be able to contribute our methodologies and ideas to a wider global network of organisations in order to perhaps enrich the pool of initiatives and also benefit from it by changing our approaches making them better according to how other initiatives are conducted. TheatrEtc a new organisation and its members are an enthusiastic and very capable group of people. For this reason, being in a wider, global Network allows us to widen our perspectives, increase our opportunities to contribute in a bigger collaboration and learn from others.