Inventura travels abroad to gain and share experience
Networking activities constitute an important part of Inventura’s projects so there’ s no wonder we have been travelling a lot recently. At the beginning of June two of us visited Banská Bystrica (Slovakia), the home town of the Theatre From The Passage, and later that month we travelled even further – to Athens, where we visited the Emotion Pictures Film Festival and a conference on people with handicap and the mass media. The two-day trip to Banská Bystrica brought us an immense inspiration. Theatre From The Passage is a professional theatre whose actors and actresses have learning disabilities. They come to the theatre every working day because being an actor (actress) is their job, which they are paid for. They rehearse, they develop their artistic skills and also they have lessons of more „trivial“ subjects like computing, cooking or communication. Theatre From The Passage exists for some twelve years now so it is obvious that people working for the theatre and the actors and actresses as well have much experience to share. We talked to people from the management of the theatre who have the same attitude to the artistic work of (and with) people with learning disabilities. And we talked to some of the actors who affirmed our theory that through professional art, people with learning disabilities can express their natural creativity and also develop skills needed in everyday life (such as communication, respect for others etc.). We must say that we are very much inspired by what we saw and heard in Banská Bystrica and that we were leaving this city with a clear vision of Inventura’s future direction. The Theatre From The Passage will be a guest to the second edition of our Normal Festival – you can see their performance Diagnóza: Túžba (Diagnosis: Desire) on November 12 in NoD Roxy. The film festival and conference in Athens were in a way dissapointing for us. Very few films in the main competition actually touched the topic of learning disabilities (the festival was dedicated to all handicaps but some handicaps, although very common, just seem to have been left out). The conference on people with handicap and the mass media only confirmed that in Greece learning disabilities are “not on the menu” right now. The representation of people with learning disabilities in Greek public space seems to be very weak and inappropriate. Although the situation in the Czech Republic is not ideal either, we must say that the Czech media and NGOs working with people with learning disabilities are much more developed in the area of representing people with learning disabilities. On the other hand, both the festival and the conference were international and we got to talk to some interesting people (filmmakers and directors of various disability film festivals) who gave us many interesting tips for films and organizations working with people with learning disabilities, mainly in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. And, as a cherry on a cake, we found a perfect film in Athens. It is called Braindamadj’d and it tells a story of a man whose brain was seriously injured in a car accident. After he woke up from the coma he was in a state similar to a state of a person with a very heavy learning disability. In the film, which is full of funny moments even when talking about very serious things, you can see the men’s struggle for regaining his former life. We will screen Braindamadj’d at Normal Festival and the director and the hero of the film (in one person), Paul Nadler, will come from Montreal to be our guest. All the networking activities can be executed thanks to a project funded by European Social Fund, the state budget of the Czech Republic and Prague City Hall.
