Reactor presented a performance of Bad Kids livestreamed on the global, commons-based, peer produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Monday 12 October 2020 at 10 a.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -5) / 1 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4) / 20:00 CEST (Cluj, UTC +3).
By: Mihaela Michailov
Directing: Alex Mihăescu
With: Katia Pascariu
Choreography: Farid Fairuz
Costumes: Adi Cristea
Music: Jak Neumann
Producer: Asociația Culturală Ado, in partnership with Teatrul Luni de la Green Hours and The Centrul Replika)
An eleven year old girl is not ”sitting nicely at her desk”. She’s spinning rubber bands. She’s playing the free child game. She’s dreaming about giraffes. She is being transferred from school to school because she doesn’t fit in the school system. She’s not a child leader. She’s not a productive child. In History class, the teacher punishes her. Then her classmates become violent. Then she is quiet. Then she doesn’t want anything anymore. Tomorrow she’s going to a new school. But what school is that which lets her be what she is - an untrained child?
Bad Kids talks about violence and submission. About the imagination that is punished because it dares to express itself. About rules and excesses that put children’s freedom in the corner. Bad children is a performance about the educational system in Romania, about the different forms of violence that transform an apparently banal punishment into a collective threat, about the power relations between children, teachers and parents.
About the author: Mihaela Michailov
Mihaela Michailov holds a PHD in Theatre Studies. Mihaela Michailov is a playwright, a performing arts critic and a cultural educator. She is one of the co-founders of the independent space Replika Center for Educational Theatre, based in Bucharest. She has written more than 20 plays focused on social and political themes: migration, relations of power in the educational system, the condition of the kids who become adults in the absence of their parents, marginalization of vulnerable categories in post socialist times. Her plays have been translated in Bulgarian, English, French, Hungarian, Italian, German, Spanish. Her play Bad Kids had a public reading in July 2014 at the Festival d’Avignon. The play was published in 2016 at Solitaires Intempestifs. Bad Kids was staged at Centre National Dramatique, Nancy, in 2015. In 2016 the play was staged at Parkaue Theatre in Berlin, in the context of Fabulamundi – international program supporting playwrights.
About the project:
Focus: Contemporary Playwriting
Eight performances written by eight contemporary Romanian playwrights.
The project aims to gather a selection of representative performances from some of Romania’s young playwrights working today. Despite differing styles, they are all dealing with current issues faced by their mostly young audience: from parental abandonment, the educational system or the complex ways they are being influenced by pop culture, to couple relations and the sense of imminent planetary disaster.
Six of these performances have been produced by the independent theatre Reactor, based in Cluj, Transylvania, while two others are coproductions of four other independent cultural organizations.
This cultural event is co-funded by The Administration of the National Cultural Fund (AFCN). The project doesn’t necessarily express the views of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of this project, nor for the way its products are being used. That is solely the responsibility of the grant beneficiary.
The project is also co-funded by the Cluj-Napoca City Hall and Local Council.
About Reactor:
Reactor (Reactor – a place for creative experiments - full name) is an independent theatre founded in 2014 and focusing on contemporary dramaturgy, artistic experiment and social themes. It is also encouraging constant artistic development by organizing workshops for theatre professionals as well as the general public, and by offering residencies for emerging artists. Two of the plays included in this series have been written during the Drama 5 playwriting residency happening at Reactor annually since 2016 (All’s Well That Ends and Our Little Centenary).
Reactor is also working towards a more open and reciprocal relation with its audience, by audience developing programs, cultural mediation and community activities. Three of the productions included in this series have been voted by the audience to be staged, after presenting the first 15 minutes of each of them (out of a total of five possibilities): I Like Sushi, Finally the End, and Glory.
Find out more at their website or follow them on Facebook or Instagram.
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