Performing Romani Identities: Strategy and Critique

Performing Romani Identities: Strategy and Critique will constitute a network of performers, activists, stakeholders and academics to map current Romani performance practices in Europe through a series of site based workshops. These workshops will examine the particular challenges facing performers working with and within Romani communities in each area and consider how performance might be harnessed and consolidated to greater effect.

Romani culture is marked by a history of critical performance and performativity. Romani survival in Europe, over the course of a millennium, has been contingent upon the adoption and practice of a number of performance strategies, including oral history, storytelling, music, dance and theatre, as well as upon everyday narratives that perform intelligible Romani identities for both the community itself and for non-Roma. What is the relationship between Romani performance, Romani iterations of performativity and hegemonic knowledge production? What are the slippages between the two? What is the potential in these slippages and iterations for different practices of agency, especially in light of the current violence confronting Romani subjects across Europe?

There is a multiplicity of performance and performative practice by and for Romani communities across Europe; to date, however, there has been neither a consolidated approach nor a platform to share best practice across these communities. In this network, we look to address this need. In particular, we will examine the potential for social change produced from within this multiplicity. As well as mapping how such performance strategies are currently being used, through the workshops themselves, we will establish new possibilities for Romani performance as political strategy.

The workshops will be organised around three key themes:

Stereotypes and dominant practices of representation

Diversity and the concomitant invisibility of local specificity, inherent in transnationalism

Collaboration and the negotiation of methodologies that make effective engagement possible

The workshops will be approached and inflected differently according to the historical and current contexts and varying challenges faced by Romani communities in each site, and constructed in consultation with the key participants. Each workshop will include an opening address by the host outlining the position in their area with a framing of the project by the PI and Co-I laying out the aims of the network. The workshops will be multilingual with local translators provided by the hosts where required. We will pay careful attention to the specifics of each locale, drawing upon local knowledge and expertise. In this way, the workshops will draw upon the arts, activist, scholarly and performance expertise of participants in order to generate a sustained response in light of the dangers of the current moment, opening up new forms of knowledge production through Romani performance practice.

The workshops will be conducted in partnership with academic institutions and stake holders in Istanbul, Bucharest, Lyon and Alicante with a final symposium in London to disseminate findings and develop a strategy to secure future funding.

These workshops will map best practice, including the use of technology. A key focus will be on the commonalities and differences between, within and among Romani communities from diverse sites. We are especially interested in the technological possibilities for linking communities through performance. In view of the urgency of the current crisis facing Roma, we will explore the opportunities afforded by the integration of multimedia and live performance. Particularly, how this integration might be utilised most effectively for an engaged social practice within and across Romani neighbourhoods, communities, and national borders.

These workshops are intended to produce a long-term, sustainable network of scholars, arts practitioners and activists focused on Romani performative practice. This project will, in turn, engender other projects that grow out of the performance network created through the workshops. In the longer term, these workshops will help to shape and inform a larger funding bid to generate performance activities within the European context, as well as a documentary film about transnational Romani performance practice. Impact will therefore be felt within the partner institutions and among the Romani performance communities more widely, as well as ultimately among the audiences and recipients of Romani cultural practice and residents of Romani, non-Romani and integrated communities.

The PI and Co-I will produce a scholarly paper on the experience of the workshops that will document the knowledge produced out of the workshops; the implications of these findings for performance studies and Romani studies and the possibilities for shifting research paradigms in both areas through the creation of the network. During the workshops, the participants will document the process through posts on Facebook and Twitter and short postings on Vimeo and Instagram. Given the topicality of the subject in the UK and Europe we envisage there will be considerable interest from the media and the press and we will seek to publicise our findings, wherever possible, through these channels. In these ways, the research and practice outcomes of the workshops will be made readily available to both specialist and generalist audiences.

Benefits to the UK, in particular, include an opening up of dialogue with our European and international partners around questions of performance, practice and Romani identity. The UK will thus be part of a larger European, Romani-focused performance network at a point when there is considerable disquiet in the UK about the prospect of increased Romani immigration. We hope that our network will serve to educate people in the UK, Europe and beyond about the benefits of Romani inclusion, and the uniqueness and diversity of Romani cultural forms, as well as about the possibilities for scholarly and general knowledge production that come from collaboration and cooperation among scholars and activists, Roma and non-Roma, performers and arts practitioners.