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The Lampedusa Project aims to create a piece of theatre about Lampedusa as a place of migrations, hope and mourning, by researching and conveying the real life stories of its inhabitants.
Lampedusa is the southern-most speck of Italian soil in the Mediterranean, an island geographically closer to Tunisia than Sicily, and has come to be known as the Porta d’Europa, the Doorway to Europe. Migrants departing from North Africa have been travelling to it for the past twenty years. Thousands of people have died at sea on this journey, their deaths often going by unreported. Their bodies are sometimes found near the shores of Lampedusa and Sicily, where they are buried in graves known in the region as burials of unknown migrants.
This theatre project wishes to employ an anthropological research method, involving observation and immersion in the island’s daily life, to develop a performance on the stories of Lampedusa. Focusing on people’s memories and on understanding what life is like for those who live on the edges of Europe will, we believe, address bigger questions of belonging, responsibility, and, ultimately, humanity.
Our working method
The project will be carried out by the members of Théâtre Senza, an international company of young theatre practitioners who trained together at the école internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. Our common background in a physical theatre that aims to create a universal theatrical language by employing movement as a vehicle for storytelling is crucial for making local stories relevant to a wide and diverse audience. The fact that the actors have different mother tongues will also be important for the research process, and will be exploited in the performance.
The Lampedusa project finds its roots in the anthropological study that was carried out in 2011 in Lampedusa by Valentina Zagaria, the director of the project, on the legal and affective regimes involved in the recovery and burial of unidentified persons in the province of Agrigento, and on how the people of the island relate to the living and the dead who arrive to Lampedusa. This research happened during the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, when over 40,000 people arrived on the island, while an estimated 1,674 went missing in the Strait of Sicily in only seven months. The people that were met and the stories that were shared in the summer of 2011 motivated this theatre project into existence, and will be essential for the group to embark on fieldwork in Lampedusa in September 2013.
Our work in Lampedusa
The actors/researchers will live in Lampedusa during the month of September to gather material for the theatre piece. Documentation and research are fundamental aspects of this theatre project, as the information and experiences we gather in Lampedusa will form the theatre piece. Research and rehearsals will therefore go hand in hand and will inform and stimulate one another.
In Lampedusa we wish to work with the local municipality to run theatre workshops in schools with young people so as to collect their reflections and feelings about their island, and so as to let them actively explore the issues brought up by our research. These workshops will feed directly into our creative process. We would also like to work with the cultural organization Askavusa, who have set up the Museum of Migrations, which holds objects previously belonging to migrants that were found and salvaged on the island and on the boats. These objects and their histories will be used as core material for developing the performance.
The municipality of Lampedusa are currently working on a document that will make our collaboration official, and we are discussing together the ways in which we could work with the youth and with the inhabitants of the island. We are also hoping to work with someone from Lampedusa to gather local songs, poems and expressions. We would like to include the dialect of Lampedusa in the performance, and wish to work with local artists and musicians to this end.
During our time in Lampedusa we will set up a blog to describe the process and openly share our research. The blog will be in the different languages of the actors (Italian, Portuguese, English, French, Finnish), so as to start getting people in different European countries reading about the project and the issues it tackles.
At the end of September we will perform a first scratch of our work in Lampedusa, and would like to receive feedback from the local audience. During the following months we will further develop the piece in Paris, and aim to tour it in different European countries.
Developing the theatre piece
From October onwards we will continue developing our performance from the research and personal experiences gathered in Lampedusa. We are working on getting a residency in a theatre in Paris, which we hope will lead to initiating conversations about the topic of our work. The theatre piece will then be toured in different European countries, amongst which France, the UK, Italy, Finland and Switzerland, and, we hope, in Tunisia and Libya (we are working on engaging in conversation with theatres and cultural centers in these countries). We would like these performances to generate discussion and exchange around the topic of migration in Europe, an issue that involves us all. We wish to tour the show throughout Europe and North Africa because we feel there is an urgent need to tell and hear the stories of Lampedusa.
Théâtre Senza 