Artistic Discoveries in European Schoolyards

Plays Database

The old sendentary and the young adventurer

The old sedentary and the young adventurer: The old teacher is a sort of sedentary farmer & The young schoolboy is a sort of sea adventurer

The schoolyards, that we used to know, no longer exist. Everything has changed. The buildings have changed. The teachers have changed. The schoolchildren have changed. Everything has changed. What stories are we supposed to tell? Which stories can we tell? Here today, we have two storytellers: one is an old professor, a sort of a sedentary farmer; the other is a young schoolboy, a sort of a sea adventurer. One loves lists. The other can’t live without his maps. Both tell school stories. All sorts of stories. The Old Sedentary, which has never left his hometown and is half buried in is own schoolyard, will describe and list the changes that time has imposed on the World and on himself. The Young Adventurer will tell describe and tell everything about the various schoolyards that he visited during the years and about his own changes. What can we tell but stories?

I don't want to be Che Guevara

In the bathroom of a private school, Martin, dressed in a strict uniform, calmly smokes a cigarette during the break, while in the other toilet, his mates are beating and kicking a younger boy, Alan, “to teach” him the proper behavior at school. Martin, an Arnold Schwarzenegger fan is the leader of the group and while we hear the shouts of the young boy, Martin reflects, in a monologue, about violence, about deception, lack of future and likens life at school to a forest in which one has to survive. He thinks also about what to do with his life. Martin wants to leave school. He wonders whether school is good for anything at all. He thinks that it would be better to work with his father, a political officer who carried out illegal activities in a neighbourhood.
So Martin decides to give the final kick to Alan. Maybe then the school will finally expel him.

In technical training schools, the creativity of students is usually very limited, almost replaced by a universe of scientific knowledge related mainly to the hard sciences. In this context, the possibility that students could express their view on the representation that they have in the break and the schoolyard served as a good opportunity to express the uniqueness of their voices.
The initiative was made by simple first-person testimonies, poems of which they were the authors, songs that they thought were representative of their views and thoughts. Under these conditions, creativity blossomed, and the voices of the students became meaningful and significant.