About the research

The village is in an interesting situation. More than half of its population, about 600 people left in the past years. A Canadian-Romanian company, Roşia Montană Gold Corporation intends to create one of the biggest gold mines of Europe on the place of the village, so they offer houses in Alba Iulia for the inhabitants of the village.

Roşia Montană is strongly present in the media, but only regarding ecological, economic and social problems. We on the other hand are interested in the people who live there, in their dreams, their fears and their everyday life. How do they handle this uncertainty that has been going on for years? What makes them stay in the village even though a Canadian company offers them an apartment in the town of Alba Iulia? How do they imagine their future?

The research of the local community and the communication with them follow some anthropological and ethnographical principles; one of them is that “you can get if you give”: by organizing common events – bonfire, film projection, playing music – on one hand the life of the village becomes more vivid, on the other hand people open up more, if they don’t feel like some kind of spectacularity, but part of a natural, mutual communicational process. The research partly proceeds by interviews with the help of interpreters. The interviews do not focus on the mining project, most of the locals are already fed up with reporters and tourists, who are willing to know only that – but they open up much more, if they are asked about their everyday life, childhood or their future.

The workshop goes on parallelly with the similar research of the Romanian „dramAcum” group, who are also collecting materials at the place for their play about the actual social situation of Roşia Montană, which will be presented in Cluj Napoca in November.

The initiative makes part of theatrical trend that involves outsider groups (for example a village) in the work, and with this and fieldwork it examinates actual social phenomenons with theatrical tools. Therefore the raw material of the production is not a pre-formed text, but the experience gained there about a heterogeneous and complex reality. This material is continuously changing, „boiling”, and never can be percepted in its wholeness. This uncertainty is inspiring: it strongly stimulates the experimentation with expressing tools of the theatre.