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Performers from the Malta Drama Centre will be traveling to the Latvian town of Akniste in March to stage Gunita’s Story. The play deals with spousal abuse, an issue topical to the country.
The production is part of an ongoing EU project under the auspices of the Grundtvig Adult Learning Project. Apart from Malta, it involves Austria, Finland and Greece. It functions as a cross-cultural educational experience that sets out to raise awareness on issues pertinent to each country through community theatre.
The different countries will work in collaboration to probe through each other’s main social problems: the Greek troupe will look at suicide in Finland while Austrian performers will visit our own shores to explore the issue of identity, also in March.
“Research on this project actually started last year,” Mario Azzopardi, head of the Malta Drama Centre, says. “We were originally planning to tackle prostitution. But as we found out through our close collaboration with Skai Prite, who is the Akniste mayor’s wife, spousal abuse is a far more immediate issue to Akniste in particular – with prostitution being more of a concern in Riga.”
While matrimonial violence is illegal in Latvia, the government has been criticized for not enforcing the law properly. Police are reluctant to make arrests and women reporting abuse by their husbands have been known to be ridiculed. The Drama Centre’s research on the subject included a literature review which included a UN report as well as reports from on the subject from various Latvian agencies. In the interests of accuracy, four victims of spousal abuse were brought in to help with the production. “Since we’ll be depicting actual beatings, we didn’t want to go over-the-top and we wanted to be true to the subject and treat it with respect, which is why we employed the help of these women,” Azzopardi says. In conformity with community theatre conventions, the play will be performed in the round and the audience will be invited to point out anything it finds inaccurate. “The dynamics of the audience are what makes the show grow and evolve and they will be allowed to ‘hot seat’ anything that is depicted or said on stage.” The play, lasting for approximately 30 minutes, will be performed in Maltese, Latvian and English, back-to-back on the same night.
A similar approach will be taken up by the Austrian troupe, visiting next month and performing at the Malta Drama Centre, Blata L-Bajda. However, while the show will be performed in both German and English, it was agreed that including a Maltese version would not be necessary. “We suggested they take on illegal immigration, Azzopardi says, “but when they came to research the island they found our bilingual situation quite interesting and wondered ‘what is this cultural schizophrenia?’ So they decided to deal with Maltese identity as a subject. Knowing how Austrians tend to take a very philosophical stance, what they come up with should be interesting!”
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