TARANTO – A theater workshop for women who have “broken up” and wish to meet with other women, to tell their stories, distract themselves and joke together about the “breakups” of everyday life. With a typical Taranto dialect and onomatopoeic expression, the workshop in question is called «Squash!», which stands for «breakup!». And Crest offers it, every Thursday, starting from May 23rd (6 pm), in the old city, in the oratory of San Giuseppe. A place in the neighborhood where the fears, confidences and dreams of local women become the voice of a city in balance and in need of finally being told with an entirely feminine gaze from its deepest heart.
The initiative is included in «A theater under the chimneys», part of the pilot actions for cultural welfare and the valorisation of places of culture promoted by the Department of Tourism, Economy of Culture and Valorisation of the Territory of the Puglia Region, by the Teatro Pubblico Pugliese and by Pact, the Consortium for Arts and Culture and the Arts, Culture and Tourism Center of the Puglia Region. «A theater under the chimneys – explains the president of Crest, Clara Cottino – represents an opportunity to give even greater scope and integration to the many interventions that we have implemented in schools and in the peripheral neighborhoods of the city, with the aim of creating a network of projects also promoted by different bodies, but all capable of responding to important objectives such as inclusion, the fight against educational poverty, support for the fragility of childhood and adolescence and the promotion of identity heritage”.
It is a network capable of truly promoting synergy to bring new elements of awareness into play, both for operators and for users of the activities. A network capable of creating opportunities for knowledge and discussion with the families of the children involved in the workshops through schools, because the family remains the founding archetype of imagination and behaviour.
«But addressing the families of the students of the Città Vecchia or Tamburi schools – explains Cottino – is not a simple thing, because it is necessary to nourish a path made up of relationships and glances that can suggest curiosity and willingness to meet. The starting point is not everyday problems, but the desire to get involved by fishing for the child that is in each of us.”
«Squash!» fits into this framework, a laboratory that is an invitation to break the mould. A large number of mothers and grandmothers participate in the initiative, representing a world of women who are always available to form a group and talk about themselves, at the same time offering an element of reflection on the male distance with respect to this type of initiative, which continues in the oratory of San Giuseppe also with the Monday theater workshop meetings aimed at teenagers. A workshop through which an evolving group has already been created, which is gradually integrating with other children and young people from the old city (and beyond) in a true dimension of inclusiveness and positive exchange of experiences, for overcoming the suburbs as ghetto and place of diversity and minority.
