Opening Doors, a theatre group of actors with learning disabilities, this summer travelled to Belgium to revisit their founding partners.
The highlight of the project was a performance festival where each group presented a theatrical piece
The actors met in the town Neerpelt, where their partners hosted them at the Dommelhof centre, a creative arts centre complete with lodging facilities, performance and workshop spaces, and surrounding woodland area hosting environmental sculptures.
French actors from the residence Foyer Jean Thibierge in Reims, with whom the Belgian group had also partnered, were invited to this exchange too.
The actors of Opening Doors engaged in drama workshops facilitated by each of the group’s artistic directors. They also enjoyed the open grounds to explore the sensory experience of the sculptures designed to actively involve their audience.
The project also enabled the group’s artistic directors to share developments in our practices.
The highlight of the project was a performance festival where each group presented a theatrical piece. All groups explore a way of working that facilitates the participants’ growth in dramatic skills.
This allows them to devise and create their own work, moving towards an authentic creative expression of their own experiences. Each group’s aesthetic becomes decisively different, each group, however, bringing in references to basic human ways of being.
The French explored political and social gossip in a bar; the Belgians improvised around sketches of happiness; and the Maltese group developed a performance looking at and playing with human interactions in different forms.
The Opening Doors group was born from a partnership between St James Cavalier, Malta, Leopoldsburg Cultureel Centrum, Belgium, and Headway Theatre Arts, UK, when they received funding from the EU Grundtvig programme.
Since completion of the project in 2009, the Maltese group has continued to work on various projects, including its first public performance in Malta, Jien u Aħna / Moi et Nous.
The relationship with the Belgian Opening Doors has from the start been a close- knit one.
“The performances were a creative expression of how the groups look at and experience life around them. And the whole festival created a space where the groups could enjoy living and being together once again, stimulating them to move further forward in their artistic journey,” said artistic director Louise Ghirlando.
The experience was possible with the support of the European Union Youth in Action programme and St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, which has been the group’s platform since inception.