16.04.2020

During the isolation period, from mid-March until mid-April, a total of 88 pupils of 6 (six) Champion schools in Prishtina, included pupils from 6 to 9 grade, in addition to the obligatory lessons, had the will and desire to join the online learning about the theater organized by the Artpolis – Art and Community Center, within the ArtEd – Growing through Arts in Education project  .

Despite the situation created with COVID-19 impact, Artpolis decided to adapt the work mode in accordance with the needs and circumstances of pupils, parents, teachers, and started organizing online rehearsals with the pupils. With this commitment, they learned about art, culture, human rights and multiethnic coexistence in Kosovo through creative activities, exercises, and training that we have prepared online. All this work was crowned with a video-drama that was broadcasted on our Facebook page.

All the 88 pupils were actively involved in theatre clubs on creating forum theatre performances. These children worked online closely with each other and shared their experiences, thoughts, concerns and desires. Addressing the negative phenomena across schools by trainers, they got more familiar to other people feelings and emotions and helped them to improve their behaviors. Forum Theatre Performances means exploring beyond you and understanding someone else’s world. Another beauty of this kind of performances is that the same emotions and feelings can be conveyed to the audience.  In this case, the performances of these theatre clubs, like “Domestic violence”, “Bullying”, “Discrimination of persons with special needs”, “The audition”, “The talent”, “Why me”, will address the negative phenomena in society.

Trainers/mentors, Qendresa Kajtazi, Daniela Markaj and Edlir Gashi were actively involved in helping the theatre clubs to create video-drama online and giving them a lot of information regarding the acting, directing and everything related to theatre, but also related to human rights. This was also a good experience for them, as artists, because they were directly ‘in touch’ with active and talented pupils and gained from their experiences too.

On the other side, parents were very happy that their children are involved in theatre activities, they were fully supportive to continue with online rehearsals, just to help them to cope more easily with the isolation situation.

After we finished the online rehearsals, all 6 clubs performed live on Facebook, separately, from 4th of April until 19th of April, 2020.  In this way, the youth and other followers of the social media will have the chance to see the video-drama and enjoy the performances of the pupils, and at the same time be aware of the topics that will be discussed in these performances.

Following this successful work we are providing training to pupils on how to use the Canva program, which will help them in various school projects. They learned about the Canva program and we encouraged them to use their imagination to create a poster of their own, and we will publish their creativity on our Facebook page. All this work was welcomed at this difficult time for the whole world which is fighting against pandemic COVID-19.

The project “ArtEd – Growing through Art in Education” is supported by German Development Cooperation, implemented by GIZ in cooperation with Art and Community Center – Artpolis.

“Theater Clubs in 20 Champion Schools are established with the support of German Development Cooperation (GIZ) through the NGO Artpolis”.