A small car rolls onto the stage and is pulled from the front and pushed from behind. It stops in front of a corrugated metal shed, with a dozen or more people streaming out of doors and trunks. They’re not clowns, but this is a joke: a joke about how certain people are perceived.
This is the start of the dance theater work “Open for Everything” by Berlin company DorkyPark About Romani, or Roma – once called gypsies, a term now widely considered a slander.show to have US premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music On Wednesday, they satirically address the stereotypes attributed to the Roma of being nomads, beggars, swindlers, thieves, fortune tellers, free spirits, moochers who proliferate like clowns from clown cars. But it also allows the many Romans who appear in it to tell their own stories.
Constanza MaclasThe production’s choreographer and director, the Goethe Institute in the Czech Republic, commissioned Macras to create a piece that addresses this issue.
Macras had a reputation for exploring social issues through dance, but knew nothing about Romani culture. She didn’t want to make a documentary, she said: “It has to be a work of art”.
Instead, she created mostly bright and playful productions enlivened by live Roman musicians. Alternating between dance and monologue, the show celebrates the strength of the everyday life of the Roma people. “It’s saying, ‘These are your neighbors,'” McCrath said.
The research and casting process in the Czech Republic and Hungary took two years. One of her early hires was Marketa Richterova, a multilingual Czech actress who had worked with Romani performers and helped with the casting.
Speaking from Prague recently, Richterova recalled an early audition in Hungary when a Roman performer exclaimed, “I’m open to everything!”
Macras remembered the origin of the show’s title a little differently. “It’s a little ironic,” she said. The title was more about me. I knew nothing about Rome, so I had to listen, connect, and be open to everything. ”
This phrase applies to Macras’ method in general. “I had a traditional dance education. We were always judging by looking in the mirror,” she said. “When I became a choreographer, it was the first thing that made me want to quit.”
Performer Emil Bordas, a Hungarian dancer, described the rehearsal process as “talking a lot, a lot, a lot”, and Macras solicited personal stories from everyone. “Then we improvise and she picks what she’s interested in and builds her work,” he said.
Among the people who talk about themselves on the show, who introduce themselves by their first names, Magdi kicked out her drug-using daughter’s father and fought back after a breakdown. Adam gets laughed at and dances to Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” at the show. Fatima explains that she was Raimundo when she first auditioned and her family supported her transition. and Ivan, who talks about how his family has been in the same place for over 100 years.
“I’ve been in Europe much shorter than that,” said Macras, who was of Greek descent but was born and raised in Argentina. “People like me are people who move a lot.”
Richterova thought she would play Rome in the show because she knew so much about Roman traditions.But “Constanza put me in the role of a kind of Nazi who is a xenophobic,” Richterova said. Based on the film director Leni Riefenstahl And it alludes to Polasimos, the Nazi massacre of Roma during World War II. Maclas said it was important to allude to a history of anti-Roma repression because “it goes on forever.”
There is a dance during the story. Macras hired another choreographer to teach the show’s highlight, the percussive and self-slap style of Roma folk dance, to the entire cast, including non-Roma members of her company. But she also put everyone, including the Roma participants, in her own contemporary dance-style section, in which men and women touch each other and they all jump on mattresses. Among other practices uncommon in Roman dance.
The Roma were skeptical at first, but “it’s really nice that they’re doing it their way, just like us,” Macras said. “
The musicians were all Roman, and Macrath chose them with authenticity in mind, but “not young singers who can no longer sing the Roman style,” she said.
The band’s violinist, Marek Balog, comes from a long line of Roman musicians. In a video call from Budapest (speaking in Czech translated by Richterova), he said, “As a musician, he had to touch places he didn’t know were inside him.” . He appreciated the new perspective and growth.
Macrath also had to change some of her thoughts. When Bordás auditioned, she thought he was a great dancer, but not Roma. “But I was completely wrong,” she said.
“I don’t look like a typical Roma,” said Bordas. “I never said I was a gypsy when I was around people in Hungary. I was afraid to speak up, but after joining I feel like I can finally be open about who I am and where I’m from.”
‘Open to all’ means a lot to Bordas. “It opened my world and my heart,” he said. He moved to Berlin and joined the Macras company full time. But even at the beginning of the process he said: Constanza did a great job of putting together a personal story. You can hear it from people where it happened.
Not entirely in New York, as some of the original Roman cast members withdrew and were unwilling to get the Covid-19 vaccine required to enter the United States. and they don’t trust it,” Lichterova said. Shaw was able to find a replacement “from the community and vaccinated,” but “it was very difficult,” Macras said.
The production, which debuted in Vienna in 2012 and toured Europe for years, took time to reach America. It was originally scheduled for April 2020 — but Macras said the show hasn’t lost its weight.
“Europe is going right,” she said. “Almost the whole world seems to be going backwards.”
“Xenophobia is very normal here,” said Richterova, speaking of the Czech Republic. She told stories of helping some Roma obtain visas to travel to New York and being exposed to the discrimination they face every day. “They were screaming at us,” she said. (However, the man at the visa office was kind. He was a fan of musicians.)
Macras referred to a xenophobic character played by Richterova yelling “Go back to the ghetto!” It “sounds like what’s happening right now,” she said.