Abstract

The research/creation program Everyday Drama is an interdisciplinary extracurricular activity, combining urban anthropological field research, story collecting, creative training and producing drama, theatre, documentaries and short fiction video creations. The idea of the Everyday Drama Research and Creation program emerged from the personal discontent of a small group of theatre professors and students at Babes Bolyai University who shared the feeling that the Romanian theatre productions - and also the Romanian theatre education system - had no relationship at all with real life. As a result, at the beginning of the new millennium, young audiences avoided going to theatre. Our group, who previously founded the alternative performing arts magazine ManInFest, started in 2004 an extra-curricular research-creation program, dedicated to young writers, journalists, stage directors and video artists. Its goals: on one hand, to educate the students from different programs (theatre studies, theatre directing, media) in working together, in small teams, on specific personal projects. On the other hand, to build a bridge between the social and anthropological field research, and theatre and media creation, in order to transform this material in artistic products, aesthetically valid. From 2007, we embraced an ambitious theme: The X-Men & Women Generation: the title, inspired by the cartoon - and eventually film—series X-Men, attempts to define the young people, between 15 to 25 years old, from urban milieu. We try to scan and analyze the profound mutations produced by the technological developments in psyche, behavior and interpersonal communication, and also their universe of representations. Moreover, we had to build a methodology in progress, combining theoretical conferences, workshops, training for anthropological field research, creative writing, and teambuilding between writer—director, in order to see the final products staged or filmed.