Parallel Lives
20th Century Parallel Lives – 20th Century Through the Eyes of Secret Police is a three-year international co-production project of the Divadelná Nitra Association, planned for years 2011 – 2013.The idea concept of the project is based on the long-term tendency of the Divadelná Nitra Association to draw attention to the crucial social and political phenomena through performing arts, to reflect the positive and negative sides of the past and „to remember the memory“.
What were the parallel lives of the 20th century like? How did we really live and how did we live in the reflection of the regime and the secret police? What were the lives of ordinary people and what of those who stood out from the crowd? The answers to these questions we will search through the long-term project20th Century Parallel Lives – 20th Century Through the Eyes of Secret Police.
description, theme, method
The project 20th Century Parallel Lives – 20th Century Through the Eyes of Secret Police will watch the every-day lives and fates of people of the 20th century as we find them in records and written documents of the secret police. This material offers a particular view on lives of people. Their observations are focused on various aims – among suspected persons and persons dangerous for the regime the secret police often followed ordinary people who lived their conformist lives and had no ambitions to make a stand against the regime.
The material is interesting as a subjective and formalized record of the memory and also as the record of the memory which is today a subject of various political and social strategies. This enables us to observe not only the every-day life during the dictatorship of proletariat period – lives of prominent people as well as those anonymous – but also to take notice of how we deal with our own past, how we create our historical, national and collective identities.
This process is particularly interesting in the countries which experienced the transformation process after the revolutionary year 1989. A new generation has grown in Europe, which does not remember the period before 1989. The every-day life of ordinary people with their dilemmas, decisions and fails enable us to study the “great history”, historically crucial decisions and fails.
message
When studying every-day stories we are partially inspired by the tradition of modern central-European and European novel and theatre. T. Kantor, A. Wajda, R. Musil, H. Broch, M. Kundera and others have drawn the picture of the period through the analysis of every-day situations and they set existential questions which have been forming the life and identity of an European of the 20th century. European theatre of the second half of the 20th century often used documentary material and worked with it by its own means.
More about the project, its nature, outcomes, project partners, schedule and project leaders read down below in the document to download.
