Testimonial: My Forum Theater Adventure

Between 15 and 24 November 2018, I had one of the most beautiful and educational days in Romania. I participated in the training course organised by Youth Alma Association, called "Drama Tools for Shaping Youth".
We played a lot of energizer games, we learned new non-formal techniques, which I used while I visited the local schools with the organisation I am volunteering "Asirys".

At the beginning of the training, we tried to know each other better while creating a path with our life in the last 5 years. I saw that I had a lot of commons with most of the people. But what will be unforgettable for me is a game in which we had to describe our biggest fear and our hero when we were children. The most fascinating was that with one of the 27 participants, we had the same fear and hero.

We learned a lot about the 8 keys competences of the Youthpass certificate and we made a collage on the wall of the meeting room in which we were writing every day all the skills we achieved.

We went to the center of Iasi through a game of hidden treasure. We had to do some tasks like questioning young people about unemployment. We made a lot of photos and videos. Next day we met Alex from IDIOT and he helped us to develop our improvisation skills. We learned how to create a story with character, action, interaction, consequence, and conclusion. We learned also other non-formal activities.

The next days we got deep into the world of Forum Theatre. At first, we learned a lot about the history and the purpose of Forum Theatre, then we split into groups and we started to create the story that we would present to the students. We had 7 characters, the oppressor, the oppressed, two allies of the oppressor, two allies of the oppressed, a neutral and the jocker - who would be basically between us, the actors and the students. We presented a story with some of the problems they deal every day, like bullying and I was one of the allies of the oppressed. The students found very good solutions for the problems of our protagonist and I hope they enjoyed it as much as we did.

These are a few of the things I lived during this training course. For sure I will always remember every person I met and everything I learned through the cubes some participants gave me, the pictures and the songs that I keep hear on the radio which reminds me the dances we had every night. And to end, one of the most funniest moment of my experience, was when the Romanian team decided to present their culture by organizing a traditional wedding, so this is how I got married in Romania.

By Nikolia Papadopoulou