The theatrical research project TURNING POINTS (WENDEPUNKTE) is an innovative mix of performative arts, cultural exchange and social science. Our concern is to offer, with the help of artistic instruments, an initiation to an intercultural exchange on personal turning points, and to make it publicly accessible in the form of an installation. We understand the term turning points as personal development processes, in the sense of a retrospective, subjective interpretation between continuity and disruption. Through the de-construction of personal life stories, they are conciously perceived; to be able to acknowledge and newly evaluate the at first unusual path of life of people in the neighbouring state, the next city, in the next house or even in the own family at the end of the project, far from categorial and simplifying observations.
People from Germany, Czechia, Hungary and Greece, conciously stemming from different regions, milieus and generations, will be co-creating different workshops in their countries.
We see the participants of the workshops as actors, since they together with the workshop directors turn fragments of their biography into aesthetic artefacts, using performative, visual or medial art forms. The conclusion of the project forms a junction of the different artistic results from all countries and workshops in the form of a performative installation in Halle (Saale) as an intercultural experience room.
With this project we want to set a sign for the intercultural diversity of Saxony-Anhalt and the EU and therefore position vastly different life paths and decisions, without judgement, in an artistic form. This should lead to a more extensive preoccupation with each own's culture and history, create identity and lead to an intercultural exchange for the actors in the workshops as well as for the public. Ideally, 'communicative doors' will be opened between people in the European domain, between people in different life phases with unique values and wishes and maybe living bridges can be built over seemingly insurcompassible extremes.
