The community of the Roma Visual Lab, which works at the Media Studies Department of ELTE, joined the Roma Heroes project in spring 2017. We attended the performances of Roma Heroes at the Studio K. Theater in Budapest (just as we attended the two festivals since then). A course focusing on Roma Heroes ran at the Media Studies Department of ELTE in Fall 2017. In this course, we attempted to examine the historical, social, medial, cultural and artistic contexts of the (then) four productions of Roma Heroes, linking diverse disciplines. We studied the reception of Roma Heroes in the press (in the Hungarian context), the literary background (e.g. studying the novel Stone Age by Mariella Mehr), sociological and cultural history aspects (Scottish Travellers, Romanian Gypsies, the Yenish in Switzerland), the methodological-generic background (the genre of storytelling and related examples, and the use of the genre in the framework of drama), as well as the post-colonial contexts. Students in the course participated in a two-session workshop led by experts of Independent Theater Hungary, during which they covered the role of the storytelling genre in social sensitivity. This was not the first collaboration between the Department of Media Studies at ELTE and the Independent Theater, and hopefully there will be more – we have learned a lot from each other.

Students participating in the project: Lilla Boglárka Antal, Lilla Huff, Viktória Kovács, Anna Móra, Vivien Pozsár, Klaudia Laura Sebestyén, Anna Stump, Lídia-Dóra Szabó, Renáta Tompos, Udval Tserendorj, Dóra Zsófia Várhegyi