About
Crash Course Chit Chat is a piece for five performers, representing five European nations: Germany, France, Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium. It is based, on the one hand, on the performers’ testimonies and stories about their homelands, families and personal lives, and, on the other, on historical facts, clichés and prejudices relating to nationality. Crash Course Chit Chat employs documentary strategies to explore the relationship between personal identity and the shared European identity. Playing within a loosely defined framework the performers take part in various task-based situations, games and linguistic exercises. Their aim? To establish which nation is most European. Challenging each other and their own assumptions about what it means to live in Europe today, they are bound to face up to what separates them and to what is it that they all share.
With the future of our continent’s fragile Union hanging in the balance, are we aware of the thin line that separates patriotism from nationalism? Can we recognise it in the language that we use or listen to daily? Are we able to trace it back to our innermost thoughts and feelings? Crash Course Chit Chat is poised between the documentary material and its theatrical transposition, offering an insight into our present predicament that is both humorous and critical.
With this new work theatre maker Sanja Mitrović continues her interest in the relationship between the individual and society.
