Talking heArts was a Youth Initiative funded by the Youth in Action programme of the European Union and coordinated by Subjective Values Foundation (Budapest, Hungary) in partnership with Associazione culturale Fabbrica Europa (Firenze, Italy), EuroEst Foundation (Bucharest, Romania) and University of Barcelona – LMI (Spain). It brought together 4 groups of young music, media and dance artists from 4 European countries with a diversity of cultural roots, to promote creative European collaboration and social inclusion. Encouraging young people to develop a common vision of a future Europe of cultural diversity as well as concrete artistic, social, intercultural and entrepreneurship skill, talking hearts is designed and organised by young people who met and worked together in various projects promoted by the ROOTS & ROUTES International network.
Each participant or small group within the Talking heArts project, representing one kind of art, had to establish ways to interact with others; it could be codes/hand signs, sensors with some programming, defined space on stage, etc. The final exercise was to combine them in an improvisation-based show. Through this process, participants could improve their own art but also their understanding of others (tolerance, etc.), and put positive energy into a participative creative process.
Talking heArts mixed visuals, music and movement. The focus and the main challenge was to strongly inter-connect visuals to the performing activities (more common for dancers and musicians), to initiate all the participants to self-expression in performing arts: Each of the participants should experience the feeling of performing, improvising and communicating across artistic languages and disciplines on stage.
Artists can express themselves in the most various languages and by the most various means, but art speaks one language: so this project focussed on the awareness of the creative process, on the teamwork between the different participating young artists while creating/working but also on stage, and on the common, shared message to deliver to the audience.