Urban Memories and Countryside Mirrors: A History of Romani Performing Arts by Miguel Angel Vargas

Abstract: Raising the question of when can we start talking about Romani Performing Arts beyond Romani performers and Romani characters, help us build an international reading of the crucial variety of national examples of Romani performers from Turkey to USA, in a crossed chronology. Connecting influences of the different contexts we learn about the capacity of Romani artistic agency to break genre limits and adapt the public discourses of alterity. A real trip from the dawn of modernity to the challenges of XXI Century, with examples including the Romani Turkish Puppet tradition, the Spanish Golden Age Theater and the XIX Century Teatro Gitanesco, the Royal masquerades in France, the Roma Slave Jesters in Walachia and Moldavia, the work with animals in Roma circuses and bullfighting, fairs and carnivals, the theatricality of different Roma religious traditions, the experiences of XIX and XX century international exhibitions and the relation between institutionalised and independent theatre companies. Though the remains of texts and the imagery created for and associated with Roma performing arts artists, we reflect on the space that theatrical fiction and representation might have in the questioning of XXI Century Romani identities. Bavarlipe Roma Online University is an online educational platform where Roma and non-Roma can access knowledge about the Roma identity(ies), history(ies) and culture(s) thorough a collection of high-quality lectures delivered by leading Roma scholars on topics ranging from the Roma Holocaust to Roma cultural productions. In partnership with Central European University (CEU), this project is part of ERIAC’s Roma Cultural History Initiative financed by the German Federal Foreign Office (FFO).