Erasmus+ Programme
KA1 – Adult Education
Coordinator
Building creative and collaborative knowledge
This training is organized by Samba Résille (Toulouse), coordinator, and its partners Bombrando (Lisbon), Piranha (Germany), Samba sem Fronteiras (Porto), Enjoy (Torino) and Views International (Liège), around the theme “Building creative and collaborative knowledge”, with the objective to promote construction of creative knowledge in intercultural education. The project plans 7 mobilities.
Partners
Enjoy is a young people’s cultural association born in Turin in 2009 and started by a group of young people who were focussed on developing young people’s life skills through the arts. Enjoy offers many different kinds of arts workshops for young people in their local community. Their principal activities are theatre and dance workshops for young people aged 16-25 years of age which include shows for people of all ages, comedies, cabaret, musicals, improvisation with many of these projects created from the ideas of the young participants. The association’s objective is to find and cultivate new and existing talent in acting, dance and singing with groups of young people from their local community.
Enjoy Association have developed and delivered many street theatre productions in Italy. They also regularly perform in the streets of Turin. The members of this association have a number of skills in the area of arts workshop delivery for young people from backgrounds of less opportunity. The association have also taken part in an international mobility meeting in 2015.
Bombrando is a youth music organization that works with young people from minority backgrounds in the suburbs of Lisbon, who experience difficulties and challenges in their everyday lives. The main aim of Bombrando is to develop the young people’s life skills and creative abilities through music and mobility actions as well as informing and educating the wider community about the cultural heritage of young people from Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Macau, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe.
Bombrando has two groups of young people (14-17 years and 18-25 years of age) both of these groups take part in ongoing workshops and create musical ensemble percussion activities. Bombrando enables young people to have positive perceptions of themselves through undertaking local and international projects.
The roda « Samba Sem Fronteiras » was created by some Brazilian people living in Portugal, who regretted not to find the roots of Samba, made by those who love it and for the people who enjoy it. The Samba which can be found in any place, but which is not in any place, which promotes tradition and the representatives of this Brazilian popular music, so marginalized at its beginning (like every black cultural event), but which, little by little, gained its space without letting its essence aside: joy, sad poetry, protestation.
Thus, Samba Sem Fronteiras manages to highlight the roots of Samba, without forgetting more contemporary productions made with attention and respect – after all, like Paulinho da Viola would say, we are “without prejudice, without obsession of the past, without wanting to be on the side of those who don’t want to sail”. But we do like the old sailor, and when the fog is out, we sail slowly. The most important thing is to free our voices, to teach and to learn a little bit from the Samba roots, from the Brazilian music roots
VIEWS International is an international association created in 2008. This is the continuation of the international activities and of the objectives of VIEWS Belgium.
VIEWS International, it’s a network of 23 countries around various projects. VIEWS International, it’s also a team of young European, visually impaired or sighted, who are actively implicated in specific projects at the European level.
Objectives :
– To facilitate the meetings between young European people, majority of whom are visually impaired
– To optimise the chances of this young people to be integrated in the social, private and professional life as autonomously as possible
– To develop spirit of solidarity and democracy, specific of the European culture
For the last eight years, Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival has presented the Edinburgh Festival Carnival (EFC) which features a parade down Princes Street and a host of informal and staged performances in Princes Street Gardens on the opening Sunday of the Festival, with over 800 performers and an audience of 25,000. The Carnival presents multiple community groups from Edinburgh and the rest of Scotland alongside international performers.
EFC also delivers community engagement programmes, including weekend events, workshops, performances, meetings, talent development projects, aimed at extending the reach of the Carnival to embrace as many communities in Edinburgh as possible.
The Piranha Arts (PA) tree has six dynamic branches. As a music publisher with its own label, Piranha Arts have been carrying new sounds and artists from all countries via Kreuzberg, Berlin to the entire world ever since. In Berlin, Piranha Arts initiated trailblazing festivals such as HeimatKlänge, Bands United, Fête de la Musique, C3 – Club Contemporary Classical and The Nights of Ramadan. With changing locations and partners, Piranha Arts organise the leading branch events WOMEX – the World Music Expo and Classical:NEXT. PA entertain international partnerships and – with Piranha Arts Consultancy – work with professional conferences and network initiatives on four continents. Whether it is with events or the global sounds of Piranha Records – PA campaign for cultural diversity in Berlin and everywhere around the globe. Music means the world to us! This is why PA engaged with Berlin’s street festival and parade Karneval der Kulturen right from the start: as musicians, in the jury, with record releases and with the after-parade party “Long Night of Soundsystems”… Since its 2016 edition, Piranha Arts has been the producer of the million-strong Karneval der Kulturen.
Piranha Arts stays in flux and is always open for more. PA stay active at the borders: between music and tech, by research & development, between music and audiovisual, with international film projects and programs.
Mobilities
From 23th of February to 4th of March 2018
Intercultural education: a positive approach of difference
This mobility in Lisbon with Bombrando was organized around research-action workshops:
– good educational practices of non-formal intercultural education;
– educational approaches developed by a multi-cultural society like interaction, exchange, dismantling barriers, reciprocity and objective solidarity;
– intercultural education as driving-force for social education;
– interdependency of the needs of minorities and majorities.
From 24th to 3th of March 2019
For this mobility following the mobility organized with Bombrando in Lisbon in 2018, Samba Résille was welcomed by the theatre company Enjoy in Torino, specialized in the Commedia dell’Arte and the alternative theatrical teaching methods.
Enjoy takes its inspiration from the theatre-laboratory of Grotowski who leaves the artifice (scenery, costume) to focus on the organic (body, voice, breath, movement), revealed and intensified via a structure (text, song, ritual, trance) having a singular power of revelation.
Transgressing the borders (disciplinary, geographical, cultural, of the body and the intimacy with the social environment) and aiming at freeing the skills of the individuals (personally and collectively), the technics used by Enjoy present benefits for all the activities led par the association, whether talking about artistic, technical, social or managerial skills (music, working on stage, speaking, leading workshops and groups). 32 members of Samba Résille, administrators, volunteers and employees, participate in the exchange with Enjoy.
From March 13th to 15th, 2019
The challenges of Cultural diversity in major metropolises in the light of terrorist threats.
Interventions by the carnival organizers of Berlin, Edinburgh, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Paris, Toulouse and Brussels, as well as the chief of the Berlin police, an artistic company and two officials of the Berlin City Council (International Relations and Marketing Department)
From 8th to 12th of May 2019
This mobility concerns members engaged in singing activities led by Samba Résille, whether they are singers, drummers or guitarists / cavaquinhistes. The course offers singing, drumming and string lessons, but also common workshops on the “playing together”, through rhythmic exercises on the samba clave which structures and gathers the rhythmic support as well as the melody and the harmonic parts.
The course includes:
– singing workshops;
– drumming workshops;
– string workshops (guitar, cavaquinho);
– common rhythmic workshops;
– information on history and current news of samba music.
From 8th to 12th of May 2019
Job shadowing Samba Résille in Liège – Views International
In the frame of the European project “Constructeurs de savoirs créatifs et collaboratifs” (Builders of creative and collaborative knowledge), Samba Résille organized a mobility for 8 people among its employees and volunteers, in partnership with Views International, Belgian organization having an expertise in welcoming and accompanying people visually impaired.
Within this frame, these 8 members of Samba Résille discovered the working environment of the partner, and its actions led to develop the autonomy of blind and visually impaired people, started a few years ago.
The link between Samba Résille and Views International was made thanks to meetings between Anca and Hamza, respectively director of Samba Résille and director of Views International, during an Erasmus + inter agencies seminar, organized to redact a guide of good practices on accompanying impaired people in European mobility projects.
This meeting led to a first project of collaboration, the mission in Belgium of a young blind from Toulouse, as an EVS during one year.
Moreover, Samba Résille works since many years around teaching batucada (Brazilian drums) with the Institute of blind young people in Toulouse, and its musical teacher, Grégory, works with the specialized workers, and exchanges regularly happen between the directions of the 2 partners regarding the necessity to qualify the teams on the skills to develop in the accompanying of visually impaired people in European mobility.
After a first succeeded experience of a group of blind and visually impaired people spending a 15 day mobility in Liverpool, that led to exchanges regarding artistic practices with other operators (English ones, Dutch, Spanish…), it seemed necessary to go beyond the accompanying of simple creation of spaces for artistic practices and cultural exchanges, and to create the supporting conditions for the individual projects of members and specialized teams by associating the directions, the employees, the musical teachers, the volunteers, to make a crossed analysis to treat all the useful teachings to qualify on:
– the adaptive processes to concrete welcoming and the evaluation of specific needs;
– the possibilities of non-formal training for visually impaired people in Liège, with the goal to increase his qualification and employability.
From 16th to 22th of April 2020
Following the governmental measures regarding the covid-19, the mobility in Porto is canceled.
This mobility concerns the people engaged in the singing activities of Samba Résille, whether they are singers, percussionists or guitarists / cavaquinhistes. The training offers masterclasses (singing, drums, strings), and common moments to play together, through rhythmic exercises on the clave de samba, which structures and gathers the rhythmic support, the melody and the harmonic parts.
The training, led by specialized musicians, will offer:
- singing workshops;
- percussion workshops;
- string workshops (guitar / cavaquinho);
- common rhythmic workshops;
- information on history and news of samba style.
Testimonies
Samba Résille meets the Alentejana tradition
Tuesday 27th of February 2018 – 4pm – Traditional Alentejano singing workshop
Back to Amadora for a part of us, neighborhood whose social project is to gather people. Here, rooms are at disposal for associations or local groups to gather, organize sportive activities, rehearse or just drink coffee.
One of these groups try to make last a tradition of polyphonic singing, transmitted from generation to generation in the region of Alentejo, agricultural and vinicultural region expanding from the south coast of Portugal to the border with Spain in the west, and lining the Faro region at the extreme south.
Before the time of social networks, the farming and ascetic life of those regions offered few distractions to the young men meeting at night to sing all together the life of a man in the countryside, love and nature. Some representatives of this traditional heritage, in the list of the UNESCO World Heritage, are facing us this afternoon to give us of glimpse of it.
Ten grandpas, red scarf around the neck and lots of lapel pins on the jacket, proudly begin to sing and take us in a trip to the past. These living museums don’t have scores; their vibrant voices take the whole space and our heart’s space. These little songs lean on musical codes that our ears don’t have the habit to listen, with harmonization on the fourth and the fifth.
Our little assembly is really focused to master the pronunciation and the singing, but at the end the experience is magical! Our eyes are shining in front of these men holding a tradition that doesn’t interest their grandchildren and that should die with them. We have the feeling to live a unique moment, to receive a gift.
At the end, a little exchange of questions allows the meeting, but what seals this beautiful exchange is the offered lunch in this tiny place, where old and young, music and singing amateurs are piled up around soup tureens where nothing is missing (pasta, chickpeas, bacon, potatoes), and whose walls have club flags and yellowing pictures reminded the memory of the disappeared.
Friday: we leave at 2pm to go to Lisbon… By bus.
The concept of interculturality of the Erasmus + stay is already within the group, with its colorful tastes and eclectic topics of discussion. We share our hypothesis on this coming experience of busy meetings, we share pieces of music, and we share food… Precisely in Spain, and we put in common our team’s games (childish interculturality) during the long break in Salamanca at 3 am.
I have to confess that something unifies us: we all wear tracksuit or saroual pants, essential and totally transcultural element to make the trip comfortable. We all anticipated the collective experience! And crossing the Pyrenees and Spain was exactly as we thought it was going to be, even if we had the surprise to search for a gas station between 1 and 2 am in the Salmantin countryside, adventure that kept us in suspense with our eyes wide open and got us to arrive in Lisbon really tired but excited.
First experience of the intercultural beyond the border: the Portuguese language. Since we stopped in the highway cafeterias or even when we entered the city, many of us try to pronounce Camões language, to understand it and to invent strategies to speak it. Eu falo un pouco de português…
9:30 am: after 19 hours of bus and lots of kilometers behind us, we unload our luggage near the pier, and we proudly carry our instruments decorated with our logo in the streets of Lisbon. And we need courage to go up the slope, eyes still full of sleep and bodies tensed by the bus seats. Arrived in the Old Town and Alface hostels: by their international characteristic, they allowed us to meet strangers like us, already charmed by the atmosphere of Lisbon and giving us good advices.
Then it’s in the bedroom that interculturality occurs: “who sleeps above? Underneath? Who has its outfit for the week? Do you brush your teeth with an electrical toothbrush? I took aspirin, just in case… I have a multi-socket…” Words of the daily-life that take nothing out of the charm of this collective life, on the contrary!
12h: It’s time to go to lunch and the group splits to discover the city. Between those deciding to taste the ginginha in the closest bar, those deciding to stride along the streets to find terraces in the sun, and those deciding to discover the market, everybody experiments the Portuguese drinks and cooking.
And while some decide to continue to experiment by tasting the pasteis de nata and visiting Belem’s beautiful architecture, others go to their bed to take a nap (not really intercultural, unless…). Don’t forget our brave comrades of the Cooking Team already cooking in Bombrando’s place (metro station Arfonelos).
5 pm: we meet outside our hostels to go to Bombrando’s place, we exchange on our beautiful discoveries and share good deals.
6 pm: discover of the singular and living cultural and social center where Bombrando has its offices and spaces for rehearsal. And the moment we all waited for comes: we meet Bombrando’s team! After the general hugs and some drinks, we have our first intercultural games, led by Clément and Mathilde. And we make line, we are all together. We wear signs covered with answers on questions asked by the comrades of both groups. The interculturality is this time written, and it’s really beautiful to read! The atmosphere is at its apogee when the intercultural diner arrives: the first courses are from the south west of France (cold meats, delicious sauces), the main course in the bacalhau a brás, and the diner finishes by the succulent deserts from Mafalda.
Fabio, Antonio, and all the Portuguese teenagers and young adults… So many beautiful meetings or reunions for the second evening of our Erasmus + stay, which is really about exchange!
We all look forward to continue the adventure, although our eyes and brain need some hours of sleep.
Boa noite, or as the Fabulous Trobadors from Toulouse sing it, « Good night, good night, it’s time to go to bed, we wish you to have sweet dreams, it’s free cinema!”
The kit of the perfect manager
European mobilities are the opportunity to live exceptional moments: artistic exchanges, giggles, extraordinary learnings, culinary discoveries, amazing meetings, beautiful visits….
But all these experiences can’t happen without a rigorous and adapted management!
You can observe below the kit of the perfect manager, took by a member of the team to Lisbon:
- Pouch with all the necessary documents for a relaxed mobility:
- List of all the participants;
- List of all the important contacts (including the bus driver’s!);
- Planning of activities and road maps;
- Attendance sheets and sign-off sheets;
- Invoice of the hotel and lists of rooms;
- Insurance papers in case of medical problems, repatriation, etc.
- Marker pens: absolutely necessary to make sure that no one is missing at departure!
- Calculator to respect the budget in case of unplanned expenses!
- Post-It to deal with the last-minute changes and the important meetings with the partners (or the web-conference with the European commission)
More a few gifts for the partners and we are good to go!
