A TULIP FOR YOU and the Black Box Project
TULIPland – where we want to live
For us in A Tulip for You, the International Theatre Festival Divadelná Nitra is always a summary of our work ‘from one festival to the next’. For fifteen years now, we take a sharp look over the shoulder and see what we have come up with for visually impaired children and what our beautiful children have made. This time it’s better not to look back!
Phone calls, e-mails, children creating art over the phone and drawings arriving by mail (because kids had to leave the boarding school and return home or to children’s homes in cities all around Slovakia, where they had no access to computers or the internet) completely exhausted us during the second wave. Children were losing their work habits, turning lazier in front of our eyes, and even the drawings of the best slowly lost their zing. These parched times literally drained our children. Some might have even forgotten my name. When at last they ‘sensed’ me from the dormitory balconies after six long months, they called out: ‘Hello, hello Mrs… Mrs. Tulip!’
At the end of the 2020/2021 school year, we could finally give it a proper go. Playing games on the welcoming bevelled meadows in front of the boarding school until sundown, sessions with ‘their court drummer’ Thierry, a workshop with the project’s sighted children from Nitra, and a solid round of work with volunteers from Deloitte, who, in a snap of fingers, weeded the schoolyard’s Garden of the Blind overgrown knee-high. And drawing – every week, until they dropped. The children suddenly came alive and even brought many drawings from home! Thrilled talks, our collective evaluations, joy – the kids attentive like never before and thankful almost to the point of tears.
But we grown-ups made good use of our time in relentless pandemic lockdown. We processed the project archive comprising dozens and dozens of valuable children’s work and prepared video-exhibitions, the websites of A Tulip for You and of the Black Box project activity, and the public interactive puzzle TULIPland – where children want to live.
And there is much for the public to see. As for children, including handicapped ‘Tulip’ kids, the pandemic only briefly put them out of action. At the International Theatre Festival Divadelná Nitra 2021, they will reach out to visitors through the interactive Black Box object, exhibitions, a drum session, graffiti, and the large collective drawing TULIPland puzzle – where they wish to live.
They will again be children as they are supposed to be – dreamy, talented, and filled with happiness.
Elena Kárová
FRIDAY 1 October, Square / Festival for Children
10.00 AM – 4.00 PM A Tulip for You. All-day integration workshop for visually impaired and sighted ‘Tulip’ children.
2.00 PM – 3.00 PM Drum Session with Thierry Ebam.
Public event. Free admission.
SATURDAY 2 October, Square / Festival for Children
1.00 PM – 5.00 PM Black Box pen – a zone for the sighted about the unsighted.
Black Box cinema, Black Box exhibition, Garden of the Blind, Pathway of Feeling, Tulipland / maxi puzzle, 2.00 PM – 3.00 PM drum session with Thierry Ebam.
Free admission.
SUNDAY 3 October, Square / Festival for Children
1.00 PM – 5.00 PM Black Box pen – a zone for the sighted about the unsighted.
Black Box cinema, Black Box exhibition, Garden of the Blind, Pathway of Feeling, Tulipland / maxi puzzle, 2.00 PM – 3.00 PM drum session with Thierry Ebam.
Free admission.
Project leader:
acad. sculpt. Elena Kárová
Co-organisers:
Elementary Boarding School for the Visually Impaired, Bratislava; Prince Pribina Elementary School, Nitra; Children’s Home, Bernolákovo; Children’s Home, Hriňová; Children’s Home, Podunajské Biskupice, and families of children involved in the project