Edward Bond’s Eleven Vests is structured by Sigma-Art-RO Theatre in Education as a complex educational and social-impact play by exploring young people critical situation in different – also critical – levels who represents nowadays main question about youngsters and future: how they will manage this unexpected and huge who’s coming over them through:
- Technology, who’s advancing day by day and request them day by day,
- Communication; despite the invasion of information in our all life’s communication ’tools’ are more and more less present; this is especially because of the lack of Emotional knowledge and culture,
- The aggressive impact of Social – World – Changes; nowadays young people are living in an continuous physical and mental War?
This is why Edward Bond’s Eleven Vests became an optimal choice for Sigma-Art-RO Theatre in Education in the frame of R.U.IN project and transnational bullying and cyber-bullying movement.
Concretely, two events involving the same person – in the first with a young teenager attitude, in the second part as an adult attitude. Both attitudes are strangely alike but at the same time worlds apart. It’s as if the first event were turned upside down by the second. Partly this is because teenagers must answer to authority but adults must first answer to themselves.
Eleven Vests shows how the adult self develops out of earlier self. It asks: how do we learn responsibility for ourselves and what we do?
Edward Bond about violence: “It would be immoral not to portray violence in plays. If I show violence, it is always for it to be understood. It is not an end, never a solution. It is always a problem..”
Eleven Vests was first presented by Big Brum Theatre in Education on 7 October 1997 in Birmingham, prior to a tour in Midlands.
Sigma-Art-RO Theatre in Education has Eleven Vests first presentation on the 22nd of September in the front of the Romanian Minister of Education.
Photo: Sigma Art