Bitef

CONCEPT OF A "THIRD CULTURE" Portable kids. Nomad kids, sons of international company's managers. Kids abandoned in airports. Orphan kids left behind because of airplane crashes. Kids who travel from one country to the other but they feel always in the same place. Bilingual kids, trilingual kids, kids that are looking for a language of their own. A Russian child sent to study in a 50.000 francs-a-year internat in an old castle in the middle of the mountains. An African child left alone in an airport brought to a foyer with orphans. The son of an American employee moves with his family every six months to a next town on the other side of the globe, where the system of The International School allows him to catch up with classmates he has never met before. Between the head-offices of Philip Morris, Nestlé and Tetra Рас in Lausanne, there is an international community, where 12 yearolds have two or three passports, credit cards and msn-messengers, oversea-friends and diplomatic vocabulary. They know how to book a flight on Internet to meet grandma on eastern-holiday in New York, but they hardly go to the centre of Lausanne. In the centre of Lausanne they might meet children without passports. Children whose parents are in prison or for psychological reasons unable to grow up their kids at home. Children who live in foyers been taken care of by educators. In words of the International School's director; ” There is a new generation of global nomads or third culture kids who don't consider themselves as part of a particular culture because they have their own culture". The rich international kids and the foreign kids that arrive in Switzerland coming from the third world without passport have something in common: they live in small communities, temporary far away from their parents or they original countries. Simulating families in small groups. Which is the home or the patria of these kids? How many days do they need to forget friends who move away and make new friends? How many of them will become top-managers of international companies, ambassadors, the new leaders of the World, the new refugees, the new homeless? In a workshop in July 2007 international children from 7to 13 years old are going to work with Lola Arias and Stefan Kaegi on the idea of such a "third culture" inventing answers like fictions. First characters and texts will be developed. Minifictions or short plays, based in a fantastic or surreal view of their own biographies. The children might immitate their parents or invent new ones... in autumn 2007 six to ten of these children have been chosen to work on the project on a longer term. In April 2008 they started rehearsing. In 2008/2009 they will go on tour. A first idea for the set design includes some dozens of air transport boxes to be used as minisets of transportable houses, forests, rooms, offices. Sometimes piled up to form the different layers of a city or a puppet house. Sometimes the boxes stay out alone in transit. The children will be the main protagonists of a global future they fancy from a childish point of view. THE PROTAGONISTS Since last summer, Lola Arias and Stefan Kaegi have been working with about twenty pluricultural children. These children started out by recounting their biographies to snails, forming a rock group and developing their visions of the future: floating cities, colonised planets or the disappearance of

AIRPORT KIDS