The theater has become a powerful vehicle of inclusion for children and young people with autismthe soul of an artistic project in MedellinColombia, which paints the stage with colors with a work that demands respect for diversity and invites us to fight against exclusion.
“Theatre is for everyone”told EFE Robinson Bedoya, the director of actors of the Integral Foundation, an entity that watches over the well-being of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and who presented a new performance on Sunday by fix the rainbowa work to talk about human colors and the search for balance.
About twenty autistic actors tell the story of the Cromas sorcerer and get involved, between music and humor, in the desperate mission of repairing the rainbow after discovering that the spectrum is full of breaks and imperfections.
Inclusive and inspiring theater
This theater project was born a couple of decades ago and has staged 24 shows, within a process that has managed to consolidate a theater group that is gaining “a lot of space” in the city, according to the director of the foundation, Myriam Luz Gómez, who underlined it fix the rainbowwritten by the Cuban singer-songwriter Rita del Prado, will be presented as part of the dynamic audience training program of the Medellín mayor’s office.
Along the way they have found that people with TORCH they have a special talent, interest and motivation for cultural issues and for verifying that artistic presentations help them develop social skills.
“They love to put themselves in other people’s roles and they do it very well,” Gómez told EFE. This has allowed them to grow, make friends with their peers and have well-being, since they are people with “few opportunities” to be in participatory environments.
“They feel recognized and admired. For many, theater has become part of their lives and their work project,” said the director, adding that the latest production featured autistic actors of varying levels of complexity, three members of the musical group Cantoalegre and a professional actress, with the intention of “showing the world that we can all interact”.
This year they have decided not to focus their work on autism, but rather on giving a message to humanity about respect, diversity and inclusion: “We must fix ourselves, like the rainbow.” And he puts his reflections on the table or on the specter guarded by the sorcerer Cromas from his laboratory with a story in which a gardener is expelled because he is old, a lighting designer because he is in love with another man, and a restaurateur because he is black.
“The idea of the work is to represent what they live inside and externalize it through fantastic characters, thus sensitizing the community,” noted Gómez.
Connect with society
One such character is the digital clock, brought to life by 12-year-old Mateo Montoya, five of whom are linked to the theater group Fundación Integrar, which has performed plays with messages to combat bullying.
For him, as he told EFE, the most fun thing “was being behind the scenes, without microphones and being able to talk with my colleagues”, but once he gets on stage he enjoys intensely “acting in public and seeing so many people who applaud me.”
The Training Program for a Dynamic Audience, which this year has included the opera in its programming Fix the rainbowis aimed at the lower strata of Medellín with the aim of increasing citizens’ interaction with artistic contents and promoting spaces with a “sensitive” and “experiential” component of art.
“Through theatrical and artistic strategies, they generate processes with children with autism to value both their life and their experience, connecting them with society and also allowing them to dream in many spaces,” he told EFE. City Culture of Medellín, Álvaro Narváez.
From a cable from the EFE Agency
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Source: Clarin
