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THE PROJECT

 

« Hopes & Memories Â» is a European cultural project for creation, transmission and cooperation, candidate in the 2012 European Culture Programme.

20 Hungarian, Czech and French artistes and partners are implicated in a vast project of transmission and creation based on the conception, realization and diffusion of a double musical work inspired by « The Mulatto/The Barrier Â» by the composer Jan Meyerowitz.

 

The Barrier is a musical work composed in 1948, in the United States, by Jan Meyerowitz, a German Jewish composer exiled in Rome in Italy in 1933, then in Belgium in 1938, and in 1939 in Provence (Southern France) and at Marseille. He departed for the States after the war, having experienced a period of institutionalized racism in Europe, period which led to the worst atrocities known to mankind. At the end of the Second World War he composed this work based on a libretto by Langstone Hughes, and which was to be performed for the first time in 1950.

The lyrical work shows evidence of the influence of jazz, and has, as its supposed geographical setting, the cotton-growing South of the States at a time when racism was part and parcel of all behaviour and marked social and spatial organization.

Having been at grips with the absurdity and destructive madness rife in Europe, Meyerowitz now used new angles to tackle the issues of segregation, mixed breeding, and social codes and their functioning, all as absurd as terrifying, that make us question the universal nature of such problems. The hierarchical organization of « races Â» and space is fortunately behind us, but forms of behaviour, political movements and isolated spots where traumatic events have left traces are still to be found. Besides, areas where there is a high concentration of poverty-stricken populations experiencing forms of discrimination are still in the news today, often in localities distant from centres and numerous forms of exchange.

At the present time, to take as a cultural and artistic object this work by Meyerowitz is to ask ourselves questions about the pertinence, notably in Central Europe, of resistance to the risk of marginality or even exclusion from the socio-economic and therefore political and cultural systems.

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