Our Story
In 2013 Seven on Tour took SEVEN on a Balkan tour in collaboration with local host organizations and individuals. The play was very well received, however, it raised questions about the lack of stories of women from the Western Balkans as part of the production, or as part of any theatrical production.
Therefore, the experience of working on the international documentary theater project ‘Seven’, has inspired ‘Six Persons Singular: documentary theater and women’s perspectives in the Western Balkans’, as a response to the explicit need for (a) mainstreaming WB women’s rights, and (b) a regional artistic collaborative project focusing on women from the region only.
The innovation of Six Persons Singular project is the protagonists – feminists from WB and thus the focus of the project will be grounded along the experiences of women in the WB countries, taking into account also these women’s experiences during ex-Yugoslavia wars, as the violent and conservative politics further eroded women’s perspective. The play will be written, published and produced in Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, Albanian and Macedonian languages, and it will be developed by a creative production team consisting of people from all WB countries participating in the project.
As such, this will be a unique theatrical and artistic project focused on women’s rights in the WB, with such a strong regional component. The play will tour all over the countries of the WB, as later, beyond WB borders.
Six Persons Singular was granted continued Creative Force funding to complete and continue the project, which was initiated in 2014 and is produced jointly by Hedda Produktion, Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Serbia and Alter Habitus in Kosovo.
The Creative Force programme is part of the Swedish Institute and provides funding for collaborative initiatives involving organisations in Sweden and in the regions specified below. Projects should aim to promote human rights, transparency and democracy with the aid of initiatives that use either culture or the media as a method for achieving change.
Find more information about Creative Force here.
SEVEN & SEVEN ON TOUR
SEVEN is a documentasy play based on interviews with seven women's rights activists; Hafsat Abiola, Nigeria, Farida Azizi, Afghanistan, Anabella de Leon, Guatemala, Marina Pisklakova-Parker, Russia, Mukhtar Mai, Pakistan, Inez McCormack, Northern Ireland and Mu Sochua, Cambodia.
The play was written in 2007 by playwrights Paula Cizmar, Catherine Filloux, Gail Kriegel, Carol K. Mack, Ruth Margraff, Anna Deavere-Smith and Susan Yankowitz with the support of Vital Voices Global Partnership.
Through the project Seven on Tour, producer Hedda Krausz Sjögren has developed a model where local partner NGO’s contextualize the issues described in the play [Seven] and cast ensembles of key persons to evoke social change.
Since 2008 Seven on Tour has cooperated with over 100 NGO’s in 28 countries to empower women, fight gender based violence and put women’s rights issues higher on the political and social agenda.
To this day over 600 people, men and women, including politicians, generals, activists, athletes, journalists and survivors have been cast in the roles of the women’s rights activists portrayed in the play.
For more information visit Seven on Tours website.