About Education through Theater and Cultural Resistance

AbstractCan the theatre be an educational tool? Can the theatre be seen as a fundamental learning tool, as well as a cultural resistance one? Can we talk about cultural diversity and multilinguism interpreting the theatrical phenomenon? The present paper aims to positively answer these questions, shedding a different type of light on the Theatre of the Absurd in the third millennium, bringing front stage a case study: Samuel Beckett's short play Catastrophe. First written in French in 1982, Catastrophe is a real manifesto of cultural resistance. The play is dedicated to Vaclav Havel, writer, poet, essayist and playwright, who was – at the time – jailed by the Check communist regime. The International Association for the Defence of Artists (AIDA) commissioned Beckett to write a play about this aberrant abuse, for the Theatre Festival in Avignon. Catastrophe can be seen as an allegory depicting totalitarianism and the constant struggle against it, a true lesson of liberty and class solidarity. The European spirit and identity are developed through cultural and intellectual opening towards esthetical values of this identity areal. The way in which we build this spirit and this identity within the new generation, teaching modern languages for special and academic purposes, must be filled with creativity and wit. Citizens of a cosmopolitan world, more and more complex each day, bombarded with all kinds of messages and manipulations, these youngsters pertaining to the virtual communication generation are more and more rooted in a reality which they build studying, questioning, digesting information, searching and thinking with no boundaries to their thoughts, looking for a world that doesn’t hold high - in clear conscience - uprooted values