My work as a community artist has started with groups like The Offensive Generosity and tangaProject, one of the first community arts projects in Romania, and continued with a Cross Sectoral and Community Arts MA at Goldsmiths University of London, 2009.
Since then, I have worked with groups in Bucharest, Vaslui, London, Timisoara focusing on collaborative work, and looking for creative ways of exploring themes like civic responsibility, education, homelessness and potential homelessness, gentrification and eviction, power dynamics within traditional family structures, LGBTQI+ representation.
During these projects, I have developed various methodologies of engaging with people in creative processes combining writing, storytelling, playwriting, visual representations, Forum Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed - with the aim of empowering the participants to represent themselves and their stories through artistic practices.
Dialogue as a principle of creating change has been at the core of my practice- and the dynamics of dialogue between people, engaged in a process to change the world through naming and renaming it, has been a strong principle that I always aimed to incorporate in my vision - following the work that has fundamentally shaped my way of understanding - that of Paolo Freire and his “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”.
In the last 10 years, I have facilitated the production of 20 new plays and 7 short films written and performed by people with no artistic background - working with stories of auto-fiction and autobiography, and devising methods for people from non-professional backgrounds, who wrote and performed theatre pieces and short films inspired by their life stories.
In my work, I’m always aiming to explore/design methodologies applied to the specifics of the communities I engage with. My practice sits at the intersection of performance, storytelling and creative writing, working between various mediums, with a strong community engagement at the core.
“Rahovanonstop”- a tangaProject 25-hour long theatrical marathon, in which directors, playwrights, actors and set designers, organized in five teams, joined their powers to write, stage and present five short performances, based on the real stories of the inhabitants of the Rahova-Uranus area.
2007- “Build your community”- an “The Offensive of Generosity” project for cultural representation and social change, following as main directions: creativity, documentary and social involvement. This project aims to make people from marginalized communities or communities with problems from Bucharest aware about their right to representation and active in any level of the creative process of writing and building a stage performance. The project deals with the problem of evacuation, homelessness and potential homelessness, and lack of education.
Help to get Education
2008- “The evacuation of the House of Students in Timisoara”(2008) is an active art project of social change and responsabilization, dealing with the problem of government-funded spaces for independent artists. The project was produced by the National Theatre from Timisoara&“The Offensive of Generosity”, and its results were presented in a performance played in the the Romanian Playwrighting National Festival in Timisoara, on October 12.
2009- “Art of being. Images of self”- a collaborative-arts project developed in Centrepoint Camberwell Foyer, one of the biggest hostels for young homeless people in SE London. The project was based on one-to-one documentation and research and aimed to explore together with the participants the notions of identity and images of self. The result of the project was a one-week portraits exhibition in the Camberwell Foyer Lounge in September 2009.
2009- “Size me”- a collaborative performance developed together with Tiina Hallakorpi and Mark Rietema, documenting stories of eating disorders and body representation in mainstream consumerist media narratives; staged at the Tea Leaf Gallery and part of the in the Brockley Max Festival, London
2010- “13 oameni, o poveste din Vaslui”- a collaborative performance developed together with highschool students from vaslui- exploring themes of coming of age, economic migration, childhood abuse and domestic violence - produced as part of the project "Write Yourself" and performed at Casa de Cultura Vaslui, Romania
2015- “Dupa 18”, devised theatre piece documenting coming of age stories in groups of young people, and their decisions regarding their future in the context of economic precarity of the city they live in - – performed in Baia Mare and Vaslui, and produced in partnership with Consiliul Judetean Baia Mare and Consiliuil Judentean Vaslui
2016- “In Grivita”- a site specific theatre performance documenting stories of visibility/invisibility, economic precarity and life in a Bucharest neghbourhood on the verge of gentrification - and working with themes of representation, neghbourhood and community - Bucharest, Romania
Research
Vera has been documenting the Romanian migrants community in the Uk since 2009- when she herself starts living the EE Migrant come-and-go dynamics. In 2020 together with Sorin Poama, she writes and performs the autobiographical play "Ich Clown" (about two Romanians who work as street clowns on the streets of Europe), and in 2011 she attends, together with Sorin Poama, the "Attic Arts Residency", at the RCI London - where they develop the project "Busk for your life!"- documenrfting Romanian buskers who work on South Bank and Covent Garden. In 2012, she writes and performs the autobiographical play "you shine.you are beautiful", which tells the story of a young Romanian theatre director who works on South Bank as a Peter Pan statue - the play is awarded with the Irish Embassy Award for an Emerging Playwright in 2012. In 2020, Vera has won an ACE grant for an R&D with the play “This kind of air”, that tells the stories of 3 Romanian Migrant women in London. The play has been developed from a short play that had won the Pint Sized plays award for playwrights, and was performed at the Bunker Theatre, in London, in 2019. The team of director Nastazja Domaradzka, writer Vera Ion and producer Miska Groidlova has since founded the company Beasts from the East, that aims to represent Migrant stories in the UK.
