The “Shaman Project” has reached its thirteenth year of research and development within the Scuola Sperimentale dell’Attore, and for the past eight years the Province of Pordenone has been publishing the documentation of this research into the field of intercultural experience, into the values of difference, and into “Theatre in the Social Field”. This provides a series that is much sought after and distributed all over Italy, and includes, other than this present one, seven earlier volumes, for the years 1999-2005, and three didactic videos, which support and accompany the editions of 2000 and 2002 respectively. The long and enriching collaboration with a number of Italian universities, primary schools and junior and senior secondary schools, libraries and centres for documentation, youth centres and cultural associations, has brought forth the most suitable instrument  to provide “specialist information”, to facilitate its dissemination and render it accessible to everyone, in particular to young people. The publications, which are easy flowing and rich in illustration, are presented as an easily accessed dossier. They refer to all of the various research lines of the “Shaman Project”, provide numerous recollections, and bring together an accurate bibliography for further research. The bilingual edition, in Italian and English, represents a response to requests that have been arriving for some years now from abroad, from various agencies involved in similar professional interests and their documentation. Finally, in conjunction with the present volume there is issued by the Province of Pordenone a new audio-visual resource in DVD, with artistic and teaching material that has been selected from different years and different sessions of the “Shaman Project”, with the intention of making available, for dissemination and study, an exemplary experience that is vital and deeply incisive to the social fabric.

The “Shaman Project”, already widely recognised as a long-term experiment in theatrical and communicative experiences in the field of physical and mental disability, has shown itself to be a wider ranging project. Certainly, the instruments that have been taken up by the project are contextualised within theatre, music, dance, and figurative arts and crafts, but the aims that it comprehends are open to the most obscure cultural and behavioural resources of society, even those which, normally, it is more difficult to think about and pursue. The “Shaman Project”, has, over the years, taken an interest in different kinds of  research and experimentation: in the training of people involved in the fields of theatre and social work, for example, in bringing up to date teachers involved in curricula studies, and in communication disciplines and body languages, in demonstrations in schools and lessons for children and young people of all ages, from primary schools to universities, in the reactivating of networks relating to the third age, in retirement homes, in entities of professional and voluntary assistance, and in contact with immigrant communities in our country. Not least, in importance and continuity, is the “sense  of  journey” that the “Shaman Project” continually proposes, thanks, no doubt, to the incursions by the team from the Scuola Sperimentale dell’Attore into the original cultures of distant countries, but thanks above all to continual proposal of “movement” of minds that the project has been able to promote: movement at the level of resources and of expectations, for actors  and for the public involved as well, for those professionally engaged in this work along with those who have recently become enthusiastics and curious, those whom the numerous integrated initiatives manage to attract from time to time, in a sort of vision of “ecology of human relations”.

(For further information take advantage of the history of "The Shaman Project": see the preceding volumes of 1999-2000-2001-2002-2003-2004-2005)

INDEX OF THE VOLUME