“Helix for Masa Theatre – what is it and why should you care? (Alina Apostu)

All the posts in this “Logbook” are testimonies of activities that are part of an initiative, frankly, a bit crazy! Crazy in the best sense – crazy like a kid who makes a spaceship out of an orange with scientists discovering new planets where beings live who daydream, cook from community gardens, and slow their pace to rejoice when they hear a woodpecker in the neighborhood or see a cat lazing lazily in the sun.

Now that activities have picked up at Masca – with landscape workshops, street art, and the neighborhood festival, I’d like to talk a bit about what this “Helix for Masca Theatre” is all about and why it’s important not to skip it too quickly. 

“Helix” is a term in the literature that proposes a model of innovation and knowledge loop that encompasses 5 systems: business/industry, public administration, education/research, civil community, and environment.

This term was central to the original program, the Urboteca 2024 Fellowship , in which the “Helix for Masca Theatre” project took shape through a collaboration between the theatre team and the fellowship’s team of anthropologists, artists, and architects/urban planners. The goal of the program was to function as an interdisciplinary laboratory to define and address issues related to sustainability and community resilience and to formulate potential solutions with multi-stakeholder contributions.  

The Fellowship and the Helix for Masca Theatre project recognize that the problems we face as a society are far too complex to be tackled from a single perspective. Masca is taking the Helix model in order to become the first green theater in Romania and to support and strengthen the proximity community, Masca takes the Helix model to bring together actors who have the power and interest to act. 

In practice, this meant a series of conversations with local government representatives, environmental NGOs, business people and residents of the neighborhood and Bucharest. Through these conversations, several themes of importance to these actors emerged – the need for clear communication, to be heard by local government, belonging, the desire to get involved, but also the lack of platforms to facilitate these things in a clear way and the lack of people’s habit of regularly getting involved in community initiatives.
Masca has taken the first step through a series of workshops: set recycling (which we talked about here), landscaping (called Nature Unmasked) and street art. The video below gives you a brief impression of how the workshops were run. Results and new open opportunities are on your doorstep!

We hope to inspire you, to show you that your needs and desires are shared, and that you, too, share this Helix model.

See you at the festival! 

See you soon,

Alina