This paper presents an ethnographic research study conducted during a theatre education project financed by the Goethe Institute, Budapest. The project was organized by the Krétakör Theatre (an alternative theatre in Budapest), and involved three different groups of young people: high school students in Berlin, in Budapest and in Miskolc (a city in Northern Hungary). The students in Berlin worked with the Theater an der Parkaue, and prepared a satirical performance about political parties. The students in Budapest was engaged in an artistic project about homeless people, and the students in Miskolc participated in a weekly theatre education course that focused on some social problems in their city. This latter group was composed by marginalized young people who have never participated in any similar extra-curricular educational activities before. The project started in August 2014, and finished in December 2014 with a meeting of the three groups in Miskolc and a closing international conference where professionals, educators and students participated as equal partners discussing together on the different educational and social issues raised during the project. 

The author of this paper was one of the educational leaders of the Miskolc group, and worked in the organizing committee of the conference. The ethnographic research focused on the work in the Miskolc group and the closing meeting and conference always from the perspective of the same group. The research objective was to discover:  

- how the marginalized students was inititiated to language and performance of social awareness and activism through performances and theatre education; 

- to what extent the objective of the project to facilitate their empowerment and critical consciousness conscientização (Freire, 1970/2000) was successful; what other side objectives were reached; 

- what pedagogical methodology worked and did not work during the process; 

- and what kind of power relations and socio-economic contextual factors influenced the project and  in particular the development of the students. 

The interpretive framework of the study draws upon Schechner's performance theory (1985), Turner's (1995) antropological theory (performance, initiation, liminality); and Freire's (2000) and Boal's (1993) critical pedagogy. The paper examins how performance and conscientização is intertwined in a theatre education project interpreted as an initiation process and deeply embedded in a certain social context. 

Although the paper focuses on the processes and perspecives of the students group in Miskolc, their performance and experience are related to the whole project, and the relation with the students from Budapest and from Berlin has an important part in the narrative of the study, similarly to the international closing conference. So the paper has a strong European perspective, and the contextual (social, economic and cultural) dimensions in relation to Europe will be explicitely mentioned. 

Boal, A. (1993). Theatre of the Oppressed. Theatre Communications Group. Denzin, N. K. (2003). Performance Ethnography, SAGE. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Schechner, R. (1985). Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press Turner, V. (1995). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Edison, NJ: Aldine Transaction.