The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) wants the EU’s human rights charter recast as an 80-minute-long epic poem, accompanied by music, dance and “multi-media elements.”
“The FRA intends to launch a negotiated procedure for the creation and implementation of an artistic concept for the presentation of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights in Poems,” reads the agency tender issued this month.
The Vienna-based agency has opened a process of contracting a poet to devise a composition based on the articles of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and hire a company of performers to accompany a presentation of the poem with music, a dance interpretation of the piece and “multimedia elements”, as well as what the tender refers to as “etc.”
The inaugural reading of the poem, whose working title is ‘The Charter in Poems’, is to take place at the bloc’s 2010 Fundamental Rights Conference on 7 December.
In a move that is likely to provoke the ire of francophones, already smarting from what they view as the galloping advance of the English language within the EU institutions and European communication with citizens at the expense of French, the tender required that poem be composed in the language of Shakespeare as English is, according to the tender document, the “literary language”.
However, “the performance itself need not be limited to just English, and indeed is encouraged to include other official languages of the EU.”
Friso Roscam-Abbing, spokesman for the FRA, told EUobserver that the poetic re-visioning of the charter aims to make the “dry, legal language of the charter, which is very inaccessible, more relevant to European citizens.”
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