Performance for opening:
Text 1.
In Search Of A Story: No Room For Romanies by Ralph Saxon "No Room For Romanies" approx 1955??? Cardiff and South Wales Times
To the average householder the gypsy woman who calls at the door with her basket of artificial flowers is a creature partly feared and largely mistrusted. She is almost certainly regarded as unclean. And she is rarely welcome.
There is an instinctive bewareness born of parental warnings in childhood, vague tales of theft and poaching, an alleged reputation for clairvoyance, some physical superiority, a stubborn door-to-door sales persistence and an ability to curse when crossed.
In the same bracket of unsympathetic mistrust are her menfolk to.
Text 2.
MILLIONAIRES JOIN FORCES TO FIGHT GYPSY CAMP Some of city's wealthiest names band together against plans. By Peter Law Wednesday June 13, 2012 South Wales Echo
Some of the nation's wealthiest and best known business people are objecting to a proposals to build a gypsy camp on Wales' most expensive street.
Sir Stanley Thomas, of the Peter Pies dynasty, and former Cardiff Blues chief executive Robert Norster are among those fighting a bid to pitch gypsy caravans near their homes.
Text 3.
The German word 'unheimlich' is obviously the opposite of 'heimlich' (homely), 'heimisch' - the opposite of what is familiar, and we are tempted to conclude that what is 'uncanny' is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.
Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny', 1919
Text 4.
In Praise of Gypsies by Arthur Symons - page 4 The Dark Race, The Wind On The Heath A Gypsy Anthology chosen by John Sampson
They are changeless; the world has no power over them. They live by rote and by faith and by tradition, which is part of their blood. They go about in our midst, untouched by us, but reading our secrets, knowing more about us than we do about ourselves, prophets, diviners, soothsayers. They are our only link with the East, with mystery, with magic. They dance and play for money; they dance in Spain, they play in Hungary; they are better dancers than the Spainards in their national dances, and they play Hungarian music better than the Hungarians. They do few things, but they do these things better than others. They create nothing; they perpetuate. They make theirs whatever is of use to them, they reject whatever their instinct forbids them to take. They reach their own ends by scheming and are the deftest flatterers on the earth......
Can the world repress this race which is so evasive and slips through its gross fingers like wind? 'Like one on a secret errand' they pass through the world. They are the symbols of our aspirations, and we do not know it. They stand for the will for freedom, for friendship with nature, for the open air, for change and sight of many lands. The Gypsy represents nature before civilisation. He is the wanderer whom all of us, who are poets or love the wind, are summed up in. He does what we dream. He is the last romance left in the world. He is the only free race....
The Gypsies are nearer to the animals than any other race known to us in Europe. They have the lawlessness, the abandonment, the natural physical grace in form and gesture, of animals. Only a stealthy, wary something in their eyes makes them human. Their speech which is their own, known to them, known to few outside them, keeps them to themselves. Their lilting voices are unacquainted with anything but the essential parts of speech for the open air needs.
Then they are part of the spectacle of the world, which they pass through like a great procession on the sound of passionate and mysterious music. They are here to-day and there to-morrow; you cannot follow them for all the leafy tracks that they leave for each other on the ground. They are distinguishable from the people of every land which they inhabit. There is something in them finer, stranger, more primitive, something baffling to all who do not understand them through a natural sympathy. The sullen mystery of Gypsy eyes, especially in the women, their way of coiling their hair, of adorning themselves with bright colours and many rings and long earrings are to be found whenever one travels east or west. Yet it is eastward that we must go to find their least touched beauty, their original splendour.
