Acting Together I: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict

Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence

Cynthia Cohen, Roberto Gutiérrez Varea, Polly O. Walker

• Publisher: New Village Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781613320068
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict is a two-volume work describing peacebuilding performances in regions beset by violence and internal conflicts. Volume I, Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence, emphasizes the role theatre and ritual play both in the midst and in the aftermath of direct violence, while Volume II, Building Just and Inclusive Communities, focuses on the transformative power of performance in regions fractured by "subtler" forms of structural violence and social exclusion.Volume I: Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence focuses on the role theatre and ritual play both in the midst and in the aftermath of violence. The performances highlighted in this volume nourish and restore capacities for expression, communication, and transformative action, and creatively support communities in grappling with conflicting moral imperatives surrounding questions of justice, memory, resistance, and identity. The individual chapters, written by scholars, conflict resolution practitioners, and artists who work directly with the communities involved, offer vivid firsthand accounts and analyses of traditional and nontraditional performances in Serbia, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Israel, Argentina, Peru, India, Cambodia, Australia, and the United States.Complemented by a website of related materials, a documentary film, Acting Together on the World Stage, that features clips and interviews with the curators and artists, and a toolkit, or "Tools for Continuing the Conversation," that is included with the documentary as a second disc, this book will inform and inspire socially engaged artists, cultural workers, peacebuilding scholars and practitioners, human rights activists, students of peace and justice studies, and whoever wishes to better understand conflict and the power of art to bring about social change.The Acting Together project is born of a collaboration between Theatre Without Borders and the Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts at the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University. The two volumes are edited by Cynthia E. Cohen, director of the aforementioned program and a leading figure in creative approaches to coexistence and reconciliation; Roberto Guti_rrez Varea, an award-winning director and associate professor at the University of San Francisco; and Polly O. Walker, director of Partners in Peace, an NGO based in Brisbane, Australia..

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SECTION ONE

Singing in the Dark Times

Peacebuilding Performance in the Midst of Direct Violence

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Introduction to Section One

Cynthia E. Cohen, Roberto Gutiérrez Varea, and Polly O. Walker

Transforming conflict in situations of sustained, direct, and systematic violence poses enormous challenges. Violent assaults of all kinds undermine agency by ripping apart the fabric of community life and destabilizing the very networks, cultural symbols, and institutions that communities otherwise could have called on for support. Witnessing and surviving violence give rise to powerful feelings of rage, hatred, and fear: feelings that undermine capacities for creative thinking and action. Truth itself is an early victim of war, as governments, paramilitaries, and other factions engage in deception and denial. Communities on opposite sides of the conflict come to perceive each other in dehumanized ways; violence both thrives on and contributes to this reciprocal demonization.

Under such circumstances, how can creativity be marshaled and agency be restored? How can suppressed communities resist assaults on their human and cultural rights without becoming trapped in patterns of oppositionalism, victimhood, and violence? How can citizens of communities and nations perpetrating crimes be encouraged to reach beneath defensive structures, acknowledge complicity, and take action to transform the dynamics of violence? Is it inevitable that artist-peacebuilders living inside a conflict region will create productions that to some degree reproduce the conflict dynamics? How can communities living in the midst of violent conflict imagine and begin to construct a better future?

These questions will be explored in this section through case studies drawn from Palestine, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Serbia, and Israel. These examples illustrate how artists and ritual leaders seek to engage communities in forms of nonviolent resistance to both their own subjugation and the abuses of military power undertaken in their names. Through theatre and other traditional or contemporary participatory practices—such as rituals, storytelling, or performative activism—these artists find resources to acknowledge truths that have been denied, and create spaces where suppressed narratives can be expressed and people can make their voices heard.

The performances documented here illustrate that artists’ abilities to transform consciousness and mobilize people are not lost on the perpetrators of violence, who realize the threat that peacebuilding artists represent. In fact, artists, and in some instances those with whom they work, place themselves at risk of arrest and violent attacks, whether by repressive governments or by the militant factions that wish to prevent overtures to “the other side.” Artists working for justice and peace have been killed or forced into exile on many occasions.

The examples highlighted in this section reveal a range of strategies for confronting or working around these dangers, such as the use of coded symbols or the staging of plays set in distant times and places, where contemporary issues can be explored more safely and indirectly. The success of these strategies is directly related to the artists’ understanding of the oppressive circumstances under which they work.

An immediate result of the artists’ skillful risk-taking is a powerful bond with and within their communities. Their ability to develop spaces of trust contributes to sustaining relationships in communities fragmented by violence, and nurtures social values that have been buried or repressed.

The chapters in “Singing in the Dark Times” were written by a playwright, a poet and performance artist, a theatre director, a youth development worker, and two coexistence workers. “Theatre as a Way of Creating Sense,” by Dijana Milošević, focuses on DAH Teatar, a theatre company she cofounded and directs, and its performances during the years of war that accompanied the splitting apart of the former Yugoslavia. This work stands out as an example of artists resisting the government’s intimidations, and expressing truths (in this case about crimes against humanity) that are simultaneously known and denied. DAH reaches diverse sectors of the Serbian population, in part through collaborations with activist groups such as Women in Black, as well as through performances in buses, plazas, and other public spaces. In addition, DAH collaborates with artists from Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and international colleagues around the world. Drawing on the experiences of DAH, the chapter asserts that the aesthetic intensity of performance and the disciplined focus of the actors have the power to stand up to and, at least in the moment, neutralize the threat of military presence.

Uganda is a country reeling from the legacies of colonialism and the shortcomings of its own democracy. “Theatre, War, and Peace in Uganda,” written by Charles Mulekwa, a playwright and director long affiliated with the National Theatre, describes how Ugandan artists subverted colonial cultural impositions by creating syncretic forms that resonated powerfully with Ugandan audiences. Mulekwa focuses on two plays that address directly the violence that has plagued Uganda in recent decades. Thirty Years of Bananas, by Alex Mukulu, simultaneously holds political leaders accountable and subtly chastises ordinary Ugandans for their complacency. Forged in Fire, by Sam Okello, Laura Edmonson, and Robert Ajwang’, brings to life for an international audience the effects of war on people—particularly children—in Northern Uganda, in hopes that people around the world will take action to put an end to the violence.¹

Madhawa Palihapitiya, a coexistence expert who grew up attending theatrical productions in Sri Lanka, wrote “The Created Space: Peacebuilding and Performance in Sri Lanka.” This chapter documents performances directed by the noted Sinhalese filmmaker and theatre artist Dharmasiri Bandaranayake, many of which highlight commonalities in Tamil and Sinhalese cultural heritages and seek to elicit empathy for the suffering on both sides. It also features the work of the influential Tamil theatre activist Dr. Kandasamy Sithamparanathan and his Theatre Action Group, which has constructed rituals and performances to help Tamil victims of war recover from trauma. In light of the brutal violence with which the most recent phase of the civil war ended, Palihapitiya asks whether artists, as respected leaders in their communities, could have done more to help people on opposite sides of the conflict understand each other and craft a less destructive way to address the Sri Lankan ethnic and political divides.

In Palestine, theatre artists living and working under conditions of occupation engage communities in a range of performances that embody creative, nonviolent resistance and build resilience in the face of ongoing assaults on human rights and security. In “Theatre, Resistance, and Peacebuilding in Palestine” Abeer Musleh, a Palestinian youth development scholar/practitioner and musician, documents the work of two theatre directors: Iman Aoun, director of Ashtar Theatre in Ramallah, and Abdelfattah Abusrour, director of Alrowwad Youth Theatre in the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. While these two examples illustrate somewhat different approaches—a youth theatre based in a refugee camp, and an adult theatre company that engages community members throughout Palestine—both companies understand that supporting the resilience, memory, and creativity of their communities is, in itself, a powerful strategy of resistance.

Israeli theatre artists work in a context of multiple conflicts: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over control of the land, as well as conflicts within Israel between Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli citizens over issues of equality and the religious/cultural identity of the state. “Weaving Dialogues and Confronting Harsh Realities: Engendering Social Change in Israel through Performance” describes the building of relationships across the chasms of mistrust, misunderstanding, and inequities that both result from and add fuel to those conflicts. The curators, the Jewish-Israeli coexistence expert and theatre scholar Lee Perlman and the Palestinian-Israeli poet, performance artist and scholar Aida Nasrallah, weave throughout the chapter the script of their creative dialogue. They document work by the Arab-Hebrew theatre that creates platforms where complicities with crimes are acknowledged, differences as well as similarities are explored, and identities are recast to highlight common experiences. They also describe the unexpected relationships that emerge across political divides, engendered when women share performance works in intimate salons.

The chapters from Palestine, Israel, and Sri Lanka describe performances produced by artists on opposite sides of armed conflicts. Considered in relation to each other, these three chapters elucidate the particular challenges of peacebuilding performances in the context of asymmetrical violent conflicts.

Performances emanating from the communities that hold the most power in conflict regions may sometimes highlight shared humanity and common suffering, shifting attention away from injustices, power differences, and complicities in crimes. While often motivated by a desire to dispel stereotypes and cultivate reciprocal empathy, such performances can be interpreted by members of less powerful communities as premature attempts to “normalize” relationships, or to undermine the yearnings and demands of the minorities for independence or equality. Reminders of interdependence can be interpreted as efforts to subsume or even annihilate the other. On the other hand, communities with less political, military, and economic power face dilemmas and challenges about how to resist violence and oppression while nourishing creativity, imagination, and flexibility. In some instances, strong performance traditions are mobilized in new ways to preserve threatened cultural memory and nonviolently strengthen identity. But those from the more powerful communities might perceive such acts of creative resistance as provocations or propaganda. While focusing on restoring capacity within the subjugated community, such performances might, at times, contribute to the dehumanization of the other, and fail to acknowledge the role that the subjugated community may have played in perpetuating cycles of violence and revenge.²

Like any kind of social change intervention, peacebuilding performances can have, simultaneously, both positive and negative effects on the work of building peace. As coeditors, we acknowledge that each of the cases described in this section may possess shortcomings, yet in all of them we also see compelling examples of the moral imagination at work in extremely difficult circumstances. We hope that inclusion of this range of cases will foster discussion and create the conditions for people on all sides of power divides to engage reflectively with their own assumptions. We would like to amplify the suggestion made by Madhawa Palihapitiya that artists working in regions of ongoing conflict should play greater roles in interpreting for their own communities the cultural productions of the opposite side of the political divide. Such a possibility points to the need to fund these types of initiatives, to develop opportunities for artists and cultural workers in conflict regions to learn skills and frameworks from the peacebuilding field and for artists to witness each other’s work, and perhaps join forces towards common goals.

In times of war, creativity itself is not completely destroyed. It finds expression even when bombs are falling, curfews are enforced, and prison doors clang shut. It springs to life wherever people understand that they are not utter victims of their circumstances. In spite of the risks they fac...