Acting Together II: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict

Building Just and Inclusive Communities

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

• Publisher: New Village Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781613320006
• eBook ISBN: 9781613320075
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

Acting Together, Volume ll, continues from where the first volume ends documenting exemplary peacebuilding performances in regions marked by social exclusion structural violence and dislocation. 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 Gutierrez 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.

SECTION I

Changing the World as We Know It

Performance in Contexts of Structural Violence, Social Exclusion, and Dislocation

Introduction to Section I

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

In situations characterized by structural violence, exclusion, and social injustice, building peace involves more than ending violent conflict; it requires creating settings and frameworks where differences can be productively engaged and negotiated, justice can be pursued, and more equitable relationships can be cultivated. Transforming conflict in these settings usually involves working for greater social and economic justice by addressing oppressive dynamics, amplifying the voices of those in less powerful groups, and building coalitions for change. It includes nurturing relationships of respect, understanding, and trust across differences in culture, ethnicity, gender, age, economic class, sexuality, and national identity. In addition to transforming relationships, laws and policies must be changed so that a society’s institutions and cultural symbols are inclusive and supportive of the development of all groups.

Those who do this work confront many challenges. Unaddressed legacies—of slavery, oppression, misogyny, and geographic dislocation—create not only structural inequities but also socio-psychological barriers of shame, guilt, resentment, and mistrust. In addition, contemporary imbalances of power can insinuate themselves into even the best-intentioned efforts at change, undermining their effectiveness.

While each performance in this volume must be understood in its distinct cultural and political milieu, taken as a group the case studies in this section highlight the extent to which the global order, with its economic inequities and its movement toward cultural homogenization, as well as its opportunities for exchange and connectivity, create a shared context at another level. For instance, in a world in which wars and geopolitical and economic forces generate massive migrations of people, conflicts about resources and culture often emerge between refugees and immigrants, on the one hand, and longstanding members of their new communities on the other.

The case studies in this section address these questions and dilemmas, as they are played out in performances and in societies grappling with issues of structural violence, including economic and social inequalities, poverty, gender-based violence, homophobia, and age discrimination. The curators of these case studies are performers and directors, researchers and evaluators, poets, coexistence practitioners, facilitators, social activists, and university educators. Some are members of the communities where they work; others are outsiders to those communities. In the chapters that follow, you will hear voices of young people, refugees, women, and men struggling with poverty, dislocation, and exclusion, and seeking to build stronger communities within Ghana and South Africa, the Netherlands, Afghanistan, Australia, Angola, New Zealand, and the United States, as well as across the divides of geography, nation, and socio-economic conditions.

The range of performance techniques and forms in these chapters is the widest of all the sections of this anthology, with artists relying on aesthetic forms from community-based performances to traditional theatre to new aesthetic movements such as hip-hop, all meaningfully addressing conflict related to entrenched structural violence and exclusion.

Eugene van Erven and Kate Gardner are champions of community theatre, based respectively in the Netherlands and New York. Their chapter, “Performing Cross-Cultural Conversations: Creating New Kinships through Community Theatre,” explores transformative bridges built of stories and creative performance, spanning cultural and global divides. Van Erven describes a project in The Hague culminating in a performance called In the Name of the Fathers, which respectfully and sensitively addresses taboo topics, while building relationships across differences in class, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, religion, language, and generation. Drawing on their own stories, immigrant men from Muslim countries and native Dutch working-class men created a performance exploring the roles that fathers have played, and could play, in dealing with physical and structural violence in their lives and in their families and communities. Later in the chapter, Gardner discusses the innovative BrooKenya! project, a multicultural soap opera combining new technologies, soap opera forms, and intercontinental collaborative script development within and between multiethnic communities in Brooklyn, New York, and Kisumu, Kenya. While creating new kinds of relationships through new technologies, participants in BrooKenya! explored issues relevant to their communities, such as gender dynamics, HIV/AIDS, and questions of tolerance in the face of diversity.

In “Youth Leading Youth: Hip Hop and Hiplife Theatre in Ghana and South Africa,” Daniel Banks explores Hip Hop Theatre’s potential as a resource for young people trying to resist oppression and marginalization, in part through the creation of shared identities. The peaceful roots of grassroots Hip Hop culture, often obscured by the violent and misogynist lyrics of commercial Rap music, are evidenced by a range of forms and conventions of performance that facilitate more equitable interactions. Hip Hop ciphers, an impromptu circle of performers, also cultivate capacities for paradoxical curiosity—generating greater acceptance for diverse perspectives. These performances also serve to reduce epistemic violence, by incorporating aspects of traditional dance, music, and ritual that had been marginalized through colonization and globalization. “Youth Leading Youth” sheds light on the possibilities of projects that support artists to engage with communities for only short periods of time.

“Change the World as We Know It: Peace, Youth, and Performance in Australia,” written by Mary Ann Hunter, discusses arts-based youth initiatives which draw on the experiences of Australian young people to create performances designed to transform conflict and build relationships across cultural, gender, and generational differences. Some of these performances are characterized by the creation of intercultural harmony, but others provoke social friction, making visible the latent conflicts experienced by many marginalized youth. In Contact Inc.’s Peace Initiative, young Australians from many different cultural backgrounds created a widely acclaimed performance articulating their own views of peace, culture, conflict, and honor. In another public performance in Brisbane, young women in the Sk8 Grrl Space project created a multimedia skateboarding performance to bring to light the sexism that had constrained their access to a local park and undermined the agency of young women in the community. Their performance simultaneously reclaimed the space and made the intensity of their opposition apparent to all.

Addressing structural violence in the United States and Afghanistan, Jo Salas, cofounder of Playback Theatre, explores the ways in which participant performance projects transform marginalized people and narratives. Playback Theatre is designed to create respectful spaces in which audience members share their own stories and witness them enacted on the spot. In the United States, the No More Bullying! program uses Playback Theatre to transmit information and build empathy and empowerment, seeking to engage students’ fullest selves in dealing with the complexities and challenges they meet in relating with their peers. Salas illuminates the principles of Playback Theatre with examples drawn from projects in several places including Angola, New Zealand, and Sri Lankan diaspora communities in the United States. She focuses in depth on the work of Hjalmar-Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn, a theatre director and transitional justice worker in Afghanistan. Joffre-Eichhorn’s work seeks to create ways for victims of violence to restore connectivity and identify more fully as participants in the wider community. Joffre-Eichhorn and other Playback Theatre practitioners grapple with a range of dilemmas, including balancing the need to address the pain suffered by participants against the ethical principle of avoiding re-traumatization.

John O’Neal analyzes the role of theatre in addressing racism in the United States in “Do You Smell Something Stinky?” One of the founders of the civil-rights era Free Southern Theater (FST), O’Neal is also the founder of Junebug Productions, a contemporary theatre company based on the philosophy that the conditions and circumstances hindering Black people in the United States are the same as those that limit oppressed people the world over. O’Neal describes his pioneering work with story circles, both in gathering material for performances and as a rich and empathetic way of exploring the human condition. His extensive work consistently explores the connections between art and social change; he argues that artistic integrity and critical engagement with social issues are both necessary factors in creating art that makes a difference. O’Neal also addresses the delicate challenge of transforming conflict within and among performers themselves as they deal with many forms of racism and other oppressive dynamics.

These chapters address many dilemmas in creating theatre performances with and for people from different backgrounds, people who have experienced marginalization and oppression. They grapple with a number of complexities. How can safe space be created in ways that respect differences and engage commonalities? How can collective identities be formed that also respect each person’s uniqueness within his or her group? How can works be effected without further traumatizing participants? How can we confront unsettling questions/issues and yet maintain hope? In conflicts with contested histories, how can these narratives be voiced without inducing violence among the participants or audience members? In marginalized communities, how can the sustainability of performance projects be maintained or enhanced? How do performances avoid strengthening an “us against them” binary that exacerbates existing tensions? How do cooperative endeavors challenge, rather than preserve, inequities in power? How can restorative and economic justice be addressed while improving relationships between conflicting groups?

These case studies also demonstrate the strengths of the many common threads related to building bridges of shared understanding and bonds of unity to reaching across regional, national, ethnic, or cultural boundaries. Artists and performances make connections between art, communities, and the issues they are facing, engaging emotions, rationality, and paradox. Through creating avenues of self-expression, performance restores agency to people who have been stripped of their full participation in the larger community, empowering them to engage more fully with the complexities of structural violence.

These aesthetic performances go beyond the limitations of language, drawing on physicality, spirituality, and emotionality, creating spaces for developing trust among people who might not otherwise trust each other. Well-crafted performances are capable of containing strong emotions, opinions, and statements as public history is reconstructed in the creative time/space of performance, allowing both shared and divergent narratives to be expressed.

As evidenced in these case studies, performance can be both purposeful in addressing violence and reflective of refined aesthetic qualities. Indeed, conflict transformation requires both qualities of artfulness and socio-political effectiveness. Changes created in the transformative space of representation also extend beyond performances, building capacities for addressing other conflicts people face; facilitating new types of relationships across the boundaries of social conflict, inequality, and cultural difference; and enhancing capacities for addressing injustice, inequity, and exclusion.

Culmination of a Brandeis class in The Arts of Building Peace, where Kate Gardner led undergraduate and graduate students in exploring the practical and theoretical principles underlying the BrooKenya! Project. Photo by Fernanda Senatori, Courtesy of Community Theatre Internationale

1

Performing Cross-Cultural Conversations

Creating New Kinships through Community Theatre

Eugene van Erven¹ and Kate Gardner²

Let us first introduce ourselves: Eugene van Erven, research director of the Commun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword: The Rebellion of the Masks
• Preface: Speak to the Past and It Will Heal Thee
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Section I: Changing the World as We Know It: Performance in Contexts of Structural Violence, Social Exclusion, and Dislocation
• Section II: Reflections and Recommendations
• Section III: Resources
• Afterword: Reflecting on the Intersection of Art and Peacebuilding
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Credits
• Index