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ART AND CONFLICT Theatre Of The Oppressed: A Community Dialogue Case Study The arts are a unique and powerful tool for exploring and resolving issues arising from conflict, for promoting healing, building relationships between divided people and fostering positive individual and social change. Arts can build peace in a number of ways by providing a medium through which people can articulate experience they might not otherwise be able to adequately verbalise. Arts can provide a creative medium through which thought, feeling, experience, perception and need may be channelled. It is a uniquely powerful way of sharing one human to another and potently effective at humanising the stories of others, even the “enemy”, for us. It enables the sharing of grief, loss, frustration, a sense of injustice, a hunger for change in a creative and unifying way. According to Michael Shank (Strategic Arts Based Peace Building: Shank and Schirch 2008); “Since the peace building field requires tools that are as diverse and complicated as the human spirit, the arts emerge as a local ally. The task for peace building practitioners, is to find ways of incorporating the arts into the work of peace building and to create a space where people in conflict can express themselves, heal and reconcile themselves through the arts.” Peace building is about enabling people to understand and manage conflict and division in a manner that leads to justice, equality and inclusion for all without recourse to violence or coercion. It is about social change, transforming people’s perception of the world around them, their own identity, and their relationships with others. It is about understanding that our individual welfare rests with our common welfare. The arts can help to transform people’s worldviews, their understanding of self and other and the reality of the shared issues and needs that underlie most conflicts. When we are locked within conflict, whether interpersonal or society wide, problems seem insurmountable and all encompassing. Discomfort with conflict often stems from the painful awareness or refusal to acknowledge 1 that there are multiple truths and that right/wrong and good/bad may be fuzzy categories dependent on the eye of the beholder. Art can frame contentious issues and relationships in a way that offers new perspectives and possibilities of transformation; acting like a prism that allows us to view the world through a new lens. Rather than solving problems by negotiating the best solution, the arts can offer a new framework within which to for interpret old problems. The artistic experience maintains the powerful potential to transform people’s understanding of self in relation to other. When combined with peace building training it can equip people with the tools and understanding to live powerful, fulfilling and peaceful lives that add to all those they meet. One of the most popular art forms in peace building is drama deployed through community based theatre. Drama provides the potential to deepen understanding of community relations issues through replaying and demonstrating events and attitudes from different perspectives and highlighting possibilities of resolution and mechanisms for positive change. Drama methods have been used for many decades in a wide range of socio-political, cultural and religious contexts in more than 100 countries worldwide. In Europe, community-based theatre has become part of the regular cultural-political landscape in countries such as Austria, England, France, Germany, Norway, Spain and Portugal, while in Northern Ireland, both Forum Theatre and Playback Theatre have been employed. Background to the Project Community Dialogue has long been aware that many people fear, or are suspicious of, dialogue. Our experience of delivering our ‘Steps into Dialogue’ programme led to a Pilot Project of alternative dialogue methodologies which eventually developed into a Creative Dialogues Toolbox. This was a radical revamp of our traditional challenging dialogue process as a toolbox of innovative, exciting and accessible alternative and compatible methodologies. We have found that this new ‘toolbox’ approach renders our dialogues more immediately appealing and accessible to potential users who are suspicious of dialogue, or who lack confidence in themselves. 2 Examples of the Creative Dialogues Toolbox approach included: Creative Writing, Song Writing and Poetry Dialogues Graffiti, Murals and Symbolism and Cartoon Dialogues incorporating artwork by internationally renowned artists donated to Community Dialogue by Parents Circle Family Forum Drama, Human Sculpture and Role Playing Dialogues in association with Blue Eagle Productions and Hector Aristizabal Troubled Readings Dialogues incorporating passages from stories read by authors Theatre of the Oppressed and Dialogue In June 2012, Community Dialogue successfully received funding from Belfast City Council Good Relations Fund to deliver a series of pilot workshops incorporating a drama technique known as Theatre of the Oppressed combined with our dialogue technique. This was an innovative process, which enabling participants to explore and articulate their experience, perception and needs. Community Dialogue worked in partnership with a locally based theatre group called Theatre Lab. Theatre Lab is a partnership between Partisan Productions and a community development organisation (Ballynafeigh Community Development Association). It utilizes applied theatre techniques to explore issues identified as important to communities across Northern Ireland. One format that Theatre Lab use regularly is Forum theatre, a Theatre of the Oppressed methodology which actively engages the audience in resolving the issues or problems they raise and explore through the drama. The methodology creates a critical distance for participants enabling them to evolve a different perspective on contentious issues and allow space for the formulation alternative responses. 3 Explanation of the methodologies Dialogue is a process involving active listening as well as talking. It implies accepting and respecting the views of others and trying to understand where they are coming from. Diversity and division are openly addressed in this process. The dialogue process enables participants to share their experience, to be heard, to be accepted and to be valued despite the diversity of backgrounds present. The process also leads participants to consider how to live together in a diverse and divided society and how to accommodate and celebrate difference. Dialogue deepens understanding of our own, and each other’s positions, often leading to shared understanding and an enhancement of our ability to make informed decisions. It does this by shifting the focus from the stated positions that we so often argue over to the needs (often shared), which underlie them. We believe that if groups understand each other more deeply they would be better able to make informed decisions about starting, continuing or ending conflict. If they stepped into the world of another group and saw how these others came to hold their positions, feel their emotions and chose their values then, although the groups often remained opposed to each other, they were less likely to engage in violence. Some of the issues discussed could be highly emotive, but through the dialogue process people learnt more about the issues, dealt with them in a less emotive way, and slowly began to hear why other groups held the positions they did. Theatre of the Oppressed describes a theatrical form that the Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal first developed in the 1960s, initially in Brazil. Boal was influenced by the work of the educator and theorist Paolo Freire. Once scenes are developed which illustrate moments of oppression or conflict, these are presented to an audience who become "spectators" who are invited to take the place of a character to explore, show, analyse and transform the reality in which they are living – this is Forum Theatre. 4 “All our senses, our perception of reality, and our capacity of feeling and reasoning, tend to become mechanical by every day repetition. We tend to become less creative, accepting reality as it is, instead of transforming it. Games of the Oppressed is a system of games that help us to “feel what we touch”," to listen to what we hear”," to see what we look at", “to stimulate all senses", and “to understand what we say and hear". Augusto Boal, Rio de Janeiro 2004 This methodology has been used in countries all over the world very successfully but is a relatively new approach in Northern Ireland. Project Participants Six groups agreed to take part in the project. These were a mixture of local women’s groups, both Catholic and Protestant, a men’s group from a Protestant community, and a group of refugees and asylum seekers. Two of the groups were recruited in conjunction with the Project Worker involved in the Learning Through Engagement Project managed by LINC/CCWA. The other groups, including the refugees and asylum seekers had previously been involved in a series of dialogues with Community Dialogue The time factor proved problematic at times as ideally each session required a full day to fully explore the issues but because of childcare needs and other factors, each group was worked with separately over a period of six two hour sessions. The starting point used games and exercises to help participants to use their bodies and all their senses in ways that are not everyday but became integral to sharing personal experiences and creating theatre from those experiences. Despite the time limitations, the participants became enthusiastically involved and the games provided a sense of fun that enabled them to give themselves permission to relax their inhibitions and become more expressive. This provided a safe space for them to enter a process of articulating the various concerns or issues that faced themselves or their communities. 5 That articulation was initially nonverbal but eventually developed into a balance between physical activities and discussion. All the sessions took place within each group’s local community. In the case of the refugees and asylum seekers, they met at the Northern Ireland Community for Refugees and Asylum Seekers building. This enabled them to feel more comfortable by being based in familiar territory. Through the Forum Theatre, the groups identified a wide range of examples of oppression. For example, the refugees and asylum seekers identified a scenario where bureaucracy provides a barrier to accessing services such as opening a bank account. Various scenarios were acted out by the other members of the group to try and deal with that bureaucracy. In the dialogue, many felt that this particular scenario could be used as a tool to raise awareness with other refugees and asylum seekers that they too have rights and should be able to assert those rights when necessary. Another example was where one of the women’s groups identified bullying in the workplace. This involved a supervisor upsetting a cleaning woman by insisting that she carry out work that was not her responsibility. Again various scenarios were acted out and resulted in a number of ways of dealing with the problem. The drama then provided the basis for a fruitful and stimulating dialogue on the issue of powerlessness in the workplace and the role of women within wider society. Hector Aristizabal Hector Aristizabal is a theatre practitioner from Colombia who has used his theatre skills to transform communities all over the world. He was invited by the Playhouse Community Arts Centre in Derry/Londonderry to carry out a residency. Community Dialogue has very strong links with the Playhouse and as a result of those links Hector was invited to Belfast to give a one day workshop on Theatre of the Oppressed techniques to some of the participants who were involved in the pilot project. 6 Hector founded ImaginAction to help people tap the transformative power of theatre in programmes throughout the U.S., Latin America, Europe and around the world as far afield as Afghanistan, India and Palestine for community building and reconciliation, strategizing and individual healing and liberation. He was recently honoured with the prestigious Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theatre. The participants felt inspired by his input and were keen to work with him again. Hector returned to Belfast 6 months later, this time to stay for a month and provide more in-depth work. For over a month he worked with two main groups, the men’s group from Tiger’s Bay, a Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist estate in North Belfast and a women’s group from Lenadoon, a Nationalist/Republican estate in West Belfast. Community Dialogue had facilitated a series of preparatory dialogue sessions separately with both groups in advance of their engagement with Hector Aristizabal. The two groups then met with each other on a number of occasions over that month. The women had written a song when working with Community Dialogue, “One Small Step”, which reflected their lives. This provided a bridge between the voices of the women, articulated through the song, the issues raised by the men and the ideas jointly developed through the drama process. The song was eventually used as the basis for the drama which was performed as Forum Theatre to the local community in Tigers Bay. The Forum Theatre process enhanced dialogue following the performance in the Tigers Bay community as the scenarios explored experiences and issues shared by performers and audience alike including drugs, lone parenting, violence and deprivation. The Forum Theatre performance enabled initially reticent performers and audience to explore and express feelings, experiences, perceptions and needs, in a creative manner that generated a sense of common humanity and shared understanding among people who have traditionally been divided by years of conflict. 7 Conclusion “Once we start doing the work of truly knowing each other’s stories and each other’s human struggles we notice how similar our stories are, we humanize the other and in that way humanizes ourselves through theatre.” Hector Aristizabal The combination of drama and dialogue utilised by this project helped to create a safe space where individuals could explore difficult and contentious issues, build trust between them and examine the possibilities for reconciliation. By empowering individuals to express their own experiences of conflict in a critical, non-threatening way, dialogue about alternatives became possible and channels for change become more apparent. The experience of Theatre of the Oppressed for Community Dialogue was both rewarding and enriching. It illustrated how community theatre can become a vital tool in enhancing the process of dialogue. 8