THE BRIDGE TO HOPE - Applied theatre in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina

 

The very first activities which today I would name as applied theatre, actually started with the forming of The Mostar Youth Theatre. Back then, we didn’t know how to define these activities; we didn’t even know what we wanted. In the meantime, we learned from others, we gained experience and our own knowledge, and we kept on working. Some were defining our work as experimental theatre or similar to that, while others proclaimed our work as something utterly stupid and dilettante.And then came 1992.

It was springtime. Mostar was engulfed by the scent of early spring bloom and gunpowder. We, from the Mostar Youth Theatre, were still buoyed up and flying on the wings of success of our last performances Galeb/Seagull (Chekhov, 1959) (after Chekhov) and Hamlet, and we ignored the real happenings around us.We lived in a sort of self-isolation where we were busy exploring the possibility to work on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (Aristophanes, 1963).We had our first big rehearsal.The audience was at the rehearsal too.Then an enormous explosion shook the whole town.The devastation started, the first victims fell, and the fear set in …the war. In the chaos that started, someone stole our equipment.We were banished from the facilities.They took it all.We were left with nothing. Everything we created in the span of 18 years was just simply swept away.We were left with nothing and not even enough to do a single performance. The only possible decision was to keep on working in spite of everything and rebel against all who wanted to stop life in the town.We continued gathering and rehearsing.We tried to carry on, but it was impossible.The explosions were interrupting the music. Death was too near. But we started. It wasn’t easy at all. Truthfulness proved to be the crucial problem. For the very first time, my actors had some secrets they were not willing to express outwardly, and I was convinced that in those secrets were the only and true answers we were searching for. I was stubborn and led the process towards their complete opening.We were entering the field of psycho-drama of which I knew a lot but hadn’t practised before.At that time, I was watching in front of me and listening to the painful stories of young people. It wasn’t a theatre any more. My actors performed, or better said, relived parts of their lives.We were rehearsing every day, each time longer and longer. It was our exile, our therapy. It was our island of hope.We went further and deeper, more open, more painful; we were opening the most hidden secrets. We shared fears, pain, tears.

The people who were watching that which we presented thought it was a performance.True, it had the form of a performance, and as days went by it grew more and more, but we knew that it wasn’t a performance at all. It was our life, but theirs too, and that is why they kept on com­ing back time and time again.They were watching it as if they were watching some old videos, recorded some time ago at the seaside, at a picnic, an excursion, or a birthday party. I realized that they also needed to watch and listen, just as we needed the ‘playing’. I realized that it mattered a lot to us all, facing up to the personal past and coming to our senses, soberly, because numerous dealings didn’t explain all the causes why our worlds were destroyed.When it all happened, and it did happen, the pain at that stage disappeared. It stopped being life.The theatre came forward. Then we started playing a performance.And we play it even today. It is a circle of death, a circle of pain, it is Pax Bosniensis. It is a performance that came out of our own experiences, but at the same time it is a play that touches the hearts of each spectator, regardless of age, nationality, or the country the person comes from. It is a play which managed to speak out in a universal tongue that everyone can understand and accept as their own.

Then we, especially because of the memories we had, created a performance about the great constructor of the Mostar Old Bridge from the distant past of 1566.We didn’t create a historical story, but, based on that story, we used imagination and dramatic scenes to present the efforts and obstacles that stood in front of the constructor back in that time.We wanted to send a mes­sage that the bridge we are building is a value that belongs to everyone, a value that has its place in the history of civilization, and that it has been created in spite of numerous difficulties and problems by the unseen stubbornness, persistence, courage, and endurance of its constructor.

We were calling our audience to build the bridges inspired by Hayrudin’s example. Each of these 23 pictures that our performance was made of, has offered a clearly stated problem which opens up and suggests how to solve it. One of the dilemmas which we often had to solve with the young people in Mostar, and widely in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was: does history better remember the constructors or the destroyers? By taking the young people into a fictional con­text, in the time of the bridge construction, we gave them a safe distance from the time in which we live. By pulling them inside the problems the original constructor had, and by giving them the chance to use their imagination to solve those problems, we taught them how to cross over the abyss they had in the central street in the middle of their own town. I invited the young people to ask their colleagues whatever they wanted about the bridge. And they asked all sorts of questions, openly, cleverly, directly, fully aware of the present time in which they live.They asked bravely, and without hesitation they pronounced the words their parents have forgotten. I remember a dialogue:

•              Who are you?

•              People from the other side.

•              Why are you standing at the very edge of the bridge?

•              I want to come over to the other side.

•              Why don’t you go then?

•              I’m waiting for him to make the first step.

•              Who is he?

•              The people from the other side.

•              Why is it important that he makes the first step?

•              So that they won’t think that I am the weak one.

•              And are you?

•              Yes I am, as long as I don’t dare make the first step.

•              Why?

•              ’Cos I am weak.

•              What do you think, why doesn’t he make the first step?

•              ’Cos he is weak, too.

•              And so until when are you going to be like that?

•              Not long.

 

I come from Bosnia and Herzegovina, a land of death and destruction, a land which the inner and outer forces of darkness have destroyed so much that it is a miracle that the land still breathes, that it still gives signs of life. I am from a land whose peoples have been scattered around, from a land where hatred has been planted in order to tear it apart. Love has been systematically destroyed, along with every possibility to imagine the mutual life of ethnic com­munities. And after years and years spent here and work done in this kind of environment, I think that I have the right to sound a bit pathetic, because what I have done and explored for years affects me directly and concerns me. It’s not about the methodology anymore, but about life. It’s not about a metaphor, but about a cruel reality. It’s not about a fiction, but about my painful emotions. It is about the reality from which we have started from, and by ‘we’ I mean us from the Mostar Youth Theatre.We began our work as theatre or,rather,we have continued our work dealing constantly with the dilemma: does it make any sense? Our work in the youth theatre with children and adolescents, in spite of horrible war actions around us, still has been and continues to be the creative and inspirational source which opens up and forms huge space, a space to play.Today we constantly wonder: how will the rest of the world comprehend and perceive the almost unperceivable reality of our long-time-taking living and dying?

Young people from our theatre, like so many young people in my town and in my country, are a part of a typical generation of youth like anywhere in the world.What is their humane and theatrical perspective on this time and this social situation we live in currently? There are two options. Firstly, to leave the country and try to live and survive somewhere abroad, in the wide world, with uncertainty and all the hardships of life in a new environment.The second option is to stay with uncertainty and all the hardships of being drawn into this grey gloominess of everyday life here, being drawn into all the schemes and problems of the social and theatrical context, which more often than not is discouraging. So, what to choose? We from the MTM, as it is locally known, have chosen the third option.To stay together, and work together.To create communication even with those from the other side of this country, but also with the world abroad.To show to the world our own creativity, knowledge, possibility, truth about us in the world and the world that is within us.That is why we believed, that we as witnesses, have the right to call for and offer bridge-building. And we offered. And we are still offering, because we are firmly convinced that drama and theatre are the right of every person, and not just the privilege of those who are talented. It is an ongoing process. Our bridges have remained here throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina in the form of nicer looks, handshakes, embraces, a kiss, pure thoughts, forgiveness. Our bridges are enduring because the only material they are made of is love, a constructor’s free will to create them.The constructors were those who decided the size and the quality and for how long they will stand there.

I remind you here: the bridges have always been the objects from where the other construc­tion spread.That is how many towns started to exist and grow in history.We believe, and that is happening, that around our bridges the construction will go on and that the new towns will spread and grow. Slowly, with difficulties, it is going to take a lot of time, painfully, but they will grow.That is why we are here still, in spite of many problems.

The authorities on many levels looked at us doubtfully and shook their heads. Many of them would be happy just to prohibit such work.The professional theatres also looked at us with a lot of doubt, because for them these are some suspicious novelties, and the school is far too traditional and conservative to open the door widely for such work. Mostly it is work with the individuals who are keen or interested. Financing? In the country – zero. First of all, there is no money for it, and secondly, even if someone offers you help, there is immediately an obligation to return the favour. So how to survive? We frequently respond to those questions: out of spite or out of love. In reality it is our friends who live abroad, who help us through donations, and numerous organisations in the world. But as one war-zone ceases to be actual and in focus, they turn to help the newly opened war-zone. Such is their work by nature, and we remain in the painful reality.A hope and a scream that can hardly be heard, but to our ears it is deafening.And so these are the perfect pre-conditions to stop working at all. For despair. For escape. Or maybe for the new beginning. Our decision is to stand in spite of everything, and not allow that sign of pain to be visible on our faces. Our decision is to work and share the destiny of those with whom we cooperate, and our key motto is: truth, love, and theatrical aesthetics.And when we use drama and theatre solely as a tool, as a means, then our personal intake is trust, confidence, openness, and love.We never got a negative response to it.

Since the very beginning of dealing with the various kinds of applied theatre, the main dif­ficulties were with the lack of trust and confidence. It came from various reasons. One was due to the ethnic division which was the direct outcome of the war and post-war politics.Another came as a result of our activities being mainly financed by international organisations.The local authorities were very suspicious of them, and we were treated as foreign spies or even worse.The third reason for their distrust was that they didn’t have an understanding of the methodology we used. Furthermore, a great number of both local and international so-called ‘experts’ were trav­elling across the country and offering their services.The damage they did took years to repair. Some consequences are still here.Apart from these problems, a big difficulty was the lack of pro­fessionals.We had a small team of people, and the need for the work in the territory of a whole state was huge.At the same time, while we were working directly,we also had to train numerous teachers, professors, actors, and other activists in practising different kinds of applied theatre.The training was accompanied by difficulties because the schools and various ministries in different areas weren’t willing to give their consent, so the teachers were coming to work with us usually on their own initiative, sometimes even in secret.The situation isn’t much better, even today.

Several years ago, I read the devastating results of the research that The National Democratic Institute from Washington gave, after they finished research among all the categories of the young people of Bosnia and Herzegovina.Then I saw in black and white what I already antici­pated. More than 62% of young people would like to leave the country immediately.They only wait for the opportunity. Some 20% of young people have still some hesitation but want to go. They all want to leave this country because they don’t see any future. Nowadays, the situation is even worse. I myself have stayed through thick and thin in the war in Mostar, so I felt that I had to at least try to answer this and similar questions.That was the only motive I offered and I still offer to young people with whom I want to explore the dilemma: to leave or to stay? It was a dilemma I myself had once, but before everything else it was their life’s decision. I had to and we had to speak out about it.We went on, starting off with this dilemma, and we started to deal with the intertwined paths of our souls.We started exploring our personal lives in fac­ing the past, the present, but also the future.We sought the answers, the causes, and the possible solutions.We tried to reinforce ourselves and prepare ourselves for what was awaiting us. In that searching, which still goes on, it seems to us that we are dealing with the same questions that were tormenting us at the time of making our first performance during the war, Pax Bosniensis 1992, and it seems as if we’re here making the second part/sequel of that performance only some 10 or 20 years later. In Mostar, even after the war, people were being killed by explosions or shootings.The whole town actually looks like an ideal setting for some Greek tragedy which is going on today and here in everyday life. In such an environment a handful of ‘lunatics’ have found asylum in theatre, as they did once a long time ago during the actual war.

We are aware that many things in the future depend on us.We are in the position to explain to those who decide here that theatre doesn’t exist, that we pull and draw the curtain every evening (as Brecht said).We are trying to throw the glove right into their faces.That is why now we do all our activities towards that goal, to liberate people from fear and to lead them towards their own facing up to their personal past in which they must recognize the cause.They have to face it.They have to reach catharsis and, so purified, move on into their own small or big ‘war’.The main inspiration for our work was the possibility to win over the fear and the pos­sibility of giving back hope to the ordinary ‘little’ man. All that also made us much healthier. Today, when I think of it, it seems that, had we not taken that decision in the spring of 1992 to continue our work, today we would be very ill. I am convinced of that because, on a daily basis, I notice people around me, and I run away with my colleagues into the world of drama and fiction in order to gain strength and prepare for new challenges that life here in this town and this country gives us.

The drama-line of the Pax Bosniensis wasn’t prepared in advance, nor has it come out as a result of much thinking or care about the audience and its reactions. It was a line of our lives, a line of people’s sufferings; people I lived with and shared evil that was forced upon us. It was life as we lived it in those four years of hell.And the life was the struggle of unarmed people to survive that fierce hunt of them. It was a war against people, unarmed people. It was a time in which death was the best friend, because what we lived there wasn’t life at all.That is why the images in Pax Bosniensis are more like a gallery of our lives, as a frozen time of pain.To many spectators, they even seem unreal, and yet they are exact representations of life as it was. Had it not been for that, this performance wouldn’t have lasted for 26 years and always able to find its audience.

When in 1996 the performance went abroad, I had in mind only the need to speak as a witness. I wanted to witness as the one who survived, as the one who took part in the hap­penings that were just news to the world.There was no anger, nor bitterness, nor the need for pity or to inform anyone. I wanted to use this performance as a tool to say that we knew what had happened and no one anywhere has the right to judge us and what we have been through. That right belongs to us and we wanted to say it directly right there from the stages where we performed abroad.There were no other motives.And we testified, but we were very difficult witnesses, the witnesses who hide nothing and speak right from the heart of the happenings. I know that at times it was quite shocking for the audience, but I didn’t choose the audience, they chose our testimony.

We performed also in the countries whose armies took part on the opposite side during the war. Going there wasn’t easy.We had to win ourselves over, face our own past, and look at oneself in the mirror and make it clean and clear.

Right after the war, we were a part of the Pax project and did workshops based on material from the myth of Pandora and Prometheus, and developed a very interesting programme of the­atre in education which deals with the topic of violence.We kept on working on that idea and explored it further and developed it through the work of the Mostar Youth Theatre where we worked with people of all generations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and many countries abroad.

I remember that the 30 participants of that workshop were mainly young people from all parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. By learning the techniques of theatre-in-education and mas­tering them, and at the same time exploring the material of myth, in the end they offered a very exciting theatrical challenge for further exploration and investigation of all sorts of violence.

Developing that exciting material, a part of that group of young people who took part in its creation at the workshop, have later on worked under the framework of the Mostar Youth Theatre and developed the theatre-in-education programme called The Masks, which follows the original idea generated at the workshop.

In the beginning, our focus was on the topic of rape as a war strategy.Then we dealt with violence as a mythological event in the Balkans, a life behind the masks, about the hypocrisy, about violence in the family and, in the end, about violence among young people and violence on young people.Why did we place the violence of young people at the end?

Back then, the ten-year long existence of the Centre for Drama Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the continuous realization of a whole line of projects in Bosnia and Herzegovina and wider, provided us with valuable information (information gathered through independent evaluations of the project) about the needs of children and youngsters in our country.

Naturally, to get the complete picture we used all the parameters of the official institutions that were available to us, and given by the non-government organizations, both local and inter­national.

Since Mostar is in a specific situation with two separate school systems and programmes, and since there is a lack of school buildings, and since there are examples that in one school building co-exist both primary and secondary schools, all these reasons have contributed to education in schools decreasing, and schools have been reduced to solely teaching subjects and nothing else. If to all of this we add the catastrophic financial situation in town, and the fact that this is still a divided town, all of this together means that the people are in a state of apathy and that the children are left on their own. In such a situation, the children become more violent and often out of control. Evaluating this situation, we have approached the schools, with one aim, to enter the classrooms from the first grade to the eighth/ninth, and to show them a theatrical scene, a micro-drama, sometimes a complete show that deals with the issues that open up a problem we want to explore with the audience, that came out as a result of the Pax Project workshop which was inspired by the myth of Pandora and Prometheus. It was the last version of ‘The Masks’ programme.We worked with all classes directly in the classrooms and were limited by the dura­tion of the school hour.

The structure of our work was:

•              Short introduction (presentation of the Theatre-in-Education methodology with the accent on participation).

•              Playing theatre ‘bait’ (four scenes already prepared, and played by the young actors who would in the second phase turn into the role of drama-pedagogues).

•              Short analysis of the bait in order to gain perspective into their understanding of the situation, characters and basic problem in the scene.

•              After the notification that the main problem in the scene is the violence, we continue to briefly discuss violence in general and kinds of violence, etc.

•              Using a suitable technique we divide pupils all into several groups of five participants.

•              We ask all participants to remember one example/situation they experienced them­selves when they have either been violent towards someone or someone was violent to them, or if they witnessed a violent situation but didn’t do anything.

•              After that we ask them to work in their small groups and tell their stories to each other.

•              Then the drama-pedagogues enter the groups; those are the actors who performed the scene earlier, to help the group, and to initiate the discussion.We don’t rush the participants to hurry with it.

•              After they have recounted their experiences, we ask each group to select one situation out of five given examples according to their choice; what they found most violent, or most interesting, or most aggressive.

•              When they have selected the situation, we give them the task to analyze, one more time, what happened and to define all who took part in it.After that we ask them to take the roles and try to make a frozen image (a sculpture) of the key moment in that violent situation.We give them time to rehearse.

•              We then call all groups to present their frozen images.We invite the others to recog­nize the situation and define all who took part in it. Depending on time, we use these techniques: hot seat and interrogation while in the role. It is possible that the perpetra­tor and the victim change roles and then repeat the interrogation-in-role.

•              In the end, we draw the conclusion from the thoughts that the participants have spo­ken.We remind them of it.

 

The purpose of this project, which is still ongoing, is to raise awareness about violent behaviour, to point out the causes and explore them, but also to state the consequences.We don’t intend to do that only with the pupils. In the project we have also included the parents, the teachers, and all the children in the school, without pinpointing those who are demonstrating extremely violent behaviour.The purpose is to point out the causes of violent behaviour and, in that way, try to prevent it, and avoid the consequences.

The project is aiming to highlight the causes of violent behaviour in each individual and to face him/her with it so that he/she realizes it, and to try to initiate the change of such behaviour today.

Parallel to these activities, we organized a series of workshops with the teachers whose aim was to enable them to use and practise the methodology of drama, theatre-in-education, and forum-theatre in their everyday pedagogical work.

Well aware of the fact that the problem is very serious and that there are no easy, quick, or short-term solutions to it, we expect to achieve these results:

•              More active participation of all interested sides in dealing with the problem.

•              Dealing with the causes which leads to prevention and avoiding consequences.

•              Enabling a huge number of teachers to apply this new methodology to their everyday work (but still not enough practised in the teaching process here).

 

We believe that the positive effects of this project in the schools of Mostar has promoted this kind of work and influenced its further spreading, and that the teachers will apply this method­ology in their everyday work.

So far, we have been to 520 classrooms and my primary concern with the work in the class­rooms was how to motivate and stimulate pupils to speak openly and express their opinions (and not just answer with a short ‘yes’ or ‘no’).

For example, in one local school in a village near Mostar, we worked with pupils in the eighth grade. They were very interested in watching the play-bait, which is actually a small piece of theatre, but as soon as the situation changed and it was their turn to speak and express their own opinions and dilemmas, it all turned drastically.The girls turned their heads, hid their mouths, and clearly showed that for them the programme had finished.They were not there to speak, but to sit and listen and be quiet. Such is the tradition even today.And not just there. There is another very striking example from one school in Mostar where we worked in the classrooms with 30 pupils.The teachers were not present. In each class, at least one of the five small groups of pupils repeated almost exactly the same scene. Even in some other grades, the same scene was repeated. It was alarming to us. By using the method of interrogation-in-role, we found out that there was a teacher in that school who regularly maltreats the pupils and some­times even hits them. The method of hot-seating helped us to identify the teacher. After this one-day visit to school, and a conversation with the school’s principal and the school pedagogue, this long-time secret finally saw the light of the day.The teacher was sanctioned and everything changed.The power of the game in fictional contexts and the sense of security they acquired gave these young people the strength to speak out, and when they spoke out, the solution to the problem was found.

The second example is a very interesting experience we had in a school in one village near Mostar.We went there with our usual stereotypes of schools in villages and we thought we knew what awaited us. But we were so surprised when we arrived.Although the school building was small and poorly equipped, everything was so impeccably clean, neat, and well organized.We were also most cordially received. It felt great to be there.The children were so open and ready to cooperate, and were very curious.We offered to play the game ‘The Masks’.We felt special joy working with one class in the sixth grade, where the children are 12 years old.After only five minutes, the actor put the white masks on. I noticed one small boy who got nervous and started asking his teacher something. She was trying to silence him and pointed at us. He barely man­aged to keep quiet for 15 minutes.As soon as he got the chance, he instantly asked,‘why is there no opening for the mouth on the masks for children, while there are openings on the masks for the parents?’ It was the first time that someone asked us that.This process that we have done in many countries across Europe and even in the US, with human rights activist, with students…, but after at least a hundred of such sessions we were never asked this key question. The child gave the answer. He clearly recognized the hopelessness of the society he lives in, which won’t let him speak freely.

After all this, I am convinced that the young people with whom we have met would speak and truly change their micro cosmos.Those changes are our greatest success.That is why we are hurrying to reach more and better micro worlds in our town and our country.

The situation is much better today. During its 26 existence, the Centre for Drama Education has gathered hundreds of individuals and groups as members who through their everyday life, practise and promote these activities. Throughout the year we continuously have dozens of workshops where we practise different kinds of applied theatre and organize the festival of applied theatre.Then programmes and performances which are a kind of applied theatre, after thorough selection, become included in the regular repertoire of the festivals. Significant num­bers of artists are becoming more and more interested in this kind of theatre.The truth is that we still don’t have a true appreciation for this kind of work in this environment, but the very fact that applied theatre is no longer at the margin, and that people write and talk more and more of it, all that gives us hope that in time to come, there will be more space for this kind of work.

References

Aristophanes. (1963) Lysistrata.Ann Arbor, MN: University of Michigan Press. Chekhov, A. (1959) Plays. Harmondsworth: Penguin.