Articles on Peacebuilding and the Arts

Acting Together on the World Stage

by Cynthia Cohen

Director, Slifka Program in Intercommunal Coexistence, Brandeis University

In conflict regions throughout the world, courageous theater artists engage creatively

with the most urgent issues confronting their societies and the global community.

Acting Together on the World Stage: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict, a project co-sponsored by Theatre Without Borders and the Coexistence

Program at Brandeis University, reflects on a collection of these works through the lens

of peacebuilding and conflict transformation.

In contexts of violence and injustice, suppressed truths about abuses of power, unexpressed stories
of suffering, unmourned losses, unpunished crimes, unacknowledged complicities, unspoken feelings of
remorse, unreconciled relationships all scream out – in silence and in deafening roars – for focused, creative
attention that might lead to healing and to justice, and, perhaps, to peace. Our research indicates that
performances are responding to these calls.

Where there is direct violence and state repression, performances speak otherwise unspeakable truths
and draw attention to abuses of governmental, military and gender-based power. They provide channels for
creative and life-enhancing resistance to repression and oppression, offering citizens – particularly women
and youth – alternatives to passivity or to participation in cycles of violence and revenge. Performances both
help communities shape traumatic experiences into narrative and draw the world’s attention to suffering
and injustice. In some cases, performances challenge – and support – members of opposing communities
to step away from the death dance of enmity.

In the aftermath of wars and other gross violations of human rights, performances provide
platforms for the reconstruction of meaning, memory and imagination. They invite citizens to acknowledge
and reflect on painful history and to embrace seemingly conflicting imperatives toward memory and
imagination, retribution and restoration, and solidarity and interdependence. In the aftermath of epistemic
violence, ritual practices in themselves embody acts of restorative justice.

In contexts of structural violence, division and alienation, performances humanize the other side,
offering opportunities for adversaries to acknowledge and negotiate differences and develop relationships of
respect, understanding and support. Performance practices also shine a light on oppressive dynamics, raise
consciousness, offer perspective and vision and inspire action toward justice.

In relation to all kinds and stages of violent conflict, performances engage people in activities that
nourish and restore capacities for expression, communication, decision making and action. They offer
venues where narratives and identities can be validated, explored, compared and crafted to be more nuanced
and complex. In contrast to the disintegration of violence and war, these performances link the heart with
the mind, the person with the community, communities with each other and the local with the global. They
embody and celebrate manifestations of power that are creative, non-violent, respectful and transformative.

Peacebuilding performances reflect what John Paul Lederach refers to as “the moral imagination” –
the ability to stay grounded in the real world, with all its violence and injustice, while still imagining and
working toward a more life-affirming order. Ethically informed creative action at the boundary of human
suffering and human possibility is a central feature of the place where performance and peacebuilding meet.

- From Acting Together on the World Stage: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict

Artist Dedicates Herself to Lost Women
of Juarez, Mexico

August 18 , 2009

The unsolved murders over the past 15 years of often unidentified Mexican women in the border city of Juarez trouble a Mexican-born artist in New York. She is creating a tribute to each victim, employing a technique reminiscent of police chalk lines.

Women's eNews - More than 400 women have been murdered in the Mexican border city of Juarez in the past 15 years. While authorities have done little to identify these women or their killers, Andrea Arroyo, a Manhattan-based artist, is determined to not let the dead women be forgotten.

Arroyo is currently working on a commemoration of the victims of the Juarez violence. So far she has completed about 200 drawings. Read full story

Painting Against the Odds in Gaza

June 8, 2009
Al Jazeera Channel - Bazel, an art teacher in Gaza, a Palestinian city, teaches hearing impaired children to express themselves through ingenious ways by practicing the freedom offered by painting. His students are prospects for being reflective and creative individuals, as they explore their own perception of the world by showing this vision in their paintings.

Watch a 12-minute video on this and other stories from around the world relating to peace and the arts.

People making a difference: Sheema Kermani

June 7, 2009
Christian Science Monitor-- In Pakistan, this women's rights activist stages plays that stir controversy – and thought.

KARACHI, Pakistan - Last December, when the theater troupe Tehrik-e-Niswan (Women's Movement) performed in Orangi Town – the largest slum in the Pakistani port city of Karachi – it did not expect Muslim clerics to make up the bulk of the audience.

At the invitation of a nonprofit organization, the activist troupe was staging a play about child abuse, which features a cleric as a molester. "We were too scared to perform," says Asma Mundrawala, one of the actors. "But Sheema encouraged us to go on, reminding us that this was the exact audience we were trying to reach." Read full story

Fomenting a Denim Revolution

Theatre Communications Group - The guerilla artists of Belarus Free Theatre perform underground while arguing openly for regime change.

Belarusians today live in a Russified independent state called Belarus. If your GPS brain-unit simply draws a blank or if you feign recognition but dismiss the place as yet another inconsequential, archaic, East-European Slavonic post-Soviet satellite, then you have just demonstrated that Communism is having the last laugh.

You have also unintentionally suggested that the West lacks a clear-cut ethical stance vis-à-vis the repression of young people, avant-garde artists, conscientious liberals and independent intellectuals struggling to survive in the undemocratic regimes of the post-Cold War world. The question has been asked too many times before: Why should the government of a modern European nation-state be afraid of a play, a performance, an audience - or of a small theatre collective? Read full story