|
|
LECTURE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION, Ramallah
August 2, 2004
IMAGINING PALESTINE
Contextual theatre for education
Introduction
I speak to you not as
somebody who knows much about theatre or even
about theatre in education.
I detected the importance
of theatre in rather indirect and unplanned
ways: through educational projects in the
Palestinian environment, through my family life,
and through political discussions. So I speak to
you in the roles of educator, father, and
citizen (even though I do not have a Palestinian
passport, but my wife and kids do).
Therefore, this is more a
personal reflection about what I have
experienced in my life here, rather than a
lecture.
I approach theatre as
something which is reverberating and responsive
to real life. Theater is, after all, situated in
and penetrated by real life.
My purpose is to show that
given the present Palestinian situation, drama
has much to offer for education here.
I'll describe three moments
of my life in Palestine and Bethlehem to
illustrate this educational role which drama can
play.
Bringing alive
Palestinian culture and environment
In establishing myself
here, I took part in some sort of educational
movement that started during the Oslo years. The
purpose of that movement was trying to bring the
Palestinian identity, reality and environment
back into education. It was the mid 1990s, the
period before the new Palestinian curriculum was
introduced. In teacher training workshops we
discussed extra- and cross-curricular activities
in which the Palestinian identity and
environment was assigned centre stage. The
guiding idea was that occupation and educational
colonialism had robbed Palestinians from
knowledge about their land.
So we discussed how to
bring back that identity. For instance, we
developed role plays in the English language:
Youths were encouraged to present their culture
towards English-speaking tourists visiting in
Bethlehem. We also developed oral history
projects and fieldtrips into beautiful places in
Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron, and linked up
with the appropriate subjects into the
curriculum. The teachers wanted to have the
students going into the environment, to touch,
feel, smell it, to hear the stories of the
people, to get alive the places.
Now this was not easy. For
one thing, present-day youths are not accustomed
to walk. They are not really used to look at
things, to make notes, or to do interviews with
people. In some cases, they have difficulty in
giving meaning to their environment other than
that as a place where you can have fun or are
bored. For many youths, as a legislator from our
area once said, the environment, the Palestinian
land, is a general symbol. Many are prepared to
die for it, as a symbol, but the details of the
land, the concrete sites with their trees,
rocks, grass, and buildings, the drama of its
history, do not have a lot of meaning for them.
How is it possible to make this environment
alive for kids; in other words, to make one's
cultural identity alive so that it speaks at
you? That was the question we faced all the
time.
Sometimes you become more
aware of the relevance of such questions in a
concrete locality. In some of the fieldtrips, we
used to visit Artas. In their own, sometimes
biased ways, anthropologists and missionaries
had brought alive this little place south of
Bethlehem, decades ago, in the Turkish and
British times. There have been some ten books
written about Artas, among them four
anthropological monographies by the Finnish Hima
Granqvist, barely known, out of print. The rich
documented folklore was later on again picked up
by a local heritage center. When you know about
the detailed history, Artas becomes an
enormously colorful and historical place, with a
museum, caves, and old places with rich stories.
A German priest once collected proverbs from the
peasants in Artas. In his view, they resembled
the Song of Songs (Canticle of Canticles) from
the Bible, the song legendarily ascribed to King
Suleiman. In fact, opposite of the village is a
monastery named after the Closed Garden, the
Hortus Conclusus, an expression from the Song of
Songs. The Closed Garden perhaps refers to the
idea of the forbidden Garden of Eden, or
Paradise. The monastery is beautifully located
on a hill, designed, as my wife is proud to say,
by some of her forefathers of the Morcos family,
and with a large balcony that looks like a
promising stage for drama.
Once I had a conversation
with Musa Sanad, the one who started the
folklore revival in the village. While we were
watching the village from a hill, he told me
that the land is so beautiful that it must have
been here that King Suleiman wrote his Song of
Songs. Mahmoud Darwish, in a book called
"Palestine as metaphor," spoke among other
things about his poetry being influenced by the
Song of Songs, one of the world's greatest love
poems. He spoke about how this poetry is a
product of the meeting of civilizations, of the
meeting of Sumerians, the Egyptians and the
Canaanites. Darwish considered himself as the
depository of all cultures and cultural works,
including the Bible. When he would write his own
book of Genesis, he said, he would do it in the
form of a dialogue between the cultures that
have succeeded each other in the land of
Palestine. The holy texts are the propriety of
all humanity, and the eastern Mediterranean is
the birth place and the infancy garden of the
great human civilizations, he said.
These words reverberated
with those I heard from the local villagers of
Artas and Musa Sanad who told about the many
encounters, legendary conflicts and forms of
cooperation between the peoples and
civilizations who had crossed the surroundings
of that village. When you are there, and enjoy
the nature, it is so easy to imagine the stories
and poetry. They have a local color but
universal significance. Leopold Senghor, the
African leader and writer, once said that by
living the particular to the full we reach the
dawn of the universal.
But back to that
educational question which is: How to bring such
an unbelievably rich tradition, with so many
threads to various languages, music, poetry,
inter-religious and inter-cultural encounters -
something so particular for the East - how to
bring that alive? And how to do so when you know
that you have to compete with TV programmes,
let's say with Star Academy or the popular songs
of the Lebanese Nancy, and that you also have to
take account of the short attention span of
present-day children?
I have always felt that the
Arts have a special role to play in bringing
young people in touch and in tune with their
heritage. But looking at static objects,
architecture, costumes, traditional artifacts is
clearly not enough for youths. I think that some
of the living popular arts are helping in doing
at least part of the job. Dancing, music and
dabkah playing help to bring alive a heritage,
especially when it is done in the real places,
and with the audience participating
rhythmically. Such forms create atmosphere,
involvement, a joint feeling of flow.
Three years ago, youths
from the educational institute where I work
performed open air music plays in front of the
Artas monastery. (We kept the decibels low so as
not to alarm the nuns in the monastery nor the
tanks which were a few hundreds of meters away
watching us). The musical plays were good, but
still not sufficient, I felt. What was missing
was that other artistic element, imagination.
You need to make a leap in imagination in order
to bring the past and the heritage alive. To see
the heritage you have to see the people who
lived there in front of you, their humanity,
their daily concerns. As museums allover the
world nowadays detect, it helps a great deal to
show the heritage and history through contextual
drama. This can be "little" drama, of how daily
life used to be organized. It can show the
washing, cooking, the talks near the spring, but
it can also include plays of the larger natural
cycles of birth, wedding, and death, and the
cycles of cultural and civilizational encounters
and conflicts, from the birth and infancy of
civilizations on, up to the military and
political events of 1948 and 1967.
I remember that some eight
years ago, with the help of the Directorate of
Archeology, a drama was developed in Artas in
which youths re-enacted the coming of the
anthropologist Hilma Granqvist. Students played
out the encounter in the open air, based upon
the assumption that the Holy Land is a land of
encounters between strangers who can also become
neighbours. Doing drama helped to create that
feeling of surprise, that feeling that you can
learn about others and events whom you thought
you knew. Artas is one of those places where you
can see the cycles of history in front of you,
including the sweet and bitter poetry of
history. I think that when all threads are
brought together it would be possible to make a
grand theatre opera about and in this village,
with poetry, religion, music, and dance as part
of a story with small and large branches. It
would be fascinating and educating for all,
including youths.
Of course, you might say
that there are hundreds of villages and places
in Palestine about which and in which you could
make such drama. So much the better. Usually we
think about Jerusalem as the place of the
meeting of civilizations, but the villages have
their own messages. They, moreover, sport
beautiful vistas, natural theatre stages, and
all too often talented young actors. They
express perhaps more than other places a
particular culture which is pointing to humanity
in general.
But there is this practical
question lurking behind the beautiful theory:
Can you perform theatre under the barrel of a
gun of a tank? Of course the Palestinian
environment has become much more difficult to
explore, with obstacles such as checkpoints and
blockades. These obstacles themselves are the
summit of ugliness and deaden the imagination.
But this does not mean that educators should
give up. Plays by school children in the natural
environment are, in a way, a form of resisting
the occupation because one refuses to be locked
up at home and give away the public space. And
here is my next story to illustrate the need for
developing theatre in education - all kinds of
education, also at home.
Children's theatre at
home
Theatre helps to imagine
reality, to open it up. This is even more
important when the environment is oppressive.
When you can't look at the environment in an
imaginative way, you're dying, or you're spirit
is dying. My daughter did a lot of theatre at
home during the siege of Bethlehem Nativity
Church. I just mention it because I remember it
so good and made notes for a diary. (I don't
mention it of course to suggest that what she
experienced in any way resembled what other
Palestinian children are experiencing in more
terrible situations).
At the time it was full and
pervasive curfew. During those times, what
helped her a lot going through the unnatural
situation was her playing with the kids in the
neighborhood. In their plays, they made a jungle
of the garden and imitated the animals. The
animals withdrew suddenly when the big dragon,
as we called the tank, came into the University
Street where we live. At the moment when the
soldiers approached our house for searching she
started crying first. Then immediately
afterwards she used her imagination. She played
that she was the Israeli army, she reversed the
roles. She was shouting "Shalom Aleichem" while
she did as if she was marching in a row. Next
day, we visited the house of a neighbor who is a
deputy minister in the PNA. She saw there how
everything was smashed on the ground. Later on
we played in the garden. She again invented a
drama. Running from one part to the other, from
home to school, she shouted, "Hurry up, the army
might shoot at you!" In reaching her imaginary
home again, she put her hand on her mouth in
surprise, and told me: "Oh, everything is
broken… Look here, and here…" I tried to give
her play an empowering turn, saying that she
could be a journalist, and that she could tell
the world what was happening. At the time kids
were talking admiringly about journalistic role
models like Shireen Abu Akleh and Guevara
Budeiri, who were reporting the sieges in
Ramallah and Bethlehem for Al-Jazeera.
Of course not all
children's drama is empowering. See the toy
shops which are overloaded with guns and
pistols. But by using her imagination in making
a little drama, my daughter tried to make
reality more bearable. In doing so, she mentally
and emotionally re-constructed reality. By
reliving it, she could look with new eyes at it.
It is a need many youths experience, of course,
more than ever, as they live a reality which
looks so closed up that it barely allows for
imagination. Still humanity, play and
imagination always come looking around the
corner. Even at the darkest moments. A few years
ago an Italian filmmaker made a controversial
film, "La Vita e Bella," about going to and
living in a concentration camp. While telling
his child about what happened the protagonist
made the concentration camp look like a play.
"Smile, no matter what they tell you." There is
always this option of looking at reality in a
different way. Doing so creates hope, a supreme
educational value.
Lately I worked together
with an English teacher of St Joseph School in
Bethlehem in a writing project. The project was
about developing and writing diaries in English,
to show the reality to foreigners, but also
because diary writing helps a lot in dealing
with traumas. You write things down and by doing
so you externalize them, and thus they become
more bearable. But by writing them down, and
reading them (or hearing others comment about
them) you also have a second look at your
realities. You can look at them in different
ways, you weigh them, give them another accent,
look at them in a different light. Some of the
diaries were enacted into drama together with 'Inad
theatre in Beit Jala. My colleague at St Joseph
still feels the effort it took with her girls
who never had drama experience, at least not
formal. They dramatized, among other things, a
particular incident that happened at the school
and that had put a big shadow upon school life:
the death of 12-year old Christine Sa'adeh, a
child at the school, who was killed by Israeli
soldiers in Bethlehem. The plays, including the
killing of Christine, were played out in front
of the school community. The dramatization of
the incident gave it a serious tone but made it
also more possible for the audience to look at
what happened, rather than to suppress or negate
it. People felt somehow relieved but were also
aware.
Non-violent actions
The previous stories were
about the past and the present, how to give a
lively meaning to the unknown past, and how to
create new meaning to an unbearable present -
and how drama can help in this. Now I would like
to dwell on a story about the future, about
change.
Many institutions in
Palestine are considering how to build up
non-violent activities. Here in Bethlehem, we
have had marches, vigils, writing letters. There
are many reasons why developing non-violent
actions are so important in the Palestinian
context. Not in the last place also for
education because non-violent actions are
intended to educate others, and also oneself,
about empowering resistance. They open up an
alternative view of reality.
Nobody can escape the
drama-like quality of non-violent actions. Think
about the pots and pans in Ramallah during
street protests, the balloons, flyers and kites
as colorful symbols of bringing a message out.
In Bethlehem we had marches, led by religious
and political personalities which were stopped
at the checkpoint. People were standing in front
of the soldiers. I discussed at the time with
youths how such a stand-off, that moment when
demonstrators and soldiers stand opposed to each
other, could be symbolically exposed. After all,
non-violent actions take place like as if they
are conducted on a stage. Rosa Sparks, by not
standing up for the whites in the bus, became an
actor. She made a dramatic act. She created a
lived message, an act which made people suddenly
to look different at reality. So did Gandhi. A
suggestion that came up at the time of our
action in Bethlehem was to organize a long
sit-in with all the marchers in front of the
standing soldiers. Doing so would emphasize the
difference between the armed power and the
absence of military power symbolized by the
people sitting. Such an act would create a real
visual contrast that could be effectively shown
in the media. While we were talking, it was as
if we could see the potential of such a scene.
Staging drama, and seeing drama in a future
reality, helps to look at present reality with
new eyes. The imagination can help not to become
imprisoned in images of reality that thwart
change.
Another example of the
importance of non-violent actions and theatre in
education. Lately at the Institute where I work
we discussed the issue of the Wall. The Wall, of
course, is an ugly obstacle which prevents a
view. But despite its oppression, it is still
possible to look at in an imaginative way. Many
Germans made the Berlin Wall into an artistic
object for graffiti and for drawings and other
things. So we used a film tape of the Wall as a
virtual background for children's graffiti,
poetry, drawings and drama. Again, no object can
be so resistant, so ugly, so onedimensional,
that it cannot be transformed by an act of
imagination.
In designing non-violent
actions, it is very helpful to take recourse to
the immense cultural resources available in the
Palestinian environment. In the Bethlehem area,
there is one example that is I think very
pertinent and with which I wish to conclude. My
daughter, when she was younger, always pointed
to the sculpture of St George above the lentils
of the doors. St George or, in Islam, Al Khader,
is of course a famous religious figure here. In
the village of Al Khader people literally
cherish hundreds of imaginative stories about
this figure. These stories bring a legendary St
George or Al Khader alive. During the Intifada
it happened in Beit Jala that one militant saw a
figure behind him who pointed out that he should
leave from the spot from where he had fired. He
did so and shortly afterwards a bomb fell right
there. He asked the people of Beit Jala and they
said it was St George. The point here is not
whether this interpretation is true or not.
Rather, the issue is that the image of St George
is still lively and has meaning for the people
there. How often did my mother in law shout "Oh
Khader!" when a bomb fell into the neighbourhood?
So why not thinking of a
modern drama of St George in relation to the
nearby terrible Al-Khader checkpoint? And to
perform such a drama in the heart of Al Khader,
inviting the foreign media, showing that the
people need protection and intervention,
providing local people a role in a reality play?
After all, who in the West doesn't know about St
George? (The Crusaders brought the stories of St
George to England where he became the country's
patron saint). In such a play, the past, present
and future would be brought together in the
service of imagination, human rights and change.
Concluding remark
When following this trail
of thoughts drama does not look like an Arts
subject confined to the school room and isolated
from reality. On the contrary, Arts serves to
evoke Palestinian reality, to deal with it, to
change it. In that sense, my argument is that a
plea for drama can be based not only on general
educational considerations, which are valid
enough, but also on how drama education
specifically serves Palestinians in facing
Palestinian reality. To press this point
further, and perhaps to put it a bit
provocative, I want to make a very last comment.
I think that imagination can make a significant
contribution to a culture of resistance in
Palestine, a culture which does not accept the
present-day reality of occupation. To illustrate
this, let's consider a main present symbol of
such a culture of resistance: the symbol of
sumud or steadfastness. Sumud means of course
that people are able to endure suffering, help
to keep community and society intact, help to
sharpen people's survival skills. It is no
exaggeration to say that Palestinian society is
a society of sumud, in which family, religion,
and a culture of solidarity help people to
survive. The well-known symbols of the olive
tree and the cactus, among others, express this
ability to withstand time and suffering. Sumud's
emphasis is upon strength, roots, patience,
immovability.
Yet in the service of a
culture of resistance, another, complementary
concept – as in the Chinese yin and yang – needs
to be developed, I think. In order to show
resistance, and also in order to keep one's
sumud, one is in need of the flexibility, the
manoeuvrability of the inventive, imaginative
person open for not adapting to reality but
seeing it in a different way and help changing
it. This is an educational task par excellence.
Drama can help to see reality but not to see it
so "heavily" that one is crushed under reality's
burden, that one is imprisoned by its concepts.
With its element of playfulness, drama helps to
look at reality in a somewhat less heavy way so
that one can detect the diversity of histories
and encounters, and the changeability of present
realities. It is here that drama in Palestinian
education and society in my opinion can give its
most profound contribution.
Thank
you. |
|
Writings
Toine van Teeffelen