Peacebuilding, Conflict Transformation, and Conflict Zones

George Brant’s Grounded, at Olney Theatre, is a fast-paced, suspenseful, and moving one-woman show about a drone operator’s struggle to play two roles: annihilator and mother.

In his last installment, Brendan McCall talks with Nicolai Khalezin, one of the founders of Belarus Free Theatre about art, exile, and if theatre has any impact on politics.

Muslim theater artist Hafiz Karmali discusses the 12th-century Persian poem The Conference of the Birds and the overlap of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian performance traditions.

In this installment, Brendan explores what happened when he directed some of the plays from the Belarusian Dream Theater at Belarus’ exiled university, resulting in differing perspectives.

In addition to new works by Belarusian playwrights, writers as far-flung as Europe and the United States, Australia and New Zealand, ended up making excellent contributions. The Belarusian Dream Theater project linked playwrights with more than a dozen independent presenting groups in Europe and North America, who donated their time and talents to assemble the collaborators necessary to present as many of the twenty-five new plays as each group wanted.

Bertie Ferdman interviews Anne Hamburger about Basetrack Live, a multimedia theatre production inspired by Basetrack: One-Eight, a web project created in 2010 by photojournalists embedded with US Marines fighting in southern Afghanistan.

While I was reaping the benefits of working internationally, my Belarusian friends were living as a theater company in exile. What could I do to help make a difference? What tools could I use, as a theater artist, to break down this silence, censorship, and oppressive regime?

Derek Goldman offers an overview of the production of Syria: The Trojan Women.

On Sunday, August 24th at the Regional Arts Commission in St. Louis, St. Louis-based theater artists Jacqueline Thompson and Don McClendon participated in the #FergusonMoment gathering and workshop with forty-five local artists and five visiting artists. In the workshop, Don's story of a recent moment of racial profiling was the basis of a short play that the group created and investigated. On Tuesday, September 2nd, Jacqueline interviewed Don about his experience in the gathering.

I felt compelled to act, to do something, to speak up—but how? What could I, an expatriate American living in Scandinavia, do to break the zone of silence surrounding Belarus? While I was enjoying certain freedoms as a theater artist in this affluent Nordic country, my friends and colleagues elsewhere in Europe—writers, directors, journalists, and more—were being imprisoned and threatened.

The three-year occupation of Teatro Valle in Rome is now legendary: a spontaneous response to the failures of conventional government in supporting a venerated public theater, and the conversion of the theater into a commons by countless ordinary citizens. Now the mayor of Rome is threatening to end the occupation, evict the commoners, and privatize the management of the facility.

In a volatile, war-torn place, things change quickly and recurring issues of conflict, occupation, and survival dominate—all the more reason to have festivals like this and theaters like Ashtar that persist under such circumstances and create transformative experiences.

In 2012, eleven young theater students succeeded in starting Ashtar’s first youth festival. Ashtar Theatre, which was founded in 1991 by Iman Aoun and Edward Muallem, describes itself as “a dynamic local Palestinian theatre with a truly progressive global perspective.” Their core programs are drama training of local youth through an extracurricular after school program, Theater of the Oppressed Forum Theatre productions that explore “essential critical topics in Palestinian society” and international collaborations.

These personal experiences of Belarus Free Theatre—what they have endured, and what they are willing to sacrifice for what they believe in—humbles me. I cannot imagine being arrested for doing theater, much less being physically threatened by my own government for a play I wrote or acted in or directed. Would I be able to be as brave as Khalezin and Koliada or the other members of their company?

An apt topic of the DC Stage, Jesus at Guantanamo and Gilgamesh explore power and abuse through the failings of heroes