Narrative power: Playback Theatre as cultural resistance in Occupied Palestine (original) (raw)

2015, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance

This paper describes The Freedom Theatre's Freedom Bus initiative and its use of Playback Theatre for community mobilisation and cultural activism within Occupied Palestine. Utilising a conflict transformation perspective, conventional dialogueoriented initiatives are contrasted against interventions that pursue concientisation and alliance building through participatory theatre and narrative-based processes. Playback Theatre is thus presented as one strategy that can be used within a broader framework of political action that seeks to address the asymmetrical power relations that characterise the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. November 2012: Israel is dropping bombs on Gazaagain. Riots are breaking out across the West Bank. Checkpoints are closed. Army jeeps are parked at every major intersection. Half of our theatre troupe is stopped from reaching the performance site. Those who can make it are gathered in Al Hadidiya, a small community located in the Jordan Valley, Occupied Palestine. The event has attracted local and international activists, Palestinian university students, a theatre director from London, a young Israeli activist and the former Vice President of the European Union, Luisa Morgantini. The majority of participants, however, are subsistence farmers and traditional herders from Al Hadidiya and neighbouring communities. The audience gains shade under a makeshift shelter of curved iron poles covered by sackcloth. The actors have levelled a space on the red, dusty ground. A small 'stage' is instantly prepared. Today, only two women are performing. Normally, four actors would be present. A 'Conductor' facilitates the event and two musicians sit to the side. The performance, 90 minutes in length, begins with a song but after that there is no script. All enactments will be improvised and based on real-life stories that are voluntarily shared by audience members. Nobody knows who will tell, or what stories will be shared. Uhm Zati 1 gets up to tell her story: My son, Quais was with the sheepover there, having his breakfastwhen suddenly a military jeep drove up from the settlement. A group of soldiers got out and handcuffed and blindfolded him. I was far away at that point but could see that they'd removed his