Odakle Ste? (Where Are You From?): Active Learning and Community-Based Theatre in Former Yugoslavia and the US

Sonja Kuftinec

Figures

Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just by sitting in class listening to teachers, memorizing prepackaged assignments, and spitting out answers. They must talk about what they are learning, write about it, relate it to past experiences, apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves.

--Arthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson (3)

I believe that theatre's function is to remind us of the big human issues, to remind us of our terror and our humanity. In our quotidian lives, we live in constant repetitions of habitual patterns. Many of us sleep through our lives. Art should offer experiences that alter these patterns, awaken what is asleep, and remind us of our original terror.

--Anne Bogart (7)

I remember my disorientation and anxiety upon entering the volunteers' bedroom in Refugee Camp Two, Varazdin, Croatia. A blanket draped on a frayed rope separated a group of army cots from the smoke-filled kitchen area. Darko, our sponsor from the Croatian-based volunteer organization Suncokret, introduced choreographer Sabrina Peck, photographer Jessie Chornesky, and me to a group of people, whom I assumed to be volunteers, sitting around a kitchen table. Only later did I learn that two of the "volunteers," Goran and Amra, were actually Bosnian refugees in the camp. They had not conformed to the picture in my head--they did not look or act as I expected refugees to behave. Through this disorientation, I learned to recognize and revise my (mis)perceptions. This moment marked the first of numerous incidents of facilitated learning and teaching, arrived at through disruptions engaged in developing original performances with youth in former Yugoslavia.

Creating theatre with participants who are not necessarily trained in the methodology of theatre-making provides several opportunities to examine the interactions of performance, identity, and learning. This article explores how the community-based performance process lends itself to active learning [End Page 171] techniques, detailing how participants, facilitators, and audience members learned about themselves and issues of identity through theatre pieces situated in the context of a war that is itself focused on identity. ¹ The article concludes with a brief look at how techniques learned in former Yugoslavia have been usefully adapted to teaching the diverse student body of California State University, Los Angeles.

Community-Based Theatre and Active Learning

The participatory aspects of creating and performing community-based theatre model active learning techniques. Active learning refers to a pedagogical approach that encourages students to engage in reflection, questioning, and commentary, prompting synthesis and analysis of information, as opposed to the passive listening and regurgitation promoted by the lecture format ("Active Learning" 1). Like active learning, original community-based theatre encourages participants to ask questions, detail observations, and draw inferences. As a storytelling medium, theatre also lends itself to effective teaching. Psychologists have discerned several techniques that aid in the synthesis of information, including vivid, visual storytelling, and providing experiential, relevant, emotionally affective models (Zimbardo lecture).

Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo cites "surprise," or the "violation of expectations" as an effective learning technique, echoing director Anne Bogart's emphasis on "disorientation" and "disruption." By disrupting conventions, theatre can prove pedagogically as well as artistically effective. Operating outside the realm of "conventional" theatre practice, community-based work operates as a learning tool by violating expectations of participants and facilitators. These initial violations can lead to further disruptions of form, providing a potential learning experience for audiences as well as participants.

Both active learning and community-based theatre practices also emphasize cooperation and long-term continuation. Community-based theatre, developed with, by, and for "communities," ² particularly benefits from collaboration with a local leadership structure. ³ Through Cornerstone, a community-based theatre company located in Los Angeles, I developed the Varazdin project with Suncokret, a Croatian-based humanitarian organization that sponsors volunteer projects in refugee camps. Suncokret organized our three-week stay in the summer of 1995, providing rehearsal and performance sites, a local population with whom to work, and a structure for participants to continue working together following our departure from the camp. I collaborated with Cornerstone member and independent director Sabrina Peck to create two original pieces with residents of the Varazdin camps and a community center for refugee teenagers. We produced a movement piece with children and a larger project with youth, Odakle Ste?, Gdje Ste?, Gdje Idete? (Where Are You From? Where Are You Now? Where Are You Going?). Both pieces involved direct participation, reflection, and collaboration with the refugee youth population. [End Page 172]

In 1996 I again collaborated with an ongoing local organization, Mladi Most (Youth Bridge) in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina. ⁴ I worked with Mladi Most volunteer and theatre artist Scot McElvany and English community educator and performance artist Kathy Tasker to develop an original theatre piece with Mostarian and German teenagers in Zuljana, on the coast of Croatia. This theatre camp endeavored to bring together teenagers from within and outside Mostar through arts activities. Both this piece and Odakle Ste? illustrate active learning techniques of reflection, observation, discussion, and personal relevance, drawing on images and narratives of home, family, and individual identity.

Although participants developed reflective exercises for these performances, they occurred within a form structured by theater directors Peck, McElvany, and myself. This form acknowledged our agency as directors, striving to limit as well as to enhance performance material. To prevent "trauma drama," we avoided focusing on war experiences in Odakle Ste? Participants and local leaders helped to define the form of the piece, while we worked to create a space for personal reflection, experiential re-presentation, and individual envisioning. The shape we arrived at asked the questions: "Where are you from?" "Where are you now?" and "Where are you going?" The first section of the piece reflected on home, family, and past activities; the second section re-presented life in the camp; and the third envisioned possible futures outside of the camp, outside of the participants' lives as "refugees." We shaped the material through movement exercises, narrative layering, sound and music, and structural changes. But the actual movement, music, and text of the show arose directly from participants.

The "question" format of the Odakle Ste? production guided initial workshops, inviting active participation and reflection while acknowledging our agency as questioners and our position as outsiders. One of the first exercises we developed began by asking, "Where are you from?" In order to create examples and establish trust, Peck, another American volunteer named Jennifer, and I also participated. This participation added to the performance of intercultural commonality around themes of "family" and "home," while also signifying intercultural differences. Bosnian and Croatian teenagers generally named a specific town, while participating Suncokret volunteers named regions, or expressed answers metaphorically: "I'm from the mountains," noted volunteer Jennifer, while I spoke of being from "a place of music." We asked the question again, evoking more specific, reflective responses. Bojan noted that his town had a wood industry. Mircad described his home as a "small town." Other responses conjured more complex notions of "home," positioning this place in a more immediate political context by referencing the impact of the ongoing war. Samir, from Brcko, described this place as "a town that is now completely destroyed." Edo spoke of his home as "a city that now has cows and chickens in the roads." Amir referred to his hometown as both "beautiful and ugly." Time and historical circumstances had changed the nature of these refugees' homes. Home had been "destroyed"; it was a city now overwhelmed by the "cows and chickens" of a rural region. The [End Page 173] memory of "home" was "beautiful" while the actuality was now "ugly." Other responses referenced the political circumstances that had changed the nature of the re-membered home. Deniza spoke of being from a place of "sadness," Renata saw her Croatian home as a place of "shadows," and Sanila spoke of hers as a site of "history."

The process of engaging the youth to make detailed observations, ask questions, and reflect upon such common entities as home, family, and daily life continued in the development of pieces for the show. Other exercises involved thinking of an activity enjoyed in the place that we were from, then breaking down that activity into four distinct movements. We also created narrative exercises in which participants reflected upon past experiences and wrote in a condensed form. One such exercise had participants (always including ourselves) write about a vivid memory of family in four sentences. We listed things that we had brought with us to the camp, favorite foods no longer available in the camp, the sounds and the smells of the place that we were from, and ideas about future activities--where we would be, with whom, doing what. In all phases of the development process, we encouraged participants to "make what they learned a part of themselves" (Chickering 3), to relate general concepts about "home" and "family" to their individual experience and vice versa. We reinforced reflection about these concepts, as well as about the process itself, by ending each workshop with a "check out" period of commentary on the session.

Theatre as Memorable Learning

While the development process exemplified elements of active learning, the performance itself modeled effective learning techniques. As Zimbardo explains, memorable learning occurs through vivid, emotionally effective storytelling and through a disruption of expectations. The work in Varazdin and Zuljana involved both: we disrupted audience expectations about theatrical form through a layered collage of movement, narrative, music, and sound, rather than a linear narrative, while participants taught us through vivid, experiential narratives.

In Varazdin we had not asked participants to discuss their war experience. However, many details about that experience arose from the participants themselves, informing the visual and aural environment of the performance. Edo's city "that now has cows and chickens in the roads," referred to the influx of displaced rural villagers into Bosnian cities. Amir's "beautiful and ugly" hometown suggested a place recently ravaged by the war. Sounds and smells of "home" also included relevant personal details such as, "vinegar," "horses," "home baked bread," and "people laughing" as well as "grenades" and "bombs destroying my house."

Another reflective and relevant performance moment arose from an exercise in which participants listed things they had brought with them to [End Page 174] Varazdin. We learned that most refugees had only been allowed one shopping bag, or less, of belongings to take with them on their journey to the camps. Everyone then underlined their three most important items and circled the most essential. All of the camp residents could write down exactly what they had brought with them, including the number of pairs of underwear and t-shirts. Many circled photograph albums or address books as their most essential items. Other responses were more affective, with Armin circling "my brother" as his most important item. Sadika's list told a narrative of departure, including only "the clothes I had on" and "food for a day." These and other moments in the performance provided stories relevant to the camp audience.

In the Odakle Ste? portion of the show, participants condensed family narratives to four lines, providing vivid experiential detail as well as suggesting inferences beyond the personal. Bojan's story read:

My brother and I are fighting.
There is a war going on outside.
My parents are separating us.
I think of when I used to hold him in my arms when he was a baby,
and I know that all fighting is senseless.

Bojan's narrative reflects and comments on external circumstances through personal memory. He juxtaposes a fight between brothers with a war among people of similar ethnic heritage. To Bojan, the origin of the fight is less important than the senselessness of conflict itself. Bojan's narrative also suggests that external or parental authority may be necessary to resolve conflict; the almost sentimental nostalgia for the peace of unity was echoed, in some ways, by the unity of the audience brought together through performance.

The Gdje Idete? or future portion of the performance also involved commentary relevant to ourselves and the audience. In developing this section, participants envisioned where they saw themselves in the future, with whom, doing what, and articulated an overall vision for the future. The responses were revealing as much for their commonplaceness as their particularity. Desires to "have a normal life" or to "do the usual things I did before the war" suggest the importance of the norm when seen in the relief of its seeming unattainability. Both Riki and Bojan wanted to be "home again" with their "family" "finishing school." Riki hoped for "time to draw cartoons." Several participants had specific occupations in mind, common to many teenagers. Bojan wanted to "be a computer expert," Amra to "work with handicapped children," and Deniza to "be a dentist." The more particular impact of the war fostered ambivalent reactions, again vivid in detail. Marko's desire to "go alone to the mountains" and "sleep for two years" implied a general exhaustion with his situation. While Sadika hoped for "love and justice" and Ajla wanted "to help people in trouble," Amir and Jasna expressed their wish to fight back. Jasna wanted to "be alone in Sarajevo fighting [Serb nationalist] Cetniks." ⁵ Amir hoped to "be in Bosanska Gradiska without Serbs there" and "with the brother [he hadn't] seen for five [End Page 175] years," and then to "have kids to fight the war." The piece also provided a place for disruptions, complexity, and ambivalence. Citing what he most wanted in the future, Amir commented, "peace and love, but that's not possible now." Jasna, who had earlier expressed her intention to fight Serbs in Sarajevo, surprised everyone by stepping out in the performance to express her desire for mir (peace).

While war indirectly effected the performance piece in Varazdin, participants in the Zuljana camp chose to create a piece based directly on their war experience. After witnessing the impact of two performance pieces exploring ideas of home, family, and waiting, several Mostarian youths asked McElvany, who lived and worked in Mostar, to help them develop a piece on the war through which they had all lived during four years of fighting in Mostar. ⁶ Mladi Most, the organization with which McElvany worked, strives to allow youth divided between East and West Mostar to come together through social activities, including the theatre camp. The camp also brought together Mostarians with German youth, groups that experienced difficulty interacting on a number of levels. The performance of Podrum (Basement) provided a site at which Mostarians could express, and Germans could learn about, the Mostarians's experience. The emotional impact of the piece proved memorable for many of the German participants, initiating dialogue between the groups where little had previously occurred.

Recognizing the delicacy of the emotional material with which he was working, McElvany developed narratives that attempted to move beyond headline coverage of the war. In one exercise he asked participants to write in four lines about "a moment when you felt very safe or very good to be where you were." ⁷ The condensed narratives revealed emotional and contextual detail about the war. Anela wrote:

Last year I was in Germany with my friends.

For us that was a time for rest, at least for one moment we forgot the fears of a dirty war.

Four years of this war, for those who have skipped the most important time of their lives, has been too much.

Even before this war we did not care about religion, it was only important that we were together . . . not any more.

In addition to indicating her ambivalence about the supposed religious causes of the war, Anela's narrative communicates the existential frustration of having "skipped life," of having lived through an experience in which "caring" about religion kept friends from the importance of "being together."

Supa's narrative echoes Anela's frustrations about the "stupid" war and its casualties, while gesturing toward a place where people love, care, and "cry for" themselves. [End Page 176]

Many times I ask myself why this stupid war has started.

Maybe it is made by those people who don't have anyone to take care and cry for them, I don't know.

I only know that I miss my friends and brother that this war took away.

I feel best when I'm with my friends and girlfriend--I think that love is the beginning or base of another better life and I go for it, follow it and believe in a better future.

Hajdi's narrative (see fig. 1) occurred towards the end of the piece. It also vividly details the personal impact of the war and suggests a place for hope.

During the shelling of the town, we had been sitting in the basement and we hadn't seen a single spot of light in the dark of the war.

We heard only screams, grenades and crying.

One of my friends took a guitar and started to play and we sang so loud that we did not hear the noise, grenades, screams.

This was the bright light that we felt at least for a moment, it helped us forget everything that was happening.

Hajdi's story provides strong visual and aural images, contrasting light and dark, evoking "screams, grenades and crying" as well as the more surprising [End Page 177] sound of the guitar playing above the "expected" noises of war. In the performance, Hajdi spoke her narrative in Bosnian as other members of the group huddled together in an island image from a previous moment in the show. The piece concluded with Hajdi joining the group, who then loudly sang a song together. Though the Germans in the audience could not literally understand Hajdi's narrative, they responded to the emotional impact of its performance. According to interviews and reports, the audience stood in silence after the performance until Supa brought them together in a circle to "howl in peace." Frauke, a German audience member, later spoke of how the performance offered a "window of understanding" to what had gone on in Mostar. Another audience member, Michael, spoke of the impact of seeing everybody "deep inside the performance." Through the performance, he began to understand "more than when someone talked about" the war. ⁸ Facilitator Kathy Tasker explained, "It is difficult to image [from media accounts] how small things change during the war. I feel finally like I have made some kind of connection from being here." These participants and audience members articulate their memorable learning experience, engaged by the performance of experiential, emotionally evocative "small" detail, which led to "understanding" beyond mere talking and newspaper reports. Other aspects of the development process promoted learning by complicating ideas about community and identity.

Theatre-making and Identity

The concept of community remains difficult to pin down, but depends in large part on borders of inclusion and exclusion. Community members define these borders in both perceptual and material ways, noting shared values, interests, and territories, while differentiating themselves from others who don't share these defining features. Yet even within seemingly bounded communities, differences exist, and individuals continuously cross and renegotiate borders of difference. In The Symbolic Construction of Community sociologist Anthony Cohen suggests that while boundaries of identity hold great meaning for the individual, these borders are more perceptual than actual, and can thus be redrawn. As a site of re-presentation, performance becomes a medium through which this redrawing can occur. The performance process reinforces commonalities, illuminates difference, and alters boundaries of identity, bringing together, for a time, those who perceive themselves as belonging to different communities.

Before beginning work on the Varazdin project, Peck, Chornesky, and I had presumed a commonality of background and experience among the refugees, mostly Muslims from Bosnia. Engagement in the performance process revealed internal divisions characterized by differences in education, ethnicity, and age, among other factors. These differences suggest the difficulty of drawing clear boundaries within and between groups and categories in the Balkans. ⁹ Early stages of rehearsal revealed how the semiotics of space and language inscribed difference among refugee teenagers in Varazdin. [End Page 178]

Varazdin hosted two refugee camps housed in former army barracks, as well as a community center for teens and youth, sponsored by Immigrant and Refugee Services of America (IRSA), a private nonprofit organization. Though residents could freely enter and exit the camps, concrete walls and fences bounded the area, and a guard house stood by the gateway to the town. In contrast, IRSA had established the Varazdin community center in a house, and, though it purported to serve all of the teenagers in the area, focused its programming on the often better-educated and better-off refugees who lived in private residences. Activities within the center and the camps further illuminated the distance between groups. The IRSA staff provided music lessons and instruments, computer training, language lessons, video movies, foosball, and pool. The camps offered a one-room, unfurnished Teen Center, a coffee bar, and a disco club--closed soon after our arrival because of fights between camp and town teens.

Though we lived in Camp Two during our stay, our Suncokret contact Darko asked us to focus our work in Camp One, where other volunteers were not already working. In the first few days, Darko, who shared office space with IRSA in the community center, helped us to gather participants from both the community center and Camp One without explaining the differences between the two groups. Other volunteers eventually filled us in. The refugees fortunate enough to live with relatives instead of in the camps had often left Bosnia before being forced to leave and were thus able to take advantage of the opportunities awarded to their Croatian relatives. Camp One and Two youth had less access to education, fewer material belongings, and less to do in the camps. ¹⁰ Camp One also included a population of non-nomadic Romany who had often been excluded from, or had chosen not to participate in, the Bosnian education system. Thus, most of the IRSA teens spoke English, while few of the Romany youth did. These factors set up ethnic, class, and communication barriers between ourselves and the two groups. (I speak only conversational Bosnian, and Peck had just recently begun her study of the language. ¹¹ ) We relied on the IRSA teens to translate our English directions, later realizing that the English-speaking teens had provided edited translations, delivered with derision and impatience.

When working with a population outside of an acknowledged "professional" system, few conventions exist, and choices are rarely perceived as neutral; both language and location magnified the disparity between IRSA and Romany youth from the camp. On the first night, we met for physical exercises in the Teen Center of Camp One, encouraging IRSA teens to cross boundaries into the camp, which they were hesitant to do. Their fears about the camp's more chaotic environment were confirmed that evening as younger children interrupted the rehearsal, shouting and spitting through the windows. We decided to meet the following evening in the IRSA house and accompanied the Romany camp teenagers across boundaries into the town. In this second rehearsal we focused on verbal rather than physical exercises, which exacerbated the communication problems between the groups. [End Page 179] Miscommunication about the purpose of the exercise led the Romany youth to misinterpret and "mis-perform," evoking laughter from the IRSA teens. The Romany youth did not return to rehearsals, now conducted exclusively at the IRSA center to avoid the disruptions engendered by the lack of private space in the camp. Efforts to rehearse privately with the Romany youth in their residence camp also failed, suggesting that early mutual misunderstandings had caused a loss of interest and trust.

Rehearsal transactions with refugee youth revealed these and other subtle, yet vital, divisions of community through the enactment of difference. In Ethnicity: Source of Strength? Source of Conflict? sociologist Milton Yinger proposes that an understanding of how a community defines itself should focus on boundaries of difference rather than on internal commonalities. While my analysis posits more fluid boundaries of differences within and between communities, the performance process did in some ways function as a site of differentiation as well as a site for boundary crossing. Populations marked by divisions in class, ethnicity, language, and location could enact these differences by refusing to cross physical boundaries or to translate English instructions. Yet, the process also enabled a temporary negotiation of boundaries. We began working with youth from the camp in which we were living, and they did eventually cross physical and perceptual boundaries to work together with the IRSA group, who they initially claimed were "stuck up." Though the Romany boys chose not to continue participating in the production, other populations did, at least temporarily, come together through the production process.

The performance event enacts what Victor Turner refers to as a moment of communitas. In From Ritual to Theatre, Turner defines communitas as a time when external status structures momentarily dissipate through the social bonding of ritual or play, resulting in a feeling of oneness, or "community" (45-46). We performed Odakle Ste? in the Women's Center of Camp Two, bringing together camp and IRSA participants with an audience representative of both populations. The audience physically and actively integrated themselves into the performance. Several of our older friends helped to prepare the stage area, moving weaving looms, sweeping the floor, and arranging chairs. The unembellished, level architecture of the room further contributed to the audience's integration, allowing for little separation from the performers. The audience of camp residents, Suncokret and IRSA workers, and relatives of the IRSA youth who lived in the town of Varazdin filled the space fully ten minutes before the start of the performance. They watched quietly as the cast participated together in a warm up, attended to the performance, and joined in the final song, which led into a more open-ended participatory musical festival, spilling into a late-night party.

The performance united participants as well as audience members. Sanimir, one of the more reluctant performers, became invested in the production by arriving an hour before the show and then accompanying songs on the guitar. Armin, who had decided not to perform, was placed in charge of [End Page 180] lighting and handing out programs. Boundaries between IRSA and camp youth, volunteers and residents, town and camp residents, IRSA and Suncokret workers, and audience and performers seemed to dissolve in the moment of performance. Status structures did seem to dissipate, resulting in a feeling of "oneness." This moment of communitas is extremely powerful in the way that it dissolves as well as potentially conceals difference. As Cohen points out, and as Turner himself underlines, communitas is an essential though temporary enactment of community, and can thus veil difference as much as it seemingly enacts commonality. Theatre can edit and exclude, concealing its dissonances and limitations in the momentary unity of performance; it is important to maintain an awareness of these limitations in analyzing the impact of community-based productions. Finally, working as a facilitator involved in the performance process can also conceal the difficult negotiation of power and agency involved in guiding a performance as an "outsider."

Learning as a Facilitator: More Terror, Disorientation, and Disruption

Often operating as "outsiders" to a local population, community-based theatre facilitators must constantly renegotiate their positions in relation to the community. They must balance their role of soliciting participants' input with the agency implicit in artistically shaping and editing a performance. The facilitator must remain aware of her power to evoke the emotionally effective material that provides such memorable experiences for performers and audience. At the same time, the fluidity of community borders illuminated through the production process suggests the potential for shifting the facilitator's position as "outsider" in relation to the "community."

Though I am not from former Yugoslavia, my father is. This relationship, coupled with my limited knowledge of Bosnian, allows me some mobility in relation to the "community" of Bosnian youth. While Scot McElvany has no familial affiliation to former Yugoslavia, he has lived and worked in Mostar for over a year. This work and the relationships it has fostered allow him some mobility in relation to the community of Mostarian youth, establishing the trust and "insider status" that enabled these youth to approach him about facilitating a theatrical expression of their war experience. However, this engagement of trust did not prevent a crisis arising early in the process, one from which both participants and facilitators learned.

Though the Mostarian youth had asked McElvany to guide them in their performance, he realized early in the development process that he and they were initially unaware of the emotional power of their narrated experience. McElvany began by asking participants to articulate the most common question they asked themselves during the fighting. Performers combined the questions with a movement exercise in which they substituted water for daily activities. According to McElvany's notes on the process, Supa, crouched over a bowl, slapped water to his face as though smoking it, looked up, paused and asked, [End Page 181] "Why did I lose my brother . . . do you know?" Ersan then arose, threw water in the air as a soccer ball, kicked it angrily and asked, "Why do I live here?" He paused, sat down, and said he couldn't continue. Following this disruption, McElvany stopped the workshop to reflect on the process with participants. He asked whether they wished to continue, requesting their permission to continue asking questions of them. In a reversal of the common terminology of community-based theatre work, the participants had to "empower" the facilitator. Ersan looked to Supa, the acknowledged local leader of the group. With a nod from Supa, and some reflection amongst themselves, all the youth asserted their desire to continue developing the performance.

In Varazdin, Peck and I had a similar experience learning to negotiate artistic power with the daily life of the camp. We had been having problems with some teenage boys during the rehearsal process and had repeatedly asked them to leave because they seemed more interested in playing cards than in rehearsing. The boys broke our window in retaliation and generally harassed the workshop participants. The evening of our dress rehearsal, the boys positioned themselves outside an open window and shouted commentary through the final run-through. Frustrated, we wondered how they might be prevented from disturbing the next evening's performance. A negotiation process ensued, in which many participants, as well as Darko, the Suncokret coordinator, questioned our own judgment and behavior towards the boys. Darko reminded us that he felt responsible for integrating the boys, whom he knew to be suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, into the camp community. This integration seemed ultimately more important than the momentary success of the performance. Eventually we spoke with the boys' therapist, who had fortuitously scheduled a group appointment in the hour before the performance. We learned that the boys had felt excluded by the performance process. They believed that we wanted to work with the more "popular" teenage girls, and not with them. The disruption caused by the boys' behavior prompted reflection and reassessment of our process. Perceptions of our own behavior and theirs shifted, and we agreed to invite the boys to see the show if they agreed to respect the performance. Accompanied by their social worker, the boys became an attentive part of the audience. In both of these examples, learning evolved from ruptures within the process, which itself focused directly or indirectly on the war in former Yugoslavia. As I discovered through teaching at California State University, such experience of rupture could extend beyond Bosnia.

Teaching as Facilitator: Active Learning

I have recently begun to use many of the exercises that focus on identity, family, and community in an introductory theatre class at California State University, Los Angeles. The class includes readings about theatre and its elements, but also involves students in the creation of short theatre pieces. Developing these pieces experientially engages students in learning the roles of actor, director, and playwright, and allows for learning about each other as [End Page 182] individuals and members of various communities. Like the work in former Yugoslavia, the exercises can also disrupt (mis)perceptions about the individual and social identities of the diverse group of students that I teach. ¹²

After beginning the class with conventional warm-up exercises, name games, and group work, I introduce an exercise developed over the course of my work in former Yugoslavia, where simple movement and text initially overcame language barriers. In workshops around Europe and the US, I found that these exercises also worked well with individuals who had little performance experience. The students interview each other, gathering information on their partner's name, two ways that person identifies him or herself (as an accounting major, a mother, an Armenian, a soccer player), and one unexpected fact (being Mexican but not liking beans, really liking disco music, enjoying strolling naked at home). Each partner then thinks of a favorite activity and breaks that activity into four distinct movements, ending with an emotional expression of how it feels to complete the activity. The partners combine the two parts of the exercise: one gives the introduction as the other moves; one line of the four-part introduction accompanies each of the four movements. The exercise provides an intriguing juxtaposition of verbal and physical imagery that can either complement or contradict aspects of the individual's identity, suggesting the multiple ways that individuals identify themselves. I have been "disoriented" by many "surprising facts"; I have learned, for example, that a perceptually white student defined herself as Japanese, that a football player loved ballroom dancing, that one student worked full-time as a fire fighter. Emotional reflection and expression, the vividness of the movement, the personal relevance and experiential nature of the exercise also promote understanding of the elements of acting and writing.

In a Boalian exercise I developed in Bosnia, students work in small groups to create sculptures of their families, using space and physicality to express relationships among family members. Images reflect relationships of support, distance, tension, and closeness. The individual creating the image functions as a director, "casting" the group as members of his or her family. The director must communicate character traits and familial relations, and the other students learn how to develop roles, asking detailed questions about relationships among family members and their emotional expression. Rather than explicitly outlining the purpose of the sculpting, the exercise encourages students to learn through reflection. The exercise also prompts discussion of differences and commonalities among families, and differences between "American" families and families in immigrant students' native countries. This exercise also teaches me about my students' identity communties.

When working with a refugee or youth group in former Yugoslavia, I am attuned to community difference and the negotiation of social identity. In my "hometown" of Los Angeles it becomes easy to forget that American students also mark boundary differences. While family exercises illustrate similarities, they can also prompt reflection about intercommunity differences and boundary [End Page 183] crossing, as students set up as well as dismantle social boundaries. The diverse, multi-ethnic student population of California State University exhibits no qualms about casting their "families" across gender and racial boundaries. Yet students have sculpted "ideal" families in which they erase a sibling's gay lover. In another class, however, two men openly sculpted family images that included their lovers. The exercises reveal less about definitive social boundaries of difference, pointing more to the fluidity and negotiation of these boundaries.

Thus, while the students and I learn about differences and similarities in the family images and values among us, students also discover that effective theatre involves relating to, as well as discerning, difference. They perceive that theatre can engage, as well as teach, and that theatre serves an individually reflective as well as a social function. Students watch and listen actively, learning about theatre by reflecting on themselves and each other. In accordance with Chickering's principles, they learn by applying theatre "to their daily lives" and "past experience." As active participants, they discover that "learning is not a spectator sport." As a facilitator open to disorientation, I too actively learn, in both the urban territory of war-ravaged Bosnia and the terrain of the urban university classroom. By altering accepted practice and patterns of expectations and by questioning conventions, we as facilitators can awaken ourselves to the "terror" of learning. We can uncover difference, surprise ourselves with commonality, and remind ourselves of our humanity, promoting theatre that reflects on the quotidian and actively engages students and teachers in their own learning.

Sonja Kuftinec is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Los Angeles.

Notes

1. Conflict in former Yugoslavia arises from issues of ethnicity, religious affiliation, and the consolidation of individual power by leaders such as Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, and Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. "Yugoslavia," literally, "Land of South Slavs," referred to a region encompassing several territories and intermixed groups. Among these territories, Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina harbor residents of similar ethnic origin who, for the most part, speak the same language, but who vary in religious affiliation and practice. While mainly Eastern Orthodox Christian "Serbs" live in Serbia, and mostly Roman Catholic "Croatians" inhabit Croatia (with significant exceptions), Bosnia is home to Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Muslim, as well as to Jewish and Romany (Gypsy) inhabitants. This delineation is complicated by the fact that few citizens of former Yugoslavia actively practice their religions. Frequent intermarriage also blurs religious and national boundaries of identity.

2. "Community" may refer to shared geography, interests, or backgrounds. For a detailed analysis of community-based theatre, see my article "A Cornerstone for Rethinking Community Theater."

3. Community organizer Saul Alinsky emphasizes the importance of working with local leaders in Reveille For Radicals. My projects in former Yugoslavia have all arisen in cooperation with organizations based there.

4. The official name for the region generally referred to as Bosnia is "Bosnia and Herzegovina," also translated as "Bosnia-Herzegovina." The territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina includes the northern region of Bosnia as well as southwestern Herzegovina, a mixed, but more Catholic-affiliated or "Croatian Bosnian" area. I use the term "Bosnia" to refer to the entire country. Though Mostar is located in Herzegovina, it remains part of the larger area of "Bosnia-Herzegovina."

5. "Cetniks" refer to royalist Serbian forces who massacred Muslim and Croatian citizens, as well as Serb partisan forces, during World War II. This renaming of the present-day nationalist Serb forces suggests the tie of the present moment to the historical past and renders the conflict less of a contemporary political manipulation than a historical necessity--a problematic revision for all sides.

6. In most of Bosnia, external partisan forces had shot at villages from surrounding hills. The most devastating fighting in Mostar, however, raged within the city itself between Croatian-affiliated forces and Bosnian Muslims. Family and friends had been separated, and a third of the city was destroyed. Most Bosnian children and youth still fear crossing between the East and West sides of the city, a line that now defines "Croatian" and "Muslim" territories.

7. All subsequent references are to McElvany's unpublished notes on the performance process.

8. Michael Schmidt, personal interview, 3 Jan. 1997.

9. The perceptual nature of cultural boundaries does not deny their importance during the Balkan conflict. Bosnian Serbs cited "national interest" in cleansing parts of Bosnia from "the Turks"--a common way of referring to Bosnian Muslims. Many thousands were killed because of cited religious and cultural differences.

10. According to Suncokret, until 1994 Bosnian youth were prohibited from attending Croatian high schools. Analyst Tin Gazivoda commented in a personal interview that many Bosnian students attained Croatian nationality and privileges through relatives and contacts.

11. Bosnians, Serbians, and Croatians all speak basically the same language, formerly known as "Serbo-Croatian." Members of varying ethnic groups now refer to the language that they speak as "Croatian," "Bosnian," "Serbian," or "Serbo-Croatian," depending on their self-identified national or multinational affiliations.

12. The ethnic make-up of my introductory class generally includes about 30% Asian American, 40% Latino students, and a mix of Caucasian, Central Asian, Middle Eastern, and African American students. Many work full-time and have returned to school at a more advanced age than the typical 18 to 21 year old.

Works Cited

"Active Learning: Getting Students to Work and Think in the Classroom." Speaking of Teaching. Stanford University Pamphlet Series (Fall 1993) : 1-2.

Alinsky, Saul. Reveille For Radicals. New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1969.

Bogart, Anne. "Terror, Disorientation and Difficulty." Anne Bogart: Viewpoints. Eds. Michael Bigelow Dixon and Joel A. Smith. Lyme, NH: Smith and Krause, 1995. 5-12.

Chickering, Arthur W. and Zelda F. Gamson. "Seven Principles for Good Practice." AAHE Bulletin 39 (Mar. 1987): 3-7.

Cohen, Anthony. The Symbolic Construction of Community. New York: Tavistock, 1985.

Gazivoda, Tin. Personal interview. 12 June 1996.

Kuftinec, Sonja. "A Cornerstone for Rethinking Community Theater." Theatre Topics 6.1 (May 1989): 91-104.

Schmidt, Michael. Personal interview. 3 Jan. 1997.

Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ, 1982.

--. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969.

Yinger, J. Milton. Ethnicity: Source of Strength? Source of Conflict? Albany: State U of New York P, 1994.

Zimbardo, Philip. "Memorable Teaching." Stanford University Lecture. 27 Apr. 1995.

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