Theatre Transcending Trans-generational Trauma
Why do certain families have the same problems generation after generation? Why do neighboring communities war with each other generation after generation? The effects of trauma inflicted on entire communities can echo for generations. How can performing arts break the cycle?
I want to facilitate the transformation of traumatic cultural legacies into healing community-based theatre. Through a group dramatic process based in embodiment and animated interaction, participants can rescript their personal and collective narratives of inherited trauma. Our bodies hold the energy of trauma we experience in our lifetime and the inherited trauma of our ancestors.
Healing can’t start until the hurting is stopped. Under the surface of hatred and ethnic conflict is deep grief and collective pain, often-ancient pain, but how can that be accessed in hostile environments?
Theatre and Cultural Conflict
When I was in graduate school at I was fortunate to have Armond Volkas as a professor. Armond’s work as a Drama Therapist is focused around using Playback Theatre to work therapeutically with people from both sides of historical conflicts. He calls this work Healing the Wounds of History.
Armond Volkas' Healing the Wounds of History has a progression of process for working through historical trauma with people. From Roland Miller and Armand Volkas article published in 2007:
- Bring together conflicting groups, breaking taboo against speaking to each other.
- Humanizing each other through sharing stories.
- Owning and examining the perpetrator in all of us.
- Deep grieving of collective pain.
- Create performance in remembrance.
- Transforming cultural legacies into acts of creation/service.
In my anti-oppression work as an arts activist I came across the work of Arnold Mindell. Arnold Mindell works with large diverse groups facilitating interactive dialogue about social issues related to power and oppression, like racism, sexism, etc. He calls the approach he’s developed Wordwork.
In the Worldwork approach to working with Transgenerational Trauma in cultural conflicts the primary focus is on humanizing each other through sharing stories. Arnold Mindell wrote:
A prime cause of conflict is the imbalance of power, worldworkers' first step in facilitating conflict is to look, listen and try to empathize and feel the feelings of power and oppression on each side of a conflict. (p. 61)
Volkas' third step "Owning and examining the perpetrator in all of us" and Mindell's "feel the feelings of power and oppression on each side of the conflict" both have a similar aim. This is a stage where many people are resistant to such a process. It's easier to claim ways in which we have been violated than it is to account for ways which we have violated others. Once we can account for our own abuses of others we can more authentically heal the divides in society.
Are you ready to go there with me? I’ll be back December.
Written by Evan Hastings
References
Mindell, Arnold: SITTING IN THE FIRE, Large Group Transformation Using Conflict and Diversity. Lao Tse Press. Portland, Oregon, 1995.
Miller, R. & Volkas, A., "Healing the Wounds of History", from Interactive and Improvisational Drama: Varieties of Applied Theatre and Performance. iUniverse, Lincoln, NE, 2007.
Websites
http://www.livingartscenter.
nice.
ReplyDeletecan be cut short.