It all started between Haifa and Jenin.
I can’t be sure, as my vantage point wasn’t fantastic--I crouched a few meters away from the group, trying for an artistic low-angle shot of the activity with my video camera. Ben was in the thick of it, standing in our Scarf Map of Palestine alongside the students.
“I’m curious,” he says. “Where in Palestine are you from?”
It’s our second day with this new group. We spent yesterday creating fluid sculptures and short improvised stories, and today we’re hoping to give some context to the Playback Theatre project as a whole.
Together, the students created a map of Palestine on the floor using materials from the rehearsal room. Scarves are stretched out to form the borders and walls. Drums and whistles mark cities.
Now the guys huddle around their respective cities of origin--one on Haifa, the other four in Jenin. Ben asks them where their parents were born, and their great-grandparents, and where they’d like to live. They relocate on the map (or relative to it) according to their answers.
I love this activity, and I think Ben facilitates it brilliantly. I watched him offer it for the first time last week, and was happy to see him use it again. I grabbed the video camera to document.
But something’s different today. The boys shuffle and mumble in Arabic, speaking all at once and seeming disconnected from the activity. Several times Ben asks them to listen as their classmate speaks.
“Please,” he says. They become quiet. “It gets very boring to keep repeating, listen, listen. As a teacher, I feel bored doing it.” Ben affects a wilting flower on the word bored, and some folks laugh.
But the instant we return to the activity, everyone is talking at once, laughing amongst one another to the near complete disregard of Ben and the scarf map beneath them.
“Alright,” Ben calls over the din. He walks away from Floor-Haifa to retrieve the ball from last week’s process. “Whoever holds the ball can speak, one at a time.” The room becomes still, and I sense a shift. I click the camera off.
~ ~ ~
“I wonder,” Ben says as I approach the group. “I wonder how many of you think you might one day give a theatre workshop. Raise your hand if you think you might be the teacher in a theatre school or in the community someday.”
Almost everyone raises their hand.
“What would you do if you were leading an exercise, and the students all started talking at once?”
And, as if on cue, they all respond at once.
“Here,” he says. “This is the place of the teacher.” He makes a sturdy, grounded stance somewhere north of Jenin. “Do any of you have an idea? What would you do?”
He tosses the ball to one of the students, who replaces Ben at the head of the map. He speaks rapidly in Arabic, pantomiming a broad backhand sweep with one hand. The guys all laugh.
“He says that he would slap him,” says Re’wa.
“So, you would slap the students who talk.” Ben clarifies. Yes, he would. More laughter.
“Okay. What else? Any other ideas?”
Saber takes the ball and speaks in his characteristic broad way, nodding and drawing circles in the air. After a minute in Arabic, he translates for himself.
“I would let the student do what he wanted. If the student does not want to do something, then as a teacher I would move to do something more.”
I feel a little sheepish, and take it personally. They didn’t want to play our games, we’re boring.
But Ben’s beyond it. “Alright, but what if the students keep talking, even after you’ve changed the activity a dozen times, they just don’t like anything you’re doing. What would you do then?”
Saber thinks about it. “I don’t know,” he says. “If a student doesn’t enjoy it, then why are we doing it?”
A good question, I think.
Another student begins to speak.
“Ah, the ball, please.” Saber lobs the ball to Mutaz.
“Here is my question,” he says. “What is the purpose of all this? We have foreigners coming, many foreigners to do the same exercise all of the time and I want to learn Playback Theatre. What is the purpose of this?”
Another student grabs the ball.
“Why so long, also? We have one half-hour break from early early until four, all the time we are doing Playback Theatre--why? I go to school for 12 years, every day waking up early to go to school and come back and it’s shit, I don’t want to feel like this at the Freedom Theatre.”
Ben requests the ball and speaks.
“I’m hearing that, for some of you, this reminds you of going to school and you don’t like that memory.” Ben grabs a woodblock from the panoply of objects at his feet, walks a few meters away, and places it on the floor.
“Everyone who is reminded of school by this activity, and doesn’t like it, please stand over here.”
Mutaz considers, then crosses to join him. I reflect on my feeling of boredom from earlier in the morning, my frustration with learning the new forms of Playback, and decide to join Mutaz in the spirit of honesty.
My internal monologue becomes nasty. Asshole, it says. Who are you to criticize Ben’s work? What the crap would you do instead? I look at my feet.
Undaunted as ever, Ben continues. “Okay, so not many of you, alright.” Anas requests the ball.
“Have we frustrated you? We like the class, really, and I hope we haven’t frustrated you.”
Ben tangos. “Thank you, Anas, for your thought, but I’d like to understand what we can do to make this situation more enjoyable for everyone. Because I respect you all as adults.”
“Of course, of course,” says Saber. He reaches for the ball. “Can I say something?” The class becomes quiet.
“Ben, I want to say, we come back from Germany weeks ago, where we are performing everyday, everyday, and go out at night and party and having fun, and now we’re in Jenin and there’s shit on the street and the people in the camp with no hope, and it’s shit, yes. I feel it is shit.”
Something stirs in me as Saber speaks. I feel the last few months have been similar for me in a personal way; I feel I’ve come home, into my body, and seen a lot of psychological shit in the streets.
“And now you’re in Jenin, and doing activities all day and you want to perform, that’s how you’re feeling?”
“Yes,” says Saber. There’s fire in his eyes. “Yes that’s how I’m feeling.”
His classmates agree. They’ve just returned from a month-long tour of Europe, where they performed and spoke about Palestine. They are loathe to be back, and bursting with stories about their trip at every moment--over their cigarettes, during the workshop, at lunch.
“Thank you for sharing,” says Ben. “This is helping me understand what we can do.”
The guys want a cigarette break, so we take one. As they file out into the courtyard, I look over the forgotten Map of Palestine on the floor. Popular education, I think. Not particularly conducive to activity agendas.
~ ~ ~
After everyone leaves the room, Ben asks me what I think about the conversation.
“It makes sense to me,” he says. “Of course they’re feeling frustrated with the activities; we haven’t really given them any context for it, any idea of what a Playback performance might look like.”
When we return, Ben asks them if they think today’s discussion has been productive. Saber doesn’t.
“I want to learn about Playback theatre,” he says. “Not talk.”
“Well, this process right now,” says Ben. “You’re learning about Playback--how to listen to a community.”
Saber throws two hands up in front of himself, alright, alright. “It is new for me, so okay. I believe you.”
Ben continues to explain the projected schedule for the project--how they will have a few months to rehearse, how a typical performance might be conducted, which communities they could potentially visit to perform for. They nod, beginning to see the structure, relieved to have reason for the voice and movement exercises.
“I have a last question,” asks Ben. “About the conversation we’ve just had. If we had just come in, Christine and I, and buldozed through you guys, ‘no, these are the exercises and we’re gonna do it whether you want to or not,’ how would you have felt?”
Mutaz takes the ball. “Like bullshit, this is bullshit.”
“Like this is bullshit,” Ben echoes.
“I would have left,” says Mutaz.
“Thank you all for being honest, it’s helped me figure out how we can continue working together.”
“No, thank you, thank you,” Ala' says. “This is a conversation very needed.”
“Returning to the map,” says Ben. We glide back to the scarves. “Where do you think there are stories that need to be heard?”
Most of the boys huddle up on Jenin. A few stand in Gaza. One at a time, they share their feelings on what kind of stories should be performed at a Playback show.
“For women, in my villiage, many times are killed because of who they love. Or with rumors. This is the wrong way to use religion, I think. It’s the wrong way.”
“So, women’s stories,” says Ben. “Who else?”
In general, the boys seem most concerned with women’s rights. One of them mentions the desire to share their stories, after having traveled to Europe. “People don’t understand what we do here, at the theatre. They should know, in the camp. They don’t trust us, or know what we are doing is good.”
One of the guys mentions problems about homophobia.
“How many of you think it’s difficult being gay in Palestine?” Ben asks. Without snickering or mocking one another, each boy raises his hand. A silent, mature consensus on an incredibly potent taboo. I feel moved.
“Thank you for today,” Ben says at the close of the activity. The guys echo his thanks. We discuss minutia--housekeeping details about next week’s schedule--before closing.
I begin to collect Palestine from the floor as everyone leaves. I ball up scarves and put each instrument back into the music bag. Somewhere in the south, near Gaza, is my video camera. I pocket it, smiling to think that I captured everything but the most important moments of the day. Ben and I snap off the lights, and close the door behind us as we leave.
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