... is folks are talking about it.

Click on this:

WOW!

The Freedom Theatre wrote a blog about me and the work I'm doing! It got almost 50 views in the first two hours it was posted! I'm famous, y'all.

...is you get to know the goats next door.

Some photos I've taken in the refugee camp and the city of Jenin since I've been here:

The goats next door!

...is it teaches you.

“Christine.”

I turn on the spot and Ben is right behind me.

“Yeah?” We’re taking the last break of the day. It’s been about six hours of Playback so far, and most of the workshop participants are already lighting cigarettes in the courtyard.

“Is everything alright?”

Ben searches my face, his voice low and confidential. I’m caught off-guard.

“Yeah,” I answer, automatic. I scan the fruit trees overhanging the drive beyond Ben’s shoulders, and something inside me deflates. “I don’t know.”

“You’ve seemed so unhappy today, through the whole workshop.”

He’s right. Something about the day’s processes--the games, the forms, the enactments--had left me numb and miserable.

“Yeah, yeah.” Suddenly it’s the only word I know. I look at Ben and he’s waiting, open, for my thoughts.

“Something about the work today,” I run a hand through my hair. “I don’t know, something bothered me.” I wade through the noise in my mind and shovel out some answers.

“It’s just, there’s so many rules in Playback,” I say. “‘Stand in neutral,’ ‘physically connect.’ I feel like there’s a standard, some kind of standard we’re going for, for ‘good’ Playback--”

“Well that’s true, we are,” says Ben.

“Sure, but...” More noise. I purse my lips and search for the words. “Maybe it’s just the form, Playback Theatre, maybe I just don’t enjoy Playback, and I know you’re a great facilitator, I don’t want to be...” Reaching, reaching, reaching. “...impertinent.”

Ben looks puzzled. “Impertinent how?”

Why am I feeling so emotional? “Like, I don’t know what I’d do differently in your situation, as a facilitator, but...” I trail off.

“Would you do something more playful, or energetic?”

“Maybe.” But that’s not it. “Maybe it’s because it’s like school, and I have all these mechanisms built in, to hold me back.” Ben’s nodding. “Maybe those are being triggered.”

“That would make sense,” he says. “This is a training, so it does have a school kind of flavor to it.”

“Yeah.” The iceberg begins to melt inside my chest. “I think I learned, in school, to shut up and suppress, even when I’m seeing things I disagree with. It’s like--something happens, and instead of saying anything about it I hold it in and paralyze.”

I’m remembering Hector’s words from five weeks ago. We were seated around the table and I was similarly stuck.

“Wow.” He looked at me over blue framed glasses. “School really fucked you up.”

My eyes water.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Ben asks. “If I notice you’re stuck?”

I take a deep breath to calm the squirrel in my throat. “Yeah.”

In Belfast, whenever I’d begin slouching in my seat or staring off at the floor in a workshop, Hector drew my attention to it.

“Hey,” he’d call from across the circle, and I’d snap up. “What happened?”

Later we decided on a signal. Whenever I seemed disconnected, Hector would signal me with his eyes and I would leave the workshop, as unobtrusively as possible, for a walk around the block or some fresh air.

I share this strategy with Ben. “It might be disruptive,” says Ben. “To leave that way, and it might model the behavior for the other students. Could you stretch, maybe? Or move your body some other way?”

I decide, yes, to stretch; that this would probably help.

“I get so far away from my body,” I say. “It’s like...”

You abandon yourself. Hector’s voice, again, is in my mind. I see you leave your body, and that’s an amazing skill, but it’s not serving you.

“What I always ask myself,” Ben says. “Is, ‘by sharing this experience or feeling I’m having, am I serving the group?’ Because if you’re feeling something and you think other’s might be feeling it too, it could be really beneficial to share it.”

I remember my boredom from today, and the languid, inattentive bodies of the students draped around me.

“Okay.” I understand.

“And, if it makes you feel too vulnerable, then we can always discuss it later, one-on-one.”

I look at Ben and he’s smiling. There’s a thin layer of stubble above his kuffia .

“Thanks for talking with me.” The squirrel has become a dragon, piping fire through my nose. I blink and sniff.

“Thanks for sharing.” He puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes a little.

Some of the guys from the workshop have finished their cigarettes, and peer at us through the grating around the courtyard. I feel vulnerable.

We complete the workshop in stride, and I walk away from the theatre, up the steps to my room, still thinking of our conversation.

At night, I dream that I’m enrolled in an Acting for Film class, with Ben as my teacher. I wake in the night, roll over to my side, and scribble the dream (still half-conscious) into my journal. Upon waking, I read:

Dreamed Ben teach an acting for Film class. I think I don’t want to be in it. He gives me the instruction: “Perform it with the objective that you want to ‘know’ the other. You want to ‘know.’” And we’re rushing, rushing, ... in a small room, moving, running out of time

For the past three weeks, my dreams have been absolutely full of teachers--from university and abroad. They tell me different things: to know, to choose the small sword, to work on my Arabic. My sleep is dizzy with them.

In a few minutes, I’ll close my laptop and climb into the disheveled bed waiting for me--under the blankets and into a gaping maw of Educators Past, scribbling their whispers in the dark between sleep.

...is it's photogenic.

Some photos from my workshop!

...is you can't be afraid to see shit in the street.

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.

...is the kids are so sweet.

Every Friday, kids (more than 100 of them) swarm to the theatre to watch a movie projected onto the big screen in the main theater space. They begin to arrive almost an hour in advance. You can hear Micaela, a movement instructor at the theatre, ask them in Arabic, "Who wants to be an artist?" and they all reply "Me! Me! Me!" Some of the graduated students entertain them with a paper puppet...

...and make it dance!

:)

...is it calls to you.

The view from my window. You can hear the call to prayer in the background from the mosque.