Zones of Disturbance: Staging Exile and War for Young Audiences

Zones of Disturbance: Staging Exile and War for Young Audiences DRAGAN KLAIC The experience of exile/diaspora only infrequently addresses the issue of children and their responses to dislocation. This paper describes strategies used by playwrights and theatre directors to convey the experiences of war, flight, refuge , and exile to young audiences, especially in the countries that are spared such turmoil but serve as safe havens for those escaping protracted conflict and mass violence. The primary aim of these artists is to make young audiences aware of the injustice and violence that affects their peers in less privileged pans of the world. While children and adolescents are exposed daily to a heavy regimen of meaningless, arbitrary, and spectacular violence, mainly through television, and video and computer games, theatre has the ability to depict violence in a more thought-provoking and metaphorical manner. It allows time and space to outline causes and consequences, it addresses the historical context and political motivations, and, by doing so, it re-introduces a distinction among the perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, This is a distinction that is often lost when mass culture turns violence into entertainment. My interest in the topic is more than just purely academic. After hastily leaving Belgrade in November 1991, at the beginning of a warthat eventually tore the former Yugoslavia apart, I moved with my family to Amsterdam. Compared to other less fortunate victims of displacement and forced migration , my new life chapter in Amsterdam was a privileged one that gave me an opportunity to put into practice my long-standing academic interest in exile, Safely ensconced in the Netherlands while the war continued in my former country from 1991 to 1995, and again in '999, I began to comprehend what my parents and their generation must have felt when asked about their Second World War experiences. From my rare, forced attempts to grasp painful life episodes of the previous generation, I remember evasive answers, the difficulty of communicating personal war experiences within the context of peace, and silence. Throughout the 1990S I experienced a comparable difficulty in Modern Drama, 46:I (Spring 2003) 22 Zones of Disturbance 23 my own attempts to explain to my daughter the turmoil, conflict, and danger that had brought us to the Netherlands and that at the time engulfed the population of the former Yugoslavia. Fortunately, some of my theatre colleagues in the Netherlands shared the same need to understand and to explain. My understanding of exile has been enriched by their work and by their friendship. In this essay, the plays and performances have been drawn from the practice of the theatre for children and youngsters in the Netherlands, supplemented with some examples from Serbia and the United Kingdom. While some works focus on representing and conveying the exilic experience and the political turmoil that lead to it others, by mixing languages and problematizing identities, attempt to bridge different cultural spaces -the one that was left behind and the adopted environment, in this case, contemporary Netherlands. Still others explore the theatrical and didactic potential of participatory strategies by envisioning theatre for young audiences as an intercultural laboratory. In this latter case, the theatre company often travels to places marked by the experience of violence, social injustice. and exile, hoping to conduct research for future projects and to facilitate cultural exchange. In the Netherlands, theatre for young audiences has been an integral part of the Dutch stage since the early t970s. Originally inspired by anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchical movements in culture and politics, theatre for young audiences now has prospered because it could rely on playwrights who in turn developed a rich contemporary repertory. In time, a range of groups, festivals, support provisions, and generous funding from both national and local governments followed. No aspect of contemporary life has remained outside the concerns of these theatre artists. Working in a variety of genres and disciplines , including dramatic and music theatre (the musical and opera), dance and puppetry, this segment of the Dutch stage is characterized particularly by a strong innovative drift and a non-conventional, straightforward approach to the most sensitive topics and situations (Meyer 3-6). Not surprisingly, giving the recent violent events...