Theatre, Facilitation and Nation Formation in the Balkans and Middle East (review)

As a scholar who also works in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, I am always interested in how theatre has been used to document and comment upon the events of the last 20 years in that region. Reading the prologue to Sonja Arsham Kuftinec’s book, I was pleased to note that her work promised to shed new light on this relationship, among others. Writing about a conversation with her father, in which he doubted the efficacy of theatre to achieve reconciliation or facilitate change, Kuftinec responds with a question of her own: “Could theatre help to remember the Balkans? [...] Could performance suture this past, unsuppress historical narratives, and stitch together people’s memories” (xiii)? This query, and the years of work it motivated in both the Balkans and the Middle East, is the focus of her text.

Kuftinec’s latest book builds upon the work she did in Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theatre, showing how the techniques of witnessing, coalition building, and performance work together to help diverse and conflicted communities convey their experiences to one another. An expert historian, theoretician, and practitioner of community-based theatre techniques, Kuftinec uses her own experience as a mediator and facilitator to frame a discourse on how performance can help young people from all sides of a conflict frame and express the complexities of their experiences and, in some cases, to build bridges between their worlds.

The book is structured as a journey; Kuftinec recounts her work with young people from Bosnia, Israel, and Palestine from 1995 to 2008. The environments range from the streets and a bombed-out building in Mostar to the Berlin House of World Cultures, to an abandoned house in a Palestinian village, to a camp in the Maine woods — a mixture of on-site and distance-mediated encounters between young people on opposite sides of the ex-Yugoslav and Israel-Palestine conflicts. In each instance, Kuftinec provides an account of her work with local inhabitants and (often) foreign mediators to use performance to expose the historical memories that inform relations between groups in these regions: Serbs, Croats, and Muslims; Israelis and Palestinians. She begins her narrative with a consideration of the terms used to describe the regions themselves — “Balkan” and “Middle East,” for example, because she sees these presentation terms as central to how individuals see themselves as part of a nation. She then moves into “proposing how theatre works as a medium and model to illuminate and engage with these disputed concepts” (5).

One of the more refreshing aspects of Kuftinec’s work is her ability to communicate the importance of learning through failure. In the section of the book dealing with her work in Mostar, she details the problems with projects in Varaždin and Srbinje. In the first instance, Kuftinec’s group grappled with issues of who had the right to frame the experience of the young people involved in the performance project (participants or sponsors); in the second, the participants were faced with localized discrimination against certain group members, which forced the relocation and recontextualization of the performance of “reparative and future-oriented memory” (70), thereby undermining the goal of the project. By “archiving these two failures,” Kuftinec is able to pose questions relating to the documentation of collective memory and ethical considerations. In fact, the consideration of the ethics involved in intervening and mediating relations between the various groups is central to Kuftinec’s consideration; she consistently foregrounds her own privilege and the privilege of other foreign mediators, adult and young adult, who engage with the participants.

The photos and maps that pepper the manuscript provide visual reinforcement of the process Kuftinec describes, depicting rehearsals and performances. Other visuals include photos of the reconstructed Mostar bridge and the separation barrier between Israel and the Palestinian territories. Each of these threshold spaces are crucial points of crisis within individual groups discussed...