feedback and comments

The business loans seem to be very useful for guys, which would like to start their company. By the way, this is not very hard to receive a secured loan.

ابشع ما يمكن ان ينتج عن الحرب هو رائحة الحرب المتمثلة برائحة الدم عندما نعيش في بلاد تكثر فيها الحروب تصبح رائحة الدم اقوى من رائحة الخبز المنبعثة من مخابز الصباح الباكر هنا في فلسطين وبتحديد في مدينة القدس لا نرى الحرب بلعين المجلردة وانما نعيشها في كل لحظة لان القدس تقع على جبال عالية وعندما تقصف الطائرات الاسرائيلية غزة في المساء وفي اليل نفيق نحن اهل الجبل على رائحة الدم مع شروق الشمس عندما يبداء هذا الدم السلئل في الشوارع وعلى جدران البيوت المقصوفة بنشفان وتبخر فيصلنا نحن اهل الجبال العالية وهنا نقف ونحاول التعرف على هذه الروائح وكلنا وفي يوم الاحد من احدا اشهر العام الماضي لا اذكر اي شهر بتحديد صحوت من نومي مهلوع على رائحة اعرفها اعرفها تمام رائحة دم تشبه رائحة دم اعرفها جيدا رائحة دم لها خصوصبة لانها كانت غير كريهة كانت تحمل معها بلاضافة الى رائحة الدم رائحة المرح ورائحة التحدي ورائحة حب الحياة انها رائحة دم من فصيل اعرفه انه احد طلابي الموهوبين بتمثيل او بكلمات اخرى انه اروع ما انتجت فلسطين من فنانين كان يعبر الحاجز ليلا وكان يحمل معه الات موسيقى على شكل غريب وعتقد الجنود انه يهاجمهم فقامو بمهاجمته حتى الموت وبعد ما اكتشفو انه لايحمل صاروخ رموه للكلاب وقال لبعضهم البعض كل العيون تبكي المهم عين امي ما تبكي

I was invited to talk about Az Theatre's WAR STORIES project at a day conference on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that was a part of the Biennale Festival of Theatre and Psychiatry held in Padua this October.

The conference was for mental health service staff; doctors, nurses and people training in this field. There were approximately 170 people there and as well as papers on the epidemiology, symptoms and treatment there were contributions about a project in Rome which worked through arts and theatre with refugee victims of torture and about a project in Sri Lanka that likewise worked with victims of the tsunami.

The festival and the conference were organised by the Department of Psychiatry at the Padua's University Hospital, Italy's foremost place of learning in this field. This was an adventurous and exciting thing to do for an institution of this kind. I saw only a little of the festival. Many of the participants were mental health sufferers. In this context theatre provided a shared space where the interdependence of the patients and the therapists manifested itself. The inclusive character of this community of suffering, witnessing and curing has a historical, even prehistorical resonance. It felt to me as if the knowing that was created by the interaction between the components of this community had been a perennial source of enrichment for the human spirit and for culture.

At the lunch break I found myself talking to the psychiatrist from Rome about space and distance. In his talk he had spoken about how patients suffering from the 'disorder' had a fragile relationship between physical or 'outer' reality and psychological or 'inner' reality. He was describing the almost complete unpredictability of situations where any event might trigger a reliving of the feelings connected to the traumatic event or events. At any moment the incidental associational contact between an interior life dominated by the trauma and an event in the real world could have shattering effects. Sometimes the less apparent the influence of the trauma over the mental life the more volatile was this relationship. The danger of what was described as re-traumatisation was evident. The strategies employed to bring the trauma towards the light of consciousness had to be subtle. In his theatre and drama work he used mythic stories as an indirect way of allowing the trauma to express itself. These stories are general and towards these knowable forms or shapes, specific stories can be drawn. Within the embrace of a myth an individual story can receive a profound, and perhaps distant, affirmation. Another example of an indirect approach to the trauma had been given by the Sri Lankan company in their description of work with everyday objects. As the imaginative world of the drama workshop participant was activated the object began, through a process of association and projection, to take on a role in the central drama of the sufferers mental life. Finding an outer form of expression for an inchoate feeling, beyond articulation and language, possibly inaccessible to thought, is a first step in creating a less fragile and more creative connection between 'inner' and 'outer' reality. The myth story is like an inner object which has the substance of an outer objectivity. The language we use to describe these processes is mechanistic and sometimes metaphorical. In the case of myths we may have images of submarine objects which through sheer weight and power attract smaller objects and draw them towards the surface. Metaphors can become mixed and images hold up only for an inspiring moment or two.

There seem to be two pathological conditions which at first sight appear to be opposites. One is where any ordinary event could all too quickly and unpredictably associate with a painful and dominant element in the inner life of the sufferer. The other is where this transport is completely blocked. As I talked to the psychiatrist he kept insisting that this internal distance manifested itself in how someone responded to interpersonal space. He demonstrated this by alternately getting very close to me and then pulling away. I realised that he was telling me something significant but the full impact of what he was saying only occurred to me later.

Theatre draws everything towards the human dimension. It can be a transitional space in just the same way as the myths and objects can be transitional objects, ways of re-opening a conduit between the child-like world of the imagination and the adult 'real' world. Perhaps this sounds mournful or clinical. The space between us and how we use it, how it forms us, is deeply connected to the dynamic in us between our physical reality and our psychological reality. Our lives are punctuated, sometimes less gently than at others, by moments of disconnection and imbalance between these elements. At their lightest these moments can be embarrassing; at others more deeply disturbing. They are essentially how we develop and grow. They are connected in a complex way to culture. There is a deep connection between certain specific aspects of our memory and our kinaesthetic sense. Bio-chemistry has established that the same hormonal substances are active in determining these functions. The same parts of the brain are involved. It is these functions which appear to be adversely affected by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Thinking about PTSD one's mind seems to head off in a number of different directions at the same time. The 'disorder' seems to lack clear definition. The impact of my attendance at the day conference in Padua was to vastly increase my sense of how much I knew about the disorder and how much I didn't know.

Human beings have suffered catastrophes that must have caused traumas throughout our existence. There were precursors of PTSD during the American Civil War during the first world war and more recently there has been a good deal of work produced about the traumatic effect of the ethnic cleansing and extermination programme carried out by the National Socialist regime in Germany. However it was really the Vietnam War veterans who were the first substantial group to be classified as sufferers. What was specific about the conditions in this instance that gave rise to the disorder? Was it the level of technology involved or was it the radical contrast between the combat zone and the life back home that the soldiers were expected to re-join?

Human beings have always faced natural disasters like the tsunami. However when the Sri Lankan group talked not about the traumatic impact of the tidal wave but of the recovery operation the modern nature of the disorder came into sharper focus. The aetiology of the disorder is indefinite. However we have become more used to the idea that illnesses have histories and are up to a point culturally, economically and politically determined. In the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis the focus of interest has shifted from hysteria to neurosis to psychosis and now to trauma.

The arrival of a new disease is a complex process. Like many modern disorders PTSD is a group of associated conditions. The epidemiology of the disease is also complex. Exactly who can be accounted a sufferer is open to question. There is an extremely high incidence in excombatants from the Vietnam and Gulf Wars. Also research shows that approximately half the male citizens of the USA feel that they have suffered some kind of trauma. In the period following the events of September 2001 a dial up psychotherapeutic service called Project Liberty was set up. By March 2003 643,000 people in the New York State area had used it.

Also the disorder manifests itself in such a diverse range of symptoms. Depression figures very highly but it is dissimilar endocrinologically from other forms of depression. Substance abuse and alcoholism are major factors. Breakdown in close personal and family relations compatible with the insights from the conversation with the Roman psychiatrist is significant. Flashbacks and delusional behaviour happen in many cases. It can take the form of asthma, skin disorders etc.

It is significant that all the the symptoms are individually capable of being treated but no cure is sustained without dealing with what appears to be the root cause of the problem. This appears to simplify matters but at the same time makes them more complicated. The precept that for any individual sufferer the disorder has a definite cause or origin - the traumatic event - is the lynch pin which holds together our view of it. But what is the nature of this event? Is it fixed and singular? How much is it a part of a process? Of what process can it be said to be a part? Why is it that an event can impact variously on people? Why does one person suffer PTSD and another doesn't?

The assumption that had the 'event' not happened the sufferer would be 'normal' is not necessarily true. A psychiatrist in Kosovo told me that he had a strong impression that many people who believed they had been traumatised by the war were deluded and in fact the origin of their disorder pre-dated the war. The war provided them with a pretext to admit their problem and seek help. There is clearly an extremely complex interaction between an individual's inclinations and the immediate environment. In Freud's work on trauma the 'event' remains concealed, subject to repression and is classically located in early infantile experience. The trauma in this scenario takes on other deceptive forms and is revealed only through persistent personal archeological work. The traumatic event which may have appeared to have triggered the disorder may have opened up an already existing fissure within the personality. The trauma of being born and the incidental nature of our early upbringing mean that human beings cannot be psychologically perfectly formed. It takes only a certain event that, as it were, resounds a certain note that will crack open the fault line in our being. Out floods all our uncertainties about our existence until we have the strength to stem the flow. These images are approximate. As are ones which are taken more directly from medicine such as the idea of opening up old wounds or of the incomplete healing that is described by damage to the scar tissue in the event of an external wound.

What is it about our lives which makes the line between sufferers of the disorder and their contemporaries difficult to draw clearly? Why do so many of the symptoms seems so familiar? What makes this such a characteristically modern disorder? If the most intense forms of the disorder are associated with war (with its accompanying activity, torture) what can this tell us about the complex impact of war in our society? How does this disease spread?

I remember meeting a man in the early 1970s in Northern Ireland who had been subjected to sensory deprivation torture by the British Army. He couldn't stop shaking. He told me that he was only aware of humiliating and terrifying experiences which included being in a dark cell with very loud noise for a very long time. He couldn't believe that this had damaged him. He hadn't suffered any physical torture and therefore, it seemed to him, that he couldn't explain his condition. Meeting this man was like meeting a harbinger.

The knowledge of how human beings can be traumatised has generalised itself into military strategy. The relationship between torture and the conduct of war has been reorganised. The strategy of inducing 'shock and awe' which was advertised at the beginning of the recent invasion of Iraq and was, at least, the clear and stated intention of the Israeli state in its attempt to terrify the population of Lebanon into withdrawing support from Hisbollah has now become the model for modern war. This idea may well be said to have penetrated every element of our society. In the 'terror' war the deliberate traumatisation of key groups of people goes hand in hand with surgical bombing.

In Sri Lanka the initial disaster of the tsunami was followed by the disaster of the recovery effort. This exacerbated the breakdown of traditional support structures and in the social chaos that ensued violent crime, rape, alcoholism and substance abuse had become widespread. The processes of disintegration, associated with globalisation, may already have been happening prior to the Tsunami. The great wave merely flung open an already insecure door. The interventions of the state and the international relief efforts simply exacerbated the growing inequality, the gap between the rich and the poor and the failing collective structures. This reduction of a population to a condition of endangered survival while at the same time disordering communal relations brings to mind New Orleans, on the one hand, and Iraq, on the other.

The disorder may have a number of conjunctural causes but it feels as of the prevalence of the disorder is connected to deep instabilities and insecurities in human society as we become predominantly city dwellers, as we move away from the land and the extended family. We have yet to construct for ourselves new forms of collectivity that will cope with our changing needs. On the whole the nation state after a period of democratic development can only offer a limited protection against the impact of the changes we are undergoing as a species. In many instances states are equivalent to illegal armed gangs. In the vacancy caused by these changes primordial and regressive forms of organisation have a temporary renaissance.

By trying to contextualise the growth of the disorder I don't mean to diminish the actual pain suffered by people or the importance of the work to alleviate that suffering.

It feels important to connect things up. In the case of the returning soldier and possibly the victim of torture once they have gained a safe haven, the dreadful suffering produced by violence is transformed by the attempt to deny it which is a function of survival. Moving into an environment which increases that sense of denial, in which the experiences become incommunicable must create the tension associated with the idea of stress. Something dreadful has happened but now it appears as if it hasn't happened. Everything is encouraging the sufferer to forget and live a normal life. Sometimes even the physical scars have disappeared. For the returning soldier there is the added conundrum of the fact that they are now asked to live the 'way of life' which they have been told was the object of their martial endeavours. The radical disconnection between the two realities, the 'war zone' and the 'way of life' zone must have been a feature of all wars but it is much more emphatically the case in the new technologised 'distant' war.

The situation for the returning warrior in the 'war producing' countries and the general malaise of those societies is difficult to connect with what is taking place, for example, in Iraq. The complete and deliberate destruction of social order in Iraq amounts to a collective trauma rarely suffered nor witnessed in human history. It is in a way simpler to understand what the impact of this has been on the Iraqis than the effect on the societies which are the source of this violence, mainly the USA and the UK.

All the unsettling circumstances of a population who have been atomised and urbanised are current in the West. Dispossession, privatisation and the disappearance of the 'common' wealth are well advanced. For the established ruling elite and for those rich enough to buy their way into it, life demonstrates an amazing monarchical continuity. For the majority of people change, insecurity and instability have accompanied the deliberate inculcation of fear and a regime of denial, mendacity and inversion. In the 'war producing' countries the pain of the 'war receiving' countries is experienced as numbness. The deliberate imposition of the rule of brutal violent force creating a situation where the capacity to kill and destroy human beings becomes the key instrument of all social control and individual power has led to a wholesale descent into violence at every level social life. What is the impact of this spectacle on the societies which are either consciously or unconsciously responsible. The violence there is experienced as fear and the fear is immobilising. In addition there is a culture of lies and denial amongst the ruling circles. The lies about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is one example. The recent statement by Bush that "We don't do torture" is another. Men who are responsible for killing and torture have a logic of their own. Similarly you do not contradict someone who is holding a gun to your head. White becomes black and black white. If you constantly repeat a lie often enough and forcefully enough then it may gain acceptance. It is well known that the world of the torturer and the killer is full of these inversions. This sense of being able to determine ones own truth is at the centre of an intense ethnocentricity. It is impossible to determine how far these factors lay the ground for the kind of insecurity which might make the 'disorder' prevalent. The belief of the man in Northern Ireland that he hadn't been tortured and therefore had no explanation for his state can be related to the stress disorder arising from the trauma of witnessing an act of violence to someone close to you and this can be related to the collective trauma caused by our relationship to what is being carried out with our complicity elsewhere. Of course in all these instances denial can play a strong and dynamic part in the underlying stress. There is bound to be a fear of reprisal which can be cultivated by operators in the political structure intent on justifying the violence. The ease with which the terror threat can be summoned is connected to our sense of relief at the spectacle of violence 'over there'.

I cannot argue that we, in the west, are suffering the same trauma as people living in Iraq. I am saying that these events have a different but related impact on us. It reminds me of what Marx said about the relation between Britain and Ireland when he pointed out that a nation which enchains another nation cannot itself be free.

The organisers in Padua point out in their description of the conference that PTSD is not yet sufficiently known about in Italy. Just as avian flu was coming from the east so the 'disorder' was coming from the west.

Jonathan Chadwick

Thank you for your invitation and the opportunity of talking about our work.

Our WAR STORIES project is an exploration of war and theatre. We have created international partnerships with companies in Algeria (Masrah El Tedj), Serbia (Bazaart), Palestine (Theatre For Everybody), Kosovo (CCTD) and Italy (Il Torchio). We have an association with the Sibiu International Theatre Festival in Romania. Partnership and working internationally are essential to our project.

In England we have partnerships with the University of Manchester Drama Department's IN PLACE OF WAR project and the National Association of Youth Theatres. In our current development project we are working with York Theatre Royal Youth Theatre, Theatre Venture, Riverside Studios Young Bloods, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art Alumni Network and Riverside Studios. We have also worked with groups of psychologists, psychotherapists and psychiatrists in the UK and our partner countries.

I work as a theatre director and a writer. My work is centred on Az Theatre. I also work for the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, the London Film School and The Actors Centre. I work freelance so, for example, I have recently completed a commission for a new play based on the Orpheus myth for a major regional theatre in Bulgaria and have just directed a new musical theatre piece for the Islington Music Forum presented at the Sadler's Wells Lillian Baylis Theatre in London. This involved 60 mental health service users as performers and was called SARDINES - The MUSICAL.

The seeds of the WAR STORIES project were laid at the end of the last century with an aspiration to bring together actors from different continents to make a collective piece of work. After running workshops with international artists in London and Sibiu we eventually brought together the core companies if the project in Sibiu in 2002. We have since then created a series of encounters and productions in London and elsewhere, notably in Belgrade in 2004.

In 2005 our activities were focused on a collaboration with the United Nations Office of Missing Persons and Forensics in Kosovo where we created , in partnership with CCTD two phases of a project working with the communities of the missing.

This year we have conducted a development project focused on the issue of recovery, working with artists, young people and 'therapists and activists' in Turkey, Algeria, Kosovo, Italy and England. Our plans to work in Palestine have been forestalled by the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip where our Palestinian partners are based. We are organising an event in London at which we will have a 7 hour long video link with Gaza so that our companies and communities can share our creative work. This development project is being supported by the European Cultural Foundation, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Roberto Cimetta Fund and the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham.

From the outset the WAR STORIES project was based on certain key principles. One was that war should be viewed as capable of being abolished. We considered this to be a crucial perspective from which to view the human behaviour which constituted this historical phenomenon. Human beings had lived for millions of years without war and would do so again. We made a distinction between violent aggressive behaviour and the cultivation, validation and organisation of these human tendencies in economic and political structures. What allowed us this perspective was the globalisation of human relations in the post-soviet communist period. What impelled it was the recognition of the power of human technology evident in the development of nuclear power. This principle was formulated before September 2001 and it is due to what might be described as the collective trauma this event and subsequent events have produced that this perspective has become obscured.

Another complementary principle was that in order to explore war we need to explore our selves. Moreover if we were to explore theatre as well as war then we had to seek ways of connecting our feelings to the behaviour, passions and attitudes which constituted the basis of war making. It didn't seem satisfactory to simply look at war objectively as if it was happening 'over there'. The project was being launched at a time of considerable upheaval. The war in former Yugoslavia raised questions about from where war 'broke out'. Also new relationships of complicity and responsibility emerged during the attack on Serbia by NATO. We recognised that war was somehow inside us. This illuminated the sense that we had of Europe and the rich world having 'exported' war . Later we got used to the surprising formulation that there were 'war producing' and 'war receiving' countries. It was this that impelled us to create partnerships that went beyond Europe.

We developed a workshop format which proposed that everybody had a war story and also that, at some point, this human activity had had a transforming impact on everybody's life. We used exercises to identify these moments of change and to embody them within the theatre space. We then used exercises which explored the distance that the key moment in any personal story was from the centre of the theatre of war. We described this centre as being like an actualised paranoia where all relationships are reduced to friend/enemy or killer/killed. Our work was concerned with investigating how these 'actualisations' spread throughout the social space which surrounded the theatre of war and enforced a kind of splitting between and within individuals so that we identified ourselves as being 'for' or 'against' in relation to a given war. This was also true of the anti-war movement.
All stories were equally valid no matter how far or near they were to the 'action' or the combat location. Since all stories were created and embodied within the human dimensional space of the workshop they all had a palpable and expressive equality.
So this second principle led us by its logic to see how people could recognise their experience, their responsibility and the connection between different stories from different wars. By making embodiments of their own stories they could activate their relationship to war-making processes. We considered actors to be carriers of stories. As a workshop participant could locate the physical roots of their story within themselves and begin to act it out they became actors. At the same time they gave a historical dimension to their story.

There were a number of impulses behind the latest phase of our work. One was a response to the re-invasion of the Palestinian West Bank in Easter 2002. We made a piece of work called Palestine Verbatim that was an attempt to create a public portrait of this event. What was striking was the way the Israeli soldiers treated the homes of the Palestinians. There was such evidence of primordial degrading violence that the damage to the victims and the perpetrators must have been profound. Another event was the breakdown of social relations and the chaos caused by the invasion of Iraq in 2003 where evidence of similar degradations emerged. Iraq was suffering a collective trauma. How were people to survive and recover their humanity in these circumstances?

In 2004 our work in Belgrade included, among many stories, that of a young girl who, when the first air raid warnings were sounded there in 1999, could think of nothing else but the safety of her little sister. She had no thought of her own survival but, terrified and in agony, she rushed around her neighbourhood in search of the little girl. She found her playing with dolls in a courtyard near their home unaware of any danger.

Later that year we presented a series of short plays in London as a part of our WAR STORIES project. I had become deeply interested in the short play form and imagined a 'sutra' of short plays as an form that could articulate the diversity of experiences that our project held. One of the plays we presented was written in Japan in the 14th century by the founding genius of the Noh Theatre, Motokiyo Zeami. In this play a warrior, who has become a monk because of his killing of a young man in battle, returns to the spot where the event took place. He encounters the ghost of the young warrior and realises that their souls are bound together for all eternity. This extraordinary dramatic dance of the killer and the killed with its strong tones of redemption and recovery was presented alongside contemporary work by English and Iraqi authors.

I began researching the question of recovery from war, violence and conflict. I asked a number of therapeutic practitioners what images and stories they had of the therapeutic process. I read as extensively as I could. I learned that the situation of the trauma sufferer could be described as the collapse of their internal space. This involved a loss of a capacity for a pluralistic response to experience and the reduction of the world to rigid 'either/or', 'for/against', 'black/white' structures of feeling and thought. This was connected to our earlier observations about the actualised paranoia at the centre of the war situation. Soldiers returning from war and their inability to return to civilian life were the prime and primary examples of the stress produced by trauma. Looking at fundamentalism and terrorism as responses to trauma seemed to open up an ability to think about these questions at a social macrocosmic level. Here I am, of course, not talking only about islamic society. The same reduction - the collapsing of internal space, the loss of multidimensionality - also seemed to be true of the fundamentalist frame of mind with its intense literalism (abiding absolutely by the word of the book) that is associated with an obsessive preoccupation with the power of the father.

I was reminded of the suggestion of internal mobility in the story of the girl during the bombing raid in Belgrade. The human capacity for compassion and seeing oneself in the other - a human skill so intimately connected to that of acting - seemed to be also connected in some deep sense with a feminine capability. I was also struck by the appeals, made by the mothers of the children of the Beslan school siege, that they wished the hostage takers to take them instead of their children. During this work I was strongly reminded of the story of Alcestis in Euripides' play and decided to use this text as an organising principle in this latest phase of our project.

At this point Az Theatre was approached by the United Nations Office of Missing Persons and Forensics in Kosovo. They had heard about our work and had looked at our internet site. The work that I was about to undertake with them brought me closer to looking at the traumatic nature of war for victims and perpetrators and to coming to terms with the relationship between individual and collective recovery.

The overall stated objective of the Memory Project initiated by the Office of Missing Persons and Forensics was to 'de-victimise the victim'. In their dealings with the families of the missing the leading thinkers there had seen that people were locked in to their role as victims so much that all experience was assimilated and interpreted according to this self perception. It was evident that this victim mentality was an expression of the stress which followed traumatic loss. The families of the missing are living at the sharp edge of the consequences of war. Their difficulty is that they are unable to grieve and to mourn. They are constantly trapped by anger and blame. The effect of this experience on all the social and psychological structures is significant. Because of the strength of this experience there was a generalised culture of victimhood throughout the society. This offered the perfect basis for future perpetration and could be commanded and organised with ease by political and military structures.

We worked in both phases of the theatre project there with separate companies of artists, Albanian and Serbian. In the second phase we were able to work much more closely with the families of the missing and the presentations took the form of forums at which the theatre elements were fluently connected to the audiences own story telling. The dramatic work was surprisingly, sometimes shockingly, based on the audiences own experiences. The simple and primitive activity of seeing the familiar represented in an artistic form gave a very powerful sense of recognition and knowing. Accounts from the audiences confirm that this experience validated and, at the same time, released them from the grip of their own experience. It opened up a distance between themselves and what they had been through. It is very difficult to measure the success of this work.

We have called the latest phase of our work WAR STORIES: Alcestis, stories of recovery and dialogues with death. It has a new workshop format which starts from a series of exercises based on breathing and the puppet-like manipulation of the bodies of other participants. These exercises themselves hold images of recovery processes. Each participant is asked to engage with their own story of recovery. They are asked to create a tableau image of the state or situation before recovery through an image-making exercise which flows out of the preceding puppet-like body manipulation exercises,. They are then asked to transform the elements of this image into an image of the state or situation after recovery.

In some sessions we are able to work on the movement between these two images. One way in which this can take place is to create a danced version of this movement with a rhythmic accompaniment. This may yield only an impressionistic version of the story that lies in the narrative space which separates the two images. In other instances the story is broken down into episodes and a template is offered which may provide a series of suggestions. This template is based on what I have extracted as basic mythic pattern from the Alcestis. The movement from splitting to denial, to anger and blame, to the recognition of loss and grief, a dialogue with death, to redemption and recovery, may seem familiar because it accords in some respects to the therapeutic story as it has been told by a number of therapeutic practitioners.

This is a search for embodiments of the human capacity to survive, to recover and gain wholeness. Our proposition is that by making contact with your own story you are able to relate actively to the story of the other. Of course the stories that are worked on in the rich West are different from those encountered in societies with a closer experience of war. The images of war, chaos and violence are televised constantly. How are we to deal with the terrorising, numbing and aneasthetising effect of this information? How can we find an active responsive relationship which doesn't simply reproduce the trauma in a negative form? We are proposing a participatory theatre. I am grateful to be able to say that our practice is not unique.

The images and accounts of this work are being collected in an interactive internet space. Like most internet spaces it is in the process of development. We have the main instructions in English, Italian, French, Albanian and soon in Arabic. We have used video extensively in this work and this material will soon appear on the site. We have been concerned to create a collective space which is internationally accessible. Once again our emphasis is on participation.

The next phase of our project will be to create performances from our research. We plan to make this available internationally.

What have we discovered so far during this phase? We are focusing on trauma and we have considered the nature of post traumatic stress disorder. Can I shed any light on your deliberations?

Our work is about therapy but we do not have a therapeutic mission. We do not deliberately seek to work with people who have mental health problems or who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We have been advised closely by drama therapists but I have no training or background in this set of skills. We want to continue to work closely with therapists.

In the rich West it is easier to talk about recovery. Our culture is more accessible to the ideas and practices of psychology. After the events of September 11th 2001 a call line was opened to provide psychotherapeutic counselling to help people affected by the attacks. It was called Project Liberty. In a fairly short space of time in the New York State area 600,000 people had telephoned expressing a need some kind of help. In Kosovo and Algeria issue of recovery has not been perceived in the way it has in the rich West, except by members of the psychotherapeutic community. Is it possible to say that they are more 'collectivist' societies. They may be less individualised. The constitution of the human individual differs in relation to the collective. The societies are significantly more agrarian and the extended family is stronger. People will go through extremely painful and humiliating experiences and recover if they perceive the necessity of what they have suffered. If they have won freedom and justice the damage is mitigated. Of course there are still mental health problems which derive from experiences violence and war or at least are unleashed by these events. There are still issues of retribution and revenge where justice has fallen short. The history of the civil war in Algeria is instructive in this respect.

All of this forms a background to our understanding of the particular disorder under discussion. Perhaps the reasons for the slower emergence of this disorder in Italy can be found here. It is a complex of disorders with a variety of symptoms. I have observations to make but they are not based on clinical experience.

Our societies are disintegrating so it is hardly surprising that human individuals are doing so as well. One factor in the therapeutic process which can guide sufferers back to integrity and health lies in the ability to open up a living connection between our imaginative childlike capacity and our adult capacity to engage effectively with the reality of which we are a part. In my view theatre work is wonderfully effective in this precise respect.

I have given you a description of the development of our project, our practice and some of the general thinking that lies behind our work. Sometimes I think that the reason why Dionysus is associated with theatre is that it is a double god with one ear turned towards the minute inner workings of the human soul and the other turned outwards towards the enormity of cosmic or geological or at least historical time. As they say in England, I am all ears.

Thank you.

Jonathan Chadwick

By Jeton Neziraj
CCTD- Kosovo

It was a really great opportunity to continue our cooperation with Jonathan, after his wonderful work last year. For 5 days we had chance to organize several art activities with different art groups around Kosova. The base of Jonathan's working visit was a workshop with young actors in Prishtina. Through “frozen” images and games actors could explore the concept beyond the project: recovery! How human beings recover after wars, traumas and/or different conflict situations! It was really interesting to see some of the images of Kosovan actors, in which they reflect their personal experiences during the war in Kosovo.
In generally, the whole project in Kosovo was as an mosaic that was completed from different ways of “viewing” the “problem”; by organizing this workshop with professional actors, workshop with young people in Kacanik, meeting several people who are involved in work with communities and by shooting a video with school kids!

I would like to say that the video film that Jonathan did with the school students was with the great interest, for kids and for “getting another view of the concept of ‘recovery”. Kids were so proud and they were fascinated by the idea that they played in a movie. I have got several compliments from them, especially from Yllka and Meridiana.

I have to say that the visit in Kacanik had another extra meaning, a symbolic one… Cultural life there is very poor and there are no cultural activities at all. Our visit and the work we did there was important for the group, and as Ahmet Krasniqi (Coordinator of the group) was saying: this workshop gave as a small hope that we are not forgotten and also helped me to keep the homogeneity of the group.

From all this work and from meeting several people I definitely ‘understood’ the complexity of the issue of recovery. It is definitely an complex issue. But, what I really liked from this project is that Jonathan did not simply seat on his working room to read books and try to ‘clarify’ things, instead, he went to work and meet people who past ore are passing through the recovery process.

Now, from my point of view, project should be oriented through organizing all collected materials into a theater piece that has to be followed by a book. I think it is important to collect all this Jonathan “dairy’s” across those countries he worked and publish a book. A book that expresses how the show transformed into a theater piece all this entire ideas and thoughts about recovery!!

And, it is also important to come back in Kosovo with the show! It is important for the participants in this workshops and for the general audience here in Kosovo to see a show that deals with the recovery! This would be like a collective therapy…!!!

Thanks Jonathan for this great project. I sincerely hope that the donors will support next stages of the project.

Dear Mr. Chadwick

I'm Yllka from Prishtina. I don't know wether you remember me from the short
movie we did together with my friends in Prishtina. Otherwise I act the role
of the corrupted teacher.
I wanted to write you and tell you that the film was wonderful. We all liked
it a lot and not only us
but everyone who saw it said that it was gorgeous.
Thank you so much for keeping the promise and for bringing us the copies of
the film.
We hope you'll be back in Kosovo with another great project like this!

Yours sincerely,
Yllka

اتاجحى يعد الحمير وحمياتى ج اتى جحى يعد الحمير وحميره 10 وهو عاى متن العاشر فاذا بها 9 وهو يصرخ
ويصيح اين الحمار العاشر

Che e il impatto del lavoro noi abbiamo fatto tra 16 Ottobre e 20 Ottobre? Che
sono i risultati?
E' stato un buon impatto il lavoro del laboratorio. Abbiamo deciso di
proseguire il lavoro su Alcesti, il primo incontro è previsto per il 16
novembre, giovedì. E' una felice coincidenza che è partito un lavoro sulla
pace per il 7 dicembre. Aspettiamo tue indicazioni per sapere come e se il
lavoro andrà avanti.
Tra i risultati buoni c'è una maggiore conoscenza tra i partecipanti e una
curiosità nata in chi ha sentito parlare del laboratorio.

Che erano le reazione dei particpanti? Che idee del futuro del proggetto sono presentato?
Alcuni dei partecipanti si incontrano per lavorare e allenarsi teatralmente.
Come ti dicevo vogliamo studiare meglio la figura di alcesti in tutte le sue
metamorfosi , in tutti gli autori che l'hanno trattata.

Era il lavoro come si a aspettato?
Noi eravamo molto aperti, non ci aspettavamo cose precise. Siamo stati bene
sorpresi . Chissà se è un lavoro da aprire al pubblico. Non so se il
pubblico può capire il percorso fatto durante il laboratorio.
Non so se tu hai mandato queste domande anche agli altri, o se vuoi che io
le estenda anche a loro.

Che cosa volete a succedere dopo adesso?
Vorremmo continuare il lavoro magari con scambi più diretti con gli altri
partecipanti al progetto , e sapere cosa si può fare per essere efficaci sul
problema della pace.

Fabio, Il Torchio, Napoli

The workshops were well received and important to both Theatre Venture's groups. The East London Performance Ensemble (ELPE) and New VIc's Youth Theatre Ensemble (YTE) devise their work in a collaborative process and your work complimented our methodology.

Your Development Workshops were good for both groups to experience because they experienced a different Director with a different style and fresh eyes to the art form.

Also, the subject matter was "more serious" than our normal material and it was important for the participants to see that theatre can be used as a very serious tool in the "real" world.

The consequences of the work were a collection of freeze frames and words reflecting conflict and, with the East London Performance Ensemble, more detailed work on resolving the conflict and addressing how it was resolved.

On the whole the groups liked the workshop leader very much and gained from his experience and approach to theatre-making. There was a mixed response to the workshop itself and the more mature members saw experienced a deeper meaning. Members of the YTE were impressed by the amount of work that was achieved in a relatively short workshop. It is difficult subject matter because our sessions tend to be more light and up-beat but I think this work is incredibly important because it highlights the life-changing power of theatre.

I was very open minded about the workshop. In this respect I personally was very impressed and pleased by the workshop and how the groups reacted to it. I saw certain members in a new light and I was glad that so much work was produced.

We will build on the freeze frames and a selection will be in our final performance.However, I respect the importance of doing this work justice for the participants and how an audience might receive it. I'm a Theatre Practitioner and I do theatre and not therapy and I think work like this can only be done in skilled hands.

I think it would be good if we were able to keep in touch with you and see how the work progressed via the web site. And the future? Who know's but there might be more working together in the future.......
Ray Downing, Associate Theatre Director, Theatre Venture

hi Jonathan, hi Anna!
I was a translator in your workshops during the Black Sea
International Theatre Festival in TRabzon. Your workshops
were really fascinating, I am not an actress but I liked
attending your workshops even though I have nothing with
acting. What you did during your workshops were so creative
that I was impressed by them. I am sure the young girls and
some actors loved them, too.
you are great!