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> Writing a life story
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Toine van Teeffelen
The thesis is that drama teaching helps Palestinian youths to better deal with their experiences. Bringing out the identity and diversity of a child's experiences is a central tenet of experiential learning – learning from/through/about experience. The following considerations are put in arbitrary order.
1. Drama helps to overcome the fragmentation of the Palestinian experience. The occupation, checkpoints and closure, as well as the boredom of being closed up, discourage Palestinian youth to use their senses. So many youths speak about suffocation as the essence of their experience. Youths are alienated from their senses. Senses: their eyes, ears, smell, taste – but also the critical, reflective and creative faculties. The occupation makes people dying in so far as they get used to under-use their senses, are cut off trom their senses. Because it is built on arousing the senses, drama can help youths to awake, to stand up and to become alive.
The occupation fragments, divides. People and youth are divided from their own environment, the physical and cultural environment. They are even divided from themselves. The more you live in fragmentation, the more you are alienated from your environment, from your community and from yourself. Since drama covers the various twinned aspects of life - the mind and the body, the individual and the social, the action and the reflection - it is a superb means to re-integrate, to make whole what is fragmented. Even reintegrating one's identity and one's senses back into one's life.
2. Drama helps communicating the Palestinian experience. Communicating the Palestinian experience is not just done by giving a speech or argumentation. Communication is done with the body, the emotions and the mind alltogether, and takes place in a human and cultural environment which conveys its own message. Communicating the Palestinian experience and cause is enormously important for Palestinians given the global development of the media and the pervasive occurrence of stereotyping. Palestinians who study drama are likely to know more about effectively communicating their feelings as well as their opinions and thoughts. They are more aware of the context, the setting, out of which their voices communicate.
Much stereotyping of Palestinians abroad is aimed at isolating, splitting off, Palestinians from normal daily life and experience. In stereotypes, you usually don't see Palestinians in an evolving human daily life context with which people can identify. Cf. the familiar images of terrorists, refugees, diplomats – it is so difficult to identify with them as they are out of touch with "normal" daily life. Drama, however, is able to communicate Palestinians in a real life context. Especially when drama is based on experiences, memories and traditions of real people in real communities.
Drama is also important for developing the communication aspect of non-violent resistence in the Palestinian community. Non-violence against the Apartheid Wall, the occupation. To develop effective non-violent forms it is necessary to consider how to bring across the message in a creative way. Usually non-violent forms in the Palestinian arena have been rather stereotypical. Marches, with statements at the end. But nowadays, with the further development of communicative means, there are many more possibilities. Non-violent actions become like drama in front of the cameras. The actions need design, props, mise-en-scene and actors. Not professional ones, but people aware of the acting aspect of their actions.
3. Drama helps to understand the Palestinian experience. The Palestinians live through a terrible but also unique experience. In a way, their history is dramatic to the core. Not just because of the events of the political conflict, but also because Palestine is the birthplace of the three religions, because it is a centre of holy places, holy settings; because the history of the Jews evoke drama. See how often the conflict is framed in dramatic terms: the sons of Abraham fighting each other, the conflict as a Greek tragedy, as an absurdist play. Also the news frames the conflict in such terms, because it increases audience attention, it makes the conflict into serious entertainment. And even Palestinians, when framing their own experiences, understand themselves as actors in a drama, playing out their actions and opinions on a local or world stage, with the eyes of the public directed at them. The Palestinian filmmaker living in Holland, Hani Al-Asad, is making a film of a suicide bomber, Paradise Now. It shows the suicide bomber as an actor, preparing for a role on a national or world stage.
Now, the thesis here is that it is important to understand drama so as to understand one's own experience as a Palestinians, to see how one often enacts, consciously or unconsciously, a drama in life, and how others react upon it. How the media, the world is making you into an actor, because you are seen, and acted upon, in a dramatic frame. So to become more aware of life in general, and of Palestinian life and identity in particular, as a drama, and how that influences Palestinians for the good or the bad, may one of the contributions of drama teaching and learning.
4. Drama helps Palestinian youth to use cultural experiences and skills. Even though drama is not a typical Arab arts form with a strong tradition like poetry, you can find many dramatic forms in Palestinian – Arab, Mediterranean - daily life. Think about the gesturing, the controlled toshe (quarrel) on the street. The intense discussions on the veranda. How people bring in all kinds of dramatic registers, many more and more subtle than Westerners are used to. Arabs are an expressive and therefore dramatic people. Perhaps we need less drama and more coolness in public life, but at the same time these cultural elements are a resource. We have talented people. Is it suprising that Palestinian drama and film are receiving so many awards abroad?
5. Drama helps youth to deal with their traumatic experiences and to become a value-oriented being, able to face choices and freedom. This healing effect happens exactly because the whole body and the whole mind are involved. In drama one can enact traumatic moments, live through them once again, but in a controlled way and therefore bearable and positive.
Drama also helps students to become proud and to fight despair, so prevalent in the Palestinian situation. It helps them to develop a product of which they are proud, for which they can invite their family, community. It gives them a purpose, and so helps resilience.
By enacting or discussing drama scenes in which fundamental value-based choices are shown, students learn to think through relevant situations and go through the considerations behind those choices. Drama evokes the freedom of concrete situations. It helps youths to become aware of the choices involved in apparently closed or static situations. Cf. the critical drama traditions of Boal etc.
6. Drama helps to realize objectives in the Palestinian curriculum by bringing out an inclusive, broad range of students' experiences. The Arts are a tool for imagination and creativity. The Palestinian curriculum attempts to implement that tool even though the implementation inevitably stays behind the principles. Drama can help to bring more imagination into the practice of the curriculum.
Drama is a subject that crosses curriculum borders. Finding forms of integration between and across the subjects in the curricula is an objective of the Palestinian curriculum. Drama can integrate Arabic (and second language) literature, physical activities like sports exercises, and social studies.
Teaching drama serves also another cause in the curriculum: student-centred learning. Drama teaching cannot be without a great deal of involvement of the student. The students participate in drama as in no other curriculum subject; it involves the students' initiatives, their inspiration, their knowledge and their bodies. In this way, education treats youths as full partners in a joint project. They grow to become responsible for their own learning.
Drama helps students who are not excellent in cognitive fields. Exactly because drama appeals to many more faculties than just the cognitive ones. So it gives an opportunity to disadvantaged students to show their worth and dignity. The same applies to special needs students. They, too, constitute a priority in curriculum development efforts.
Toine van Teeffelen
(written for meeting of Theatre Day Productions, Ramallah, 2004)
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