It is salutary that a leading American practitioner of new-style U.S. community theatre should contribute to this international series a book whose title implies potential causal connections among theatre, creative facilitation, and nation formation. Stretched beyond the oppression-fixated local focus of Boalian gaming and into the ambivalent territories of nationhood, might participatory theatrical interventions in the trouble-strewn Balkans and Middle East provide a fresh view of performance efficacy on an earth seriously under threat from Homo sapiens?
Kuftinec's monograph has five chapters. In the first, “Contours and Contestations,” she spells out the keywords, methods, ethics, and overall organization of her work with suitable precision, and clarifies the crucial nature of social identity in “divided cities.” Chapter 2, “Balkan Bridges: Re-Membering Mostar (1995–2000),” covers the postwar plight of youths who survived the dreadful internecine conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, focusing primarily on aftermath events in Mostar. Chapter 3, “Between the Lines: Staging ‘the Balkans’ through Berlin (2001),” transfers focus to post-Wall central Berlin, and a gallery-based installation in which Balkan youth reanimate their predicament for a wider European environment. Chapter 4, “Border Zones: Theatrical Mobilizations of the Middle East (2004–2008),” figures Israel mainly through its consideration of the U.S.-sponsored Seeds of Peace Center and the occupied West Bank via the Palestinian–Israeli alliance Combatants for Peace. Thus the short Berlin chapter forms a staging area between past and present zones of deep-seated and severe conflict, in which hope becomes a highly fragile, “utopian” prospect for young people caught in the immediate wake of enduring the unendurable. In all temporal locations, the lacunae separating ethics and ethnicities provide a particularly unstable and ultimately, perhaps, inescapable dynamic for building optimistic futures. In these past and present urban killing-ground territories, how might “nation formation” be transformed to transcend its dreadful histories of destruction and death?
Kuftinec's engagements in Mostar and especially Jerusalem and Tulkarm—both war zones in all but name—chart a journey through participatory forays into conflict resolution badlands. Theatre facilitation in the Mostar project is strongly linked metaphorically to the destroyed Stari Most bridge, its climax staged in a bombed-out hotel and skillfully bypassing the deadening literalism that can plague Boal-based drama. It also found a resonant counterpoint in a short film by Sarajevo filmmaker Benjamin Filipovic that enabled the youth theatre group to break its rule of not working outdoors because it was too dangerous. The shoot included staged scenes of Spanish peacekeeper tanks and troop carriers rumbling past the group in rehearsal, prompting Kuftinec to contrast the film's powerful “image manipulation” (62) with the maintenance of regressive “national sentiment” by the city's reconstructed civic theatre (63). This theatre–film, indoor–outdoor, autobiographical–fictional contrast encapsulates the aftermath of the horrors of war for youth with a lucidity and economy that undergirds the book's main theatrical/theoretical sources, poignantly implying that the only “real” place of restitution rests in the imaginary.
A testing of limits for that prospect was raised in both Israel and the occupied West Bank by more conventional Boalian enactments, as the facilitators of Seeds of Peace and the Israeli-funded Viewpoints theatre projects engaged youthful participants embroiled in the ongoing conflict's violence. Seeds used image theatre with separate Israeli and Palestinian groups in a single space to reveal “conflicting world views” seen as “projections rather than authoritative definitions” (117). Viewpoints deployed one-off forum theatre techniques with separate Jewish and Arab student audiences, focusing on violence-charged scenarios followed by “spect-actor” interventions to “unhouse the youth from received habits of … being” in the divided Palestinian/Israeli nations (131). The sole theatre group of the alliance-based/ex-soldier Combatants for Peace (CFP) convened storytelling events that rehearsed deliberative democracy on both sides of the concrete barrier and mounted extraordinary direct-action protests by dismantling Israeli-built roadblocks in the occupied territories. Kuftinec relates how one action ended with theatre combatants surviving a rain of rubber bullets from the Israeli Defence Forces. As the group faced criticism from within CFP for provoking violence (148), Kuftinec is subtly cautious about the effectiveness of theatre-based interventions for peace in Israel. How might the lengthening aftermath of unimaginably violent, historical states of exception produce human environments free of nostalgia for the future?
The Berlin-based interlude brilliantly suturing these encounters describes how youth from different Balkan regions created a gallery-based installation-exhibition to frame performed actions exploring civil-war repercussions and nation-building processes. Kuftinec's impressionistic and heart-stopping account presents a powerfully fragmented event with solo performers mostly in separate spaces and an ensemble-performed denouement that presents as collage moments of acute disconnection. In a book advocating theatre activities that inspire war-damaged youth to repair (for) the future, this startling, bleak, and challenging centerpiece iconoclastically eschews overt gestures toward utopian hope by ironically refracting the coping-strategy affects that remain. This lowlights a profoundly honest and brave between-the-lines disquiet regarding even the most skillful facilitations aiming to make a positive difference in the war-torn lives and lands of the youth they engage.
The book's subtle conjunctions between global-city gallery installations and war-zone site-responsive events gesture toward fresh, alternative aesthetics for deconstructing the hellish environmental niches of third-millennium intraspecies degradation. Given the clarity, acuity, and probity of Kuftinec's analyses—which include a sharp suspicion of nation-forming narratives—it is fitting to venture a supportive caveat about theatre facilitation in severe conflict zones. To make a humane difference with young people in those circumstances certainly merits admiration and applause. Yet the contextual sensitivity of such practices indicates that an efficacious grip might best be gained by an aesthetic–analytical mix aimed at radical transformation through affective indirection, rather than via the head on routines of Boalian jokering. If so, might the historical terms of engagement of politically oriented participatory theatre no longer provide sufficient leverage on the sources of endemic violence in international environments? Does the African American–sourced theatricality of Wesley Days's “Middle East” interventions as reported in Kuftinec's closing chapter come closer to the radical transformative mark? That this stimulating book prompts such queries is surely a distinctive measure of its timeliness when everyday states of extreme exception appear to be becoming the global rule.
