THE HOLOCAUST THROUGH DRAMA 1
Drama Workshop – A new look that touches and transforms.
Leslie Marko
Drama is a form of knowledge, but it also should be a way to transform
society. It can help us to build a future instead of just gently waiting for it
to happen.
Augusto Boal, author of the concept of the Theatre of the Oppressed.
This report is intended to present part of the methodology developed on the
First Drama Workshop for Educators: SCENES AND NARRATIVES ABOUT
THE HOLOCAUST, which was accomplished by teachers of the Public Network
of São Paulo’s State on June 2011. Excerpts of letters, written at the end of the
course by the participants of the workshop, will be used to illustrate its content,
which is being discussed.
About Drama and its contribution to social and political changes
We start with the premise that Drama, as a collective and ludic art, contributes
to people’s relationships. It helps to overcome prejudices as well as reinforcing
the importance of otherness, respect and the value of diversity. It also
stimulates group work, building of group knowledge and aesthetic articulation of
expression; of speech and of thought, amongst other aspects of human life.
Part of the board coordinated by Professor Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro: Pedagogical
strategies for the prevention of Holocaust: The Holocaust as a Subject-Matrix. During the
9rh Biennial Conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars Leslie Marko is a Peruvian theater director, living in São Paulo, with a Phd about Holocaust, Drama and Education at USP/São Paulo. Representative for the Latin America International
Jewish Theatre (AJT). Leslie has directed several Jewish plays for young people and adults
.Currently teaching at the Advertisement and Marketing University (ESPM), at the International
Relations and Administration course with the class: “Communication Expressions”. São Paulo,
Brazil.
I felt touched by each gesture, by each scene, by each unique moment. We
explore the core of our inner feelings.
Amanda, teacher, Arqshoah’s member
The Educational Theatre makes use of methodological resources borrowed
from drama language that, throughout history uses abstraction, imagination,
creativity and criticism as a way of perceiving the world.
It is important to promote young people’s character within the society in the
work the educator performs at the schools. In educational and learning spaces
we promote an exercise of reflection and action towards the young person’s
role, their space and struggle in society; especially the Brazilian one. And in our
case it can strengthen the young person’s own identity and help them to claim
their place in the world.
Through Educational Theatre’s practice we favor the shaping of youth drama
groups in communities with little access to culture or no access to social
services whatsoever. Theatre may be utilized as a valuable educational
resource to a society that we want to improve and humanize, by the means of
questioning and transforming both actors and spectators.
It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theatre. Our
theatre must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality. Our audience
must experience not only the ways to free Prometheus , but be schooled in the very desire to
free him.
Berthold Brecht
About the Drama Workshops developed
Promoted annually by LEER/USP (Laboratory Studies of Ethnography,
Discrimination and Racism) and coordinated by Profa Maria Luiza Tucci
LEER’s website (Laboratory Studies of Ethnography, Discrimination and Racism) within USP
(Universidade de São Paulo) about Jewish European immigration to Brazil during the Holocaust
and after that.
Carneiro, a B’nai B’rith of Brazil, and presided by Mr. Abraham Goldstein and
the São Paulo’s Department of Education; it has been happening for a few
years now the Multidisciplinary Educational Journeys to public school
teachers.
The formation of the workshops’ group happened through an invitation made by
the LEER/B’nai to a group of 20 public school teachers from different regions of
São Paulo, who had already taken part in one or more Multidisciplinary
Journeys about the Holocaust.
The inclusion of a Theatre Workshop has represented, in its essence, a space
for experimentation of drama’s educational resources directed towards the
understanding and gaining knowledge about the Holocaust – a singular
genocide in the history of mankind. As an educational action, the workshops
integrate a large plan directed to the construction of a PEACE CULTURE;
Project which has been developed by the organizers through multiple strategies
such as interdisciplinary journeys, extension courses, lecturers, exhibitions,
publications and seminars.
The dynamics of the Drama enable and encourages educators to research,
comprehend and reflect about the atrocities committed by the Nazi during the
Holocaust; to add to that, it encourages them to create pedagogical projects
that may be applied in the class room. Having the history and the memory of the
Holocaust as reference to the studies about intolerance, it was intended to
strengthen a group of universal values such as dignity, justice and ethical
citizenship. Supervised by us, the final projects may be used in basic education,
High School and College.
The way in which the meetings took place. The Idea was to form a work and study group so
that the participants developed, as multipliers in their respective work places, workshops similar
to those they were taking part as students themselves.
There were three meetings with educators. After the first two the participants
would decide themes to be developed with their students, in their respective
educational centers. These workshops would take place during the course of
three weeks and they would count on me (as facilitator) through emails. On
the third meeting each participant would present to their colleagues the
process and results of the workshop they took part in. These workshops
would be divided in three meetings and I would supervise them, also through
e-mails.
On the first meeting, through dynamics, the teachers, who didn’t know each
other would socialize through games, affection and humor. They established,
first and foremost, a trusting bond that allowed them to develop expression
processes thanks to letting go of inhibitions that block imagination and
creativity. We started the exercises with different resources such as a stimulus
to the development of theatricality, character development and scanning of new
scenic spaces. We tried out some forms of narrative, especially through non-
verbal expression.
I got intoxicated, I could undress myself from the shame and, still
timidly, to dare. The taste of boldness is good.
Hamilton, educator, SP
The participants shared and expressed aspects of their own personal
experiences towards the Holocaust; they also shared possible changing
situations of intolerance using Image Theatre, methodology proposed by
Augusto Boal from the sixties to the nineties and now spread around the world.
Using other artistic forms we enhanced the fictional construction by observing
and reflecting on a painting by Lise Forell and seeing the film, Charles Chaplin’s
“The Great Dictator”.
Have you ever heard of the Holocaust? So you see, can you believe I threw
myself at the ground, heard and acted the emotions that maybe these men and
women felt.
Eneida, educator, SP
On the second meeting, more reading and a video. “A letter, an ache” was
based on a letter written by a Polish child. Taking advantage of the sculptures
found in another place of the Museum in which the meeting took place (MuBE –
The Brazilian Museum of Sculpture); allied to an instrumental music coming
from a distance, it was set a stage to the creation of new meaningful scenes.
The group was aware that it was possible to “dramatize” about all of that, even
in a non-conventional space. They could even place themselves as audience,
not necessarily in an Italian or frontal stage anymore.
After the performance of all the scenes, we discussed about what they were
trying to convey, how did they organize their “dramatizations” to attain this
result, what reaction each scene caused in them, as actors and as spectators.
We also tried to establish parallels with the Brazilian reality that each of them
live in; particularly with those who experience the day to day of educational
centers with children and young people who live in the poorer regions of the
city. That was when we felt the most impotent and anguished before the urban
horror in which São Paulo is immersed; in the outskirts, they in touch with traffic,
drugs and violence committed both by delinquents and policemen.
Mankind is on a path towards violence, destruction,
prejudice, tragedy. At the workshop we remembered one of the
biggest genocides in History and our challenge was to create
images, and to reproduce them, in some way, to our own
students.
Lilian, educator and Arqshoah’s member, SP
In this meeting I asked them to talk, in pairs, about ways to develop the Project
they would execute in their schools. After that, everyone presented their ideas
for the Project, which was supervised by me. They would have three weeks to
accomplish and register their project; the project should be presented at our
third and final meeting, three weeks from then. The example below should
illustrate that process.
When an educator asked me what I thought about putting together a group of
five year-old children inside a cardboard train to experience the “death train” I
said, with caution, that it didn’t seem the best option because one of the
concepts developed by the Museum of Holocaust, for instance – a Museum that
organizes and promotes several courses for educators around the world – is
precisely to avoid the experience of horror and victimization. The horror is
already too strong so that one should experience it or propagate it, especially
with small children that don’t know specifics about the Holocaust and other
ways of extreme violence. We should work on the aspects about difference and
intolerance on our daily lives. At that point, the educator found another path to
her work, this time through a children’s tale.
Between the second and the third meeting the workshop members sent their
projects around via email so that we could reflect on them more. When
developing them, they brought materials for their respective activities using
pictures, videos, drawings and testimonials to be at the third meeting.
It was pleasant to share everyone’s experience at the third meeting with their
materials, their difficulties, the satisfactions, and the doubts. We shared a
cauldron of differences in the soup of creative experience that had each one of
us as a leading character in the learning process, both as students and
teachers.
The activities they put into action presented themselves as meaningful, within
the possibilities of time of each one in their respective schools. So in a three-
week period, at least five hundred students — children, teenagers and adults,
reflected about the Holocaust, about situations of intolerance and racial discrimination, in History classes, during a soccer match or at a story telling
moment.
The educators realized the richness of the dramatic resources when they acted
as guides and led the activities. It was suggested that the group should be
maintained and so we decided to present a collective sketch on the
Multidisciplinary Journey that took place in August 2011. The group got together
and rehearsed and a new poetic was built as a group of actors and educators.
Through comments, excited faces and compliments from the audience and
members of the Journey, we can affirm that the scene created touched
everyone in the audience.
Know that there are other words, other ways to Express, to communicate
oneself: the voice of the body, of the movement, of the moment.
Aldo, educator, SP
A few considerations:These workshops seek to sensitize its members when it comes to their own
comprehension of the Historical meaning of the Holocaust; not considering it a
product of a single human mind anymore, but contextualizing it in a historical
process where the conception and practice of the Nazi Fascism, through the
fierce domain of a alleged superior race, repeated the necessity of the
widespread extermination of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists and a
non-Aryan population in general that would prevent the German “purity” of
taking the planet. It also promotes consciousness; as it states Zygmunt
Bauman, some aspects of the Holocaust reveal crucial features of the society in
which we live in today.
The Holocaust happened in our modern and rational
society; at our high stage of civilization and at the peak
of our human and cultural development.
Zygmunt Bauman
Through the contact with the drama poetic and by rescuing texts that expose
the horror and the pain of the victims: excerpts of diaries of young people and
children numbed by the horror; also by being in touch with artistic pieces we
inherited from the wreckage of catastrophes, the educators had, at the Drama
Workshop, in a sensitive and intellectual way, access to information, to criticism,
an alert. Mainly an access to the exercise of provocative interaction, aesthetic
wise. Access to the making of new poetics.
I’ve got in touch with teachers, people that worked with education, that
are willing to say enough to a death culture that degrades the human
being.
Antonio, educator, SP
The accomplishment of the drama workshops made possible for the
educators to ally drama resources to the pedagogical ones; experiencing a
creative process, the making of an aesthetic translation of reality; integrating
the body, emotions and intellect, which brought a more profound reflection
about the horror and dehumanization of the Holocaust, as it is stated on the
testimonials shown in the letters displayed.
We undressed ourselves from fears and prejudice. The look upon the
world must go beyond the obvious. We are naked in front of ourselves.
There is no room to be lethargic. Let’s risk.
Amanda, educator, Arqshoah’s member
A discovery was made: drama can happen naturally, in a pleasant way, with
proper stimulus and how theatricality is present in all of us and not just in a few
talented ones.
I was fascinated by the work. We were moved after each performance that
apparently would come up out of nowhere, with almost no resources. (…).
Rute, educator, SP.
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