7η ΔΙΕΘΝΗΣ ΣΥΝΔΙΑΣΚΕΨΗ ΓΙΑ ΤΟ ΘΕΑΤΡΟ ΣΤΗΝ ΕΚΠΑΙΔΕΥΣΗ
«Θέατρο & Εκπαίδευση: δεσμοί αλληλεγγύης»
Zobodo: The past that lies before us
David Oddie
Visiting Research Fellow in Applied Theatre at the University of Plymouth, UK
Workshop: 3 hours
Language: English (με βοήθεια στη μετάφραση)
‘From the perspective of indigenous people, original violence might best be understood as the disruption – and far too often, outright destruction – of a people’s story. The challenge lies in how, in the present, interdependent peoples ‘restory’, that is, begin the process of providing space for the story to take its place and begin the weaving of a legitimate and community-determined place among others’ stories.’ John Paul Lederach
The workshop seeks to develop structures through which a long view of ‘living’ history can be explored and a peoples’ narrative be given a space and voice. We will explore the idea of conflict transformation as a window of opportunity through which the web of relationships, which sustain a given conflict, at personal, cultural and structural levels can be understood and explored.
Participants enter a museum space in which will be displayed a collection of artefacts from the region of Zobodo, an imagined region based broadly on the climate, geography and communities of West Africa. This section of the museum contains artefacts created before the time of ‘The Great Change’.
Zobodo is a structured simulation exercise that uses John Paul Lederach’s ‘multiple time frame’, as described in his book, The Moral Imagintion, to re-create events over a wide period of time in the history of an imagined region. Lederach’s time frame includes the elements of recent events, lived events, remembered events – sometimes focussed on the concept of a ‘chosen trauma’ at a key moment in history; and narrative events - the understanding of how people see their place in the wider scheme of creation, history, myth and geography.
Zobodo culminates with a specific incident in recent times arising from the discovery of oil in a sensitive part of the region and participants are engaged in a race against time to address a diplomatic crisis with potentially wide political ramifications.
David Oddie Visiting Research Fellow in Applied Theatre at the University of Plymouth. After some years teaching in secondary education and working as an actor David founded the current Plymouth Barbican Theatre company and then Barefoot, Plymouth’s Art Education Agency. In 1999 he was invited by UCP Marjon (University College Plymouth St Mark and St John) to write and teach a new BA programme for drama and in 2004 he established the highly respected ARROW programme (Art: a Resource for Reconciliation Over the world), praised by Desmond Tutu as being ‘exciting, especially as it is so apt for the times’. The ARROW programme has involved David working in the West Bank, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, South Africa and elsewhere and in 2006 David became a National Teaching Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy and in 2008 was awarded an MBE. He also wrote a pilot MA programme for UCP Marjon, ‘The Creative transformation of Conflict through the Arts’, drawing together the threads of his diverse experience in the field. David has now left UCP Marjon and, building on the work of ARROW is heading up a new initiative, The Indra Congress (International Development of Reconciliation through the Arts).