"My Unknown Enemy" – Theatre Workshop with Artists from both Parts of Cyprus

Report

A further installment of the "Unknown Enemy" workshop series was held in January 2005 in cooperation with the Berliner Festspielen / spielzeiteuropa. Guests included actors from Cyprus, Greece and Turkish Cypriots. Over the course of ten days, the participants worked on the rehearsal stage at the festival house and the result was a public presentation of the working process on one of the house's side stages.

The workshop was organized and sponsored in conjunction with the Cypriot ITI Centre and the Turkish Community Theatre in Nikosia. Financing on the German side came from ITI project funds underwritten by the Arts Foundation of the Federal States. Berlin director Alexander Stillmark served as artistic director.

In September 2004 Alexander Stillmark made a first journey to meet the Cypriot organizers and participants. The plan was to create a small working group composed of a total of 6-8 people, including artists with very different involvements in the conflict. Older individuals who had experienced coexistence of Greek and Turkish Cypriots before 1974. Others for whom the division of the country is perhaps not the only experience, but a formative one nonetheless. Finally, younger people born into the conflict. Our expectations, i.e. that of the initiators and organizers from Germany, drew on the results of previous workshops. We thought that it would be possible for the invited theatre artists to view the situation of their own country with critical distance. We expected that as artists and actors (comparable to changing roles) it would be possible for the workshop participants to assume and perform other perspectives on the conflict that called into question their own situation and attitudes. The basis of the workshop was Shakespeare‘s "Othello". The participants were informed in advance of this text selection and asked to study the play and mark notable passages and also to bring their own texts, images and small, personal props to the workshop. Ultimately, three Turkish and three Greek Cypriots met in Berlin. They were joined by a Greek actress and an actress of Turkish background, both of whom live in Germany and are not involved in the conflict in Cyprus, but were connected to their colleagues through language. The working language was English and translations among the German, Greek and Turkish languages were not a problem for the group.

The most striking experience of this workshop was the force with which the political conflict gripped the participants and their artistic work. Right at the beginning – the plan had actually been to start with a short performance of a literary text – one of the participants presented a statement about their view of the Cypress conflict. The other side (formulated in this case by a Turkish actress) was compelled to respond and offered a contrasting view of the events of the past. And even though openness and mutual respect were emphasized repeatedly, already from the first moment onward the theatre artists assumed the roles of representatives of political positions, holding the other side responsible as a group for a position articulated by an individual. Working on a dramatic text in the workshops always creates a productive back-and-forth between two fields – the thematization of conflicts and the practical/artistic work on the scenes. But this time we were dealing with two very different groups of actors. Whereas the Turkish Cypriots all came from the same ensemble, shared a common method and had a good deal of acting experience, the Greek Cypriots were a very heterogeneous group, which included a veteran actor, a middle-aged director and a very young colleague without much stage experience.

The text also proved to have its limitations in the context of the workshop. Shakespeare‘s language and the form of the text were too complicated to create the bridge of a common language over a sufficient duration of time. The actors repeatedly fell back into their native languages.

The result was that differences were amplified on the professional level; there was little interplay or experimentation with a scene. The groups preferred to remain among themselves and found the situation at once unsatisfactory, but impossible to take in a more open direction. It was not possible to achieve a form of artistic collaboration that would allow the participants to move beyond political differences. As a group we were unable to awaken a true interest in the artistic perspective of the Other and theatre practice.

What felt good to everyone – and what also could have functioned as a very theatre-like form – was the humor of the mirror reflection. It could have been a caricaturing reflection of attitudes and statements, a release of tension through laughter. Whenever there was improvisation on themes of individual scenes (Iago manipulates Othello, Iago murders the only witness, a scandal is created of Desdemona‘s relationship to Othello, etc.) and when these improvisations turned humorous, an artistic and human connection among the actors was created and tensions eased. In the moment of performance, opposing positions seemed surmountable, yet the theatrical interplay did not leave behind visible traces of understanding or bonds of sympathy.

As organizers, we had consciously afforded a central role to the political conflict. Opposing views and the lack of reconciliation were tolerable – less yielding, more personal and existential than in previous "My Unknown Enemy" workshops. There should have been more space during the course of the workshop for negotiating such tensions with the help of conflict resolution methods. This became clear once again in the final workshop presentation. After a description of the work process of the previous ten days dramatic improvisations, which left a comic impression, a surprising discussion ensued. We had invited Christoph Ramm, a historian from the University of Bochum and a member of the German-Cypriot Forum, to moderate the discussion. Christoph Ramm offered an overview of the political situation on Cyprus and asked the workshop participants to draw on their common experience and to think about possible forms of living together in their homeland. But the very mention of the northern Cypriot government, which is only recognized by Turkey, or the occupation of parts of the island by the Turkish military, resulted in energetic counter depections from both sides. Each speaker presented an argument from the past before any perspective on a possible future. Political positions and historical facts supplanted artistic vision at the very moment in which the artists had been called upon to be creative. As organizers we realized that before any common vision can be formulated there must be an enormous effort – an exchange of stories and coming to terms with what has occurred. The workshop in Berlin was not able to offer very much in this regard. The differences that separate both sides – between the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots – were not overcome. But at least they were articulated.