REACT – community theatre setting the stage for refugee integration
If refugees are able to share their stories with the communities they find themselves in, all the abstract discussions about integration and intercultural dialogue melt away in the face of real human relations. As Neil Beddows, one of the coordinators of this project, says, "It's hard to hate someone when you've just been listening to their story or laughing at their jokes".
The REACT partnership is exploring ways of building understanding between newly arrived refugees and local populations, to make their integration into society easier. The project offers refugees the opportunity to use their own creativity, talents, ideas, opinions and imagination to put on an original theatre show. This gives refugees the chance to communicate with their host communities. At the same time it equips them with new skills and competences, ranging from language to local knowledge.
The partnership is made up of three partners:
In Bristol, community theatre acta has been working with women from Somalia, Sudan, Bangladesh and the UK since 2016 to create a new theatre piece, based on their lives and experiences. The women have been meeting weekly, and through improvisation, discussion and role-play they have created their own play.
'It’s My Life' focuses on the stories of two women trying to find a balance between what they want for themselves, and what is expected of them by their families and cultures. The first performance took place in May 2017 at the actacentre theatre, for a diverse audience made up of different local communities.
acta has also run theatre workshops with refugees and migrants, including a group of fathers at a local school and tenants from a social housing project. New theatre projects will be created from these, and will be performed in Bristol at an international theatre festival organised by refugees in the spring of 2018. This will also feature shows, seminars, workshops and conversations involving the other REACT partners in the Netherlands and Sicily, as well as a dozen of other theatres and refugee centres that have been invited to contribute and to share.
The Rotterdams Wijktheater has been working with a group of Syrian refugees in a local asylum centre. This allows them to share their stories, improvise, and dance.The result was a three-man show for the Syrian community living in Rotterdam, which was also performed at Rotterdam’s International Community Arts Festival in March 2017.
As a consequence many more Syrian refugees are interested, and will take part in a follow-up theatre project that started in the second half of 2017.
In Palermo, the Danilo Dolci Centre used dance and other theatre techniques with refugees and local communities. During four months they developed a production together, based on the real-life experiences of the participants. It was performed in July 2017, and provided another tool to personalise the issues around migration.
It helped to develop empathy and relationships, both among the performers and between the performers and the audience. Martino Lo Cascio, the Italian theatre director involved, said:
"Knowing the Italian language isn't essential, although it could be useful later. Nor is the ability to sing, to dance, to act. What really matters is having the desire to express oneself, to talk about one's own journey, and the aspiration to move beyond a painful condition of silent invisibility ".
Theatre work of this type helps to challenge prejudice and misconceptions, and promote understanding between refugees and host communities. It also develops personal and transferable skills in the participating refugee, like presentation, language and communication skills. Theatre can build self-confidence and self-esteem, can create new friendships as well as raise awareness of the host country's culture(s).
The REACT festival aims to encourage wider use of community theatre as a tool for helping refugee integration in Europe. It does this by bringing together the partners' work so far, demonstrating the lessons learned as well as the performances created. The festival will also provide an opportunity to look at some of the challenges in this sort of work: coping with the very specific problems that refugees often face, like accommodation, health issues, legal status, or administrative complications.
By comparing a range of integration-related and educational approaches in the partner countries, the overall project aims to identify innovative participatory methods that can be used successfully for refugee integration across the EU.