Jonathan Chadwick, ex Artistic Director of Meeting Ground has set up a sister company to explore War Stories and other developments. For further information please visit www.aztheatre.org.uk or e-mail info@aztheatre.org.uk

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War Stories

An international exploration of theatre and war

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This project is a partnership between five theatre companies:

Meeting Ground Theatre Company (England)
Theatre de l'Opprime (France)
Masrah el Tedj (Algeria)
Theatre for Everyone(Palestine)
Growing Up Theatre (Yugoslavia)

in association with the Sibiu International Theatre Festival (Romania)

Supporters: William Gaskill Harriet Walter Maggie Steed

Aims
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The aim is to create a programme of encounters, workshops, spectacles, presentations and performances which will explore the roots, causes and impact of war and add to a common pool of wisdom and knowledge that will contribute to its eventual abolition.

At the same time the project will be an investigation of theatre, its capabilities, its forms of expression and its potential.

Out of this will come a series of theatre pieces, some of which may be co-productions. It will be a seedbed of creative thinking and theatre activity. There will be publications of texts and a documentary film.

Each of the companies will work with a group of non-professionals as a way of developing and sharing ideas, working practices and stories. There will thus be a potential for these groups from the different countries to share their work.

The project will be focused on the 'home towns' of the participating companies and the Sibiu International Theatre Festival. The World Social Forum will be another contact point for the project.

The project will be long-term with a prospect of a five year programme of work. Each year will be planned separately and the project will be financed through contributions to a central administration fund as well as elements of the programme being funded by partners from local sources. In the initial period Meeting Ground will provide the key administrative and organisational centre

Focus
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The work is being undertaken from the point of view that war is a historical phenomenon and is capable of being superceded and abolished. Looking out at how this human activity is occurring we have to simultaneously look into ourselves.

The focus of the project will be on the psychological and social relationships which surround the activity of making war rather than directly on the activities of killing and inflicting injury.

The diversity of the companies involved will provide a variety of perspectives involving different proximities to the central activities of war. Exploring this activity which is embedded in nationality in an international context will create rich discoveries.

How consent to war is created and mediated, how war is made into a spectacle, how it alters the composition of social relations and of the individual, how it works on our sense of destiny and fate, on our sense of impotence and power and on our sexuality are all central questions for us.

The fact that the area where hostilities take place is called the theatre of war has implications for what theatre is and what we consider action to be. The fact that war effaces the individual and transforms collective relations in terms of both consciousness and responsibility has implications for the structure of character and the definition of the human being.

The imaginative processes entailed in destruction are capable of being transformed into sources of creativity.

Plans
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At the current time at the end of 2001 we are developing our knowledge of each other as companies. We are creating an agreement of the principles by which we will work. We are looking for support for our work. Meeting Ground is planning to take a new piece of theatre to the Sibiu International Theatre Festival in May 2002. Meeting Ground and Theatre de l'Opprime are sending delegates to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre Brazil in January 2002. We are planning to bring the companies together at workshops in Sibiu and later in the year in London.