Playback Theatre Ensemble

Healing the Wounds of History & International House, Berkeley

Present

Healing the Wounds of History:

Tamil and Sinhalese in Dialogue in the Aftermath of their civil war

International House, Berkeley

2299 Piedmont Avenue

Sunday, March 7, 2010

The Workshop

There is an impasse between the Tamils' need for acknowledgement and acceptance of their historical trauma and the Sinhalese feeling of insult, rage and defensiveness at the thought of their ancestors committing despicable crimes against humanity. For Turks it is an affront to their national identity that challenges their sense of positive cultural self-esteem. For Armenians, it is the ultimate hurt, humiliation and degradation to have one’s experience of genocide denied. The inability of both groups to move through these complex emotional stances towards mutual recognition and respect, prevents political reconciliation.

How do we navigate through this psychologically loaded minefield towards constructive dialogue and cooperation?

Healing the Wounds of History is based on the premise that there can be no political solutions to intercultural conflict until we understand and take into consideration the needs, emotions and unconscious drives of the human being. The Healing the Wounds of History Project, which takes a psychological approach to conflict, provides a map to help both groups traverse the emotional terrain to reconciliation. We invite Armenians and Turks who are willing to be emotional pioneers for their cultures to participate in this groundbreaking project:

·      Breaking the taboo against Turks and Armenians speaking to each other.

·      Humanizing each other through sharing our personal stories.

• Taking steps towards healing personal and collective wounds using creative, experiential methods.
• Transforming historical trauma into constructive action and service.

Healing the Wounds of History

Healing the Wounds of History is a process in which experiential techniques are used to work with a group of participants who share a common legacy of historical trauma. The process was developed by Armand Volkas, MFT, a psychotherapist and drama therapist from Berkeley, California. Volkas is the son of Auschwitz survivors and resistance fighters from World War II. He was moved by his personal struggle with this legacy of historical trauma to address the issues that arose from it: identity, victimization and perpetration, meaning and grief. Healing the Wounds of History helps participants work through the burden of such legacies by transforming their pain into constructive action. Armand Volkas’s work has received international recognition for bringing groups in conflict together: Germans and Jews; Palestinians and Israelis; Japanese, Chinese and Koreans; African-Americans and European-Americans, to name a few.

A Two Day Workshop

and Research Project in the Creative Arts

Sponsored by

Initiative for the Advanced Study of Culture, Conflict and the Arts Therapies

Research Project

 participation in drama therapy and art therapy processes, especially the “Healing the Wounds of History” method, facilitated by Armand Volkas, MA, MFA, MFT, its creator.

These workshops are a precursor to a major pilot study proposed to take place in Sri Lanka, later in 2009-2010. The August workshops will be mainly based in the method developed by drama therapist Armand Volkas, which is called “Healing the Wounds of History.” Mr. Volkas is internationally renowned for this work that he has been practicing all over the world since the 1980s. He came to Concordia, in 2003, at the invitation of Stephen Snow, Ph.d., and sponsored by the Peace and Conflict Resolution Academic Series, to effectively use his method with Palestinian and Israeli Canadians in the wake of “the Concordia Riots.” In 1989, he brought together children of Holocaust survivors and children of the Third Reich. An important documentary film was made about this historic event. He has worked with Afro-Americans and Euro-Americans on the legacy of slavery. He has been invited to China, this fall, to work on the intergenerational trauma resulting from “the Rape of Nanking” in WWII. All this to say, he is deeply experienced and a genuine expert in his method, knowing how to safely and therapeutically guide his process. He is a licensed family and marriage counselor and a registered drama therapist. Mr. Volkas will be the main facilitator of the workshops on August 29 and 30.

He will be assisted by Dr. Shavindra Dias and Dr. Stephen Snow. Dr. Dias, a psychiatrist from Sri Lanka, will also serve as translator (as needed). Our plan is to bring together two Tamil and two Sinhalese Sri Lankans who are immigrants to Canada who will use the “Healing the Wounds of History” method to process the stories of their experience of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. We also plan to have two very experienced art therapists, Dr. Josee Leclerc and Ms. Olga Lipadatova, present to use art work and sandtray work to assist the Sri Lankan participants in expressing their emotions and their experience related to the ethnic conflict between the two groups. All of this material will be used as data to build the future workshops in Sri Lanka. With the consent of the participants, it will be photographed and archived. Some sections of the workshops will be videotaped by a professional documentary filmmaker, again, with the consent of all participants.

Contact: Dr. Stephen Snow at 514-469-0255 or dramarx@sympatico.ca