Building Peace through the Performing Arts: the rohingya
The special capacity of the performance arts to bridge gaps and build peace is manifested in a music, speech and dance event portraying the ordeal of the Rohingya expelled from Myanmar, living in the world’s largest refugee camp.
We live in a world simultaneously stamped by the pressures of globalisation and individualisation. Globalisation brings mass movement of people and ideas, so ‘all that is solid melts into air’; individualisation breaks down accepted roles for ‘people like us’ and makes life a social construct. Together they bring conflicts as diverse individuals are thrown together in social milieux and some seek in an imaginary way to restore past certitudes—expunging from their midst those who differ from them, who can be scapegoated by populist leaders for the insecurities they suffer when nothing can any longer be taken for granted.
Vast swaths of humanity are displaced by these nativist forces, turned into refugees and turned out upon the world. Such have been, for instance, for the Rohingya of Myanmar. Hundreds of thousands still occupy the world’s largest refugee encampment, at Cox’s Bazaar in neighbouring Bangladesh.
But can these movements of exclusion be challenged, by an alternative take on globalisation and individualisation—which instead interprets them as an imperative for compassion towards fellow human beings populating a shared planet whose social fabric is at risk? One way of doing so is via the arts.
A decade and a half ago, the Nobel prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk wrote in the Guardian that ‘central to the art of the novel’ is ‘the question of the “other”, the “stranger”, the “enemy” that resides inside each of our heads, or rather, the question of how to transform it’. For even as the novel ‘relates our own lives as if they were the lives of others, it offers us the chance to describe other people’s lives as if they were our own’. Similarly, the Magnum co-operative member Erich Hartmann’s arresting black-and-white photographs of relics of the concentration camps embodied his belief ‘that if we decide that we must link our lives inextricably—that “me” and “them” must be replaced by “us”—we may succeed in making a world where gas chambers will never be used again’.
Perhaps the performing arts in particular have that capacity—to present an individual acting out a role in such a way that members of the audience, who may have no other access to it, can enter that role for themselves. As Amir Ali, a 70-year old Rohingya refugee violinist, put it, ‘You and I are not going to stay forever, but what will remain immortal is our music and through our music, our stories, our culture and our ideas.’
The story of the Rohingyas is being told and retold in many ways but a dance choreography, ‘Uncharted’, has for the first time let the Rohingya refugees themselves tell their stories in their own artistic way. It was a novel initiative to involve the refugees in every stage of the production of the dance—from scripting, production designing, music composition, music recording, dance composition and rehearsal through to performance. It has bridged barriers between artists and allowed the larger audience to feel and empathise with the hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas who have gone through untold atrocities in their homeland.
The piece was commissioned in collaboration with a group of Rohingya musicians in the camps and choreographed in one of oldest classical dance forms practised in Bangladesh. It starts with a metaphor of Ocean, how the ocean is far and wide and beautiful, and the refugees in the camps have not seen it even when they are so close—they can just hear the waves. Against that calm, the narrator, a Rohingya refugee whose story is core to the piece, says: ‘But I have seen an ocean of hopes, ocean of dreams and ocean of emotions in this camp. It was a night of gunshots, it was everywhere. I heard it, everyone heard it. Many children, many women, many like you, many like me lay motionless.’
Moving from one corner to another, the dancer evokes the journey—at one juncture the narrator’s voice resounds to the emotions they felt through their ordeal, seeping into the warmth they received from the people of Bangladesh when they first arrived: ‘We had nothing with us when we came here, not a single drop of water, but the people of this country gave us hope of a brighter tomorrow—it was only for the people of this country that we survived.’
The narrator and the musician express their deepest of fears, yet the ‘voice of hope’ and ‘voice of humanity and togetherness’ stand out in the piece: ‘There was food everywhere in the country we came from, but we couldn’t gather a single ounce to feed the children. It was in Bangladesh that we finally felt secure and safe—we had food after days, we had water and we had a shelter,’ retails the narrator whose words intersperse the music and dance.
It took almost a year to produce the piece, from recording the music in the camp environment to combining it with the narration, which was scripted in collaboration with the young Rohingya refugee who delivered it. The musicians didn’t even have their own instruments: they rented instruments to do voluntary shows for groups of people every day and were designated informally as ‘peace ambassadors’.
Culminating on a high note, the choreography evokes hope for a better tomorrow, ending with the civil-rights song ‘We shall overcome’.
‘Performing this has been one of the best experiences of my life. It shakes you from within and brings you to understand what they have gone through, it makes you believe in humanity, it makes you the believe in friendship, harmony and freedom—it gives you a message of hope and peace,’ said a performer, who performed the choreography at an event in Cox’s Bazar.
The performing arts have a special potential to break down the stereotypes which block natural instincts of compassion—to render individuals secure in their everyday, perhaps cocooned, lives open to the experiences of others whose lives have been turned upside down. All the world’s a stage, said Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and all the men and women were ‘merely players’. But the fatalistic tone of that soliloquy fitted a world of four centuries ago, not that of today.
Now dance, theatre and other forms can present on stage a world which calls upon us, the local, national and even global audience, not simply to watch the spectacle passively—but to rise from our seats and respond.
Contributor: Baisali Mohanty
