Act For Peace

On the 70th anniversary of voting for women in Italy, Rotarian women and women of Rondine Citadel of Peace, who live the drama of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict and that in their countries they cannot meet, they are together to accomplish a project devoted to peace. To give those places the chance to put in their fabric a concrete seed of hope.

The project was divided in several phases

 

1.       Participants

Lusine and Ulviya, the Rondine students from Armenia and Azerbaijan gathered 11 participants from these two countries to come and make a dialogue and theatre experience in symbolic and peaceful ambience of Rondine Citadella della Pace

2.       Methodology

One of the methodologies used in the “Act for Peace” project, was the methodology of Imagine Center of Conflict Transformation.

The Imagine Center works with the histories of the conflicts, including the historical narratives and their impact on the conflicts themselves and individual and collective identities, conducting analysis of the methodologies of historiography and history education and developing alternative approaches. The Center also works with the present-day dynamics of the conflicts, attempting to step away from the entrenched and visibly irreconcilable positions and analyze conflicts from the point of view of the needs, fears, concerns, and hopes of the involved societies. And finally we conduct joint visioning of the future, followed by strategy building and implementation of specific initiatives conceived in these planning workshops.

Another methodology used in the project, and the one that gave name to the project is Forum Theatre methodology.

Forum theatre is a type of theatre created by the innovative and influential practitioner Augusto Boal as part of what he calls his "Theatre of the Oppressed." Boal created Forum theatre as a forum for teaching people how to change their world. While practicing earlier in his career, Boal would apply 'simultaneous dramaturgy'. In this process the actors or audience members could stop a performance, often a short scene in which a character was being oppressed in some way. The audience would suggest different actions for the actors to carry out on-stage in an attempt to change the outcome of what they were seeing. This was an attempt to undo the traditional actor partition and bring audience members into the performance, to have an input into the dramatic action they were watching. Eventually this 'simultaneous dramaturgy' became Forum theatre when audience members were asked not just to suggest different actions, but to come on stage and perform their own interventions.

3.       Campus

By staying together in Rondine Cittadella della Pace, also divided some values spread by the current students of Rondine. Thanks to the experience gained at Rondine, the protagonists of the project intend spreading the culture of dialogue and peace through an intense exchange experience to a group of young active Armenians and Azeris, with strong motivations and capabilities to bring positive changes in their respective conflicting societies.

4.       Collaboration with Rondini D’Oro

Collaboration with Rondini D’Oro completes a full circle of Rondine as a peace-building project, where its alumni are called to facilitate the dialogue process for the young project participants. The trust given to their experience shows the level of maturity and professionalism of Rondine alumni.