Art and peace series
Karen McFarlane has been involved in community relations and social theatre for years. She works with Partisan Productions, a professional Theatre and Film production company (core funded by CRC and ACNI) committed to creating socially engaged art working with communities on social and political issues.
Interview conducted by Stefania Gualberti
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Stefania – How did your background and experiences lead to your involvement in social theatre?
Karen – None of it was intended. Everything happened – for a reason – accidentally. I did my degree in English and film studies. My focus at school when younger was science based. My mum died when I was 16 which didn’t impact on me consciously for a long time, but later I realised that it completely changed my focus and direction more toward the arts.
I have been very lucky in my career. My first full time job after graduating was with the first branch of Waterstones in Belfast. Setting it up from a shell of a building to a fully functioning book store and I was put in charge of running the Children’s section which I really enjoyed as I had become a mum during my time at University. I progressed well for a number of years but became disillusioned as it moved from the love of books and recommendations to the realisation that money making was paramount to the organisation. It wasn’t my cup of tea. After a few changes in the book trade I then became redundant and unemployed for many months – it was a difficult time.
I eventually found an ad in the paper looking for unemployed women to take part in a film training programme – friends and family thought it sounded dodgy but I went for it anyway and it opened up a number of opportunities for me. It was a training course for film festival management, being run by Cinemagic under the auspices of The Nerve Centre. It was a year-long programme studying every aspect of managing and running a film festival. It was a really enjoyable art programme that tied into my degree in English and Film Studies. The festival exposed young people to foreign movies and offered opportunities to attend workshops with actors, directors, writers etc.
Most of the audience would have been children brought by schools or sometimes by parents, but they would have been mostly middle class pupils and families. I was more interested in trying to reach less privileged young people and eventually went from administrator in Cinemagic to Outreach coordinator, which was the start of what I am doing now in many ways. I was bringing projector, screen, films by taxis and buses out to different community centres, traveller camps, youth clubs etc showing films, talking about films and giving the young people access to films they wouldn’t see anywhere else. Most of the children I was interested to reach out to would have never been to the cinema to see any films.
When funding ran out for my post, I started to work in Ballynafeigh Community Development Association (BCDA) surprisingly as I hadn’t had a community development background. We were looking at Ballynafeigh as a shared neighbourhood working with other communities in Northern Ireland who identified as shared and what lessons we could all learn from each other particularly in a post conflict society. As part of that project, we employed Partisan Productions to do a piece of Forum Theatre and that was the start of my interest in social theatre. It was a very difficult project negotiating the conflicts between the needs of the community and the artistic aesthetic. One example of the issue tackled was of flags going up in a neighbourhood which was supposed to be shared.
Forum theatre terrified me at first. A short piece of theatre is constructed, in this case 45 minutes long, which brings up the issues that have been researched with people in advance (through interviews or workshops in the community). This production was called “Stevie’s Big Game” and focused on shared neighbourhood issues. In forum theatre after the piece has been played for the audience, it is played again and the audience is asked if they want to change anything, find solutions. You are completely reliant on audience participating and they can decide to shout some suggestions from their seats or get up on stage and replace the actor in acting solutions to the problem they are facing. Every night in the side wings we were worried that nobody would get up, but every night we were inundated really.
In every experience I always found that there is somebody willing to get up, to give it a go and try this format and it astounded me every time. In this format of forum theatre there is a figure called a joker which interfaces between the audience and the character on stage. They are the ones who will encourage the audience to participate, at least to start shouting suggestions about what they want to happen and then encourage people to get up on stage. Sometimes you would have people who are reluctant to get up on stage but never to shout out suggestions. We will never force anyone to get up on stage or do something they wouldn’t feel comfortable doing. Even if you end up in a discussion you are still looking at issues and finding solutions. After this experience I trained in Dundalk on Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed which forum theatre is an integral part of.
Stefania – What do you feel is special about art and especially theatre to transform conflict, connect and build peace?
Karen – Forum theatre is very powerful. At the time when I was first involved with social theatre, we were doing some work with young people. The relaxed atmosphere that they brought to the show was hilarious. They all brought lots of sweets, crisps, juice but they were really engaged. The issues they chose were very different from the ones the adults chose. Their sense of morality was very different. There was a scene where there was a potential affair happening between two people, flirting and the young people were outraged, they hated it: if you are married to one person you can’t be flirting with another. The issue never came up with the adults.
From the ridiculous to the more sublime; the flag issues. There was a scene where the main character is trying to sell his mothers house and he doesn’t have an issue with the flag per se as he is from the same background, but the flag going up is going to affect the price of the house. When the kids were asked what they would do in that situation one of them suggested the use of physical violence. When he was invited on stage to perform it, he knew he was going to look ridiculous if he tried to hurt the actor, so he engaged him in a conversation. He had to try and find different ways. Just this example for me showed how powerful this format is. The conversation didn’t go as he had thought it was going to go, he had to think what else can I do here? He realized he had different options.
Stefania – How can socially engaged theatre help tackle racism and sectarianism locally or build relationships?
Karen –The idea of tackling racism and sectarianism is very funding lead. There is a certain amount of dishonesty that comes with that. Because you can’t tackle sectarianism and racism doing just a workshop. You need continuous work and you need to be able to build relationships and chip away at some of these issues, then you have some hope. I don’t know if the young person I was talking about earlier had a positive impact from participating in our project, but I know his life turned around. I can’t tell you if it had an impact on him at all, but I would like to think that maybe it did.
I think we all need to think about the language we use when doing this work. For instance we have been working with a group called ‘Stop Attacks’. We are all familiar with the term ‘punishment beatings’, but this has all sorts of connotations, not least that the young people deserve the violence that is used to control and manipulate them. It is ultimately child abuse though and we are working with this group to bring awareness about the brutality and coerciveness of such practices.
Social theatre gives you a way of building relationships and looking at things from different perspectives. It offers you the opportunity to realise there are always different options and choices.
Five or six years ago, there was a theatre production we did in East Belfast, “East Belfast Boy”; a traditional piece of theatre based on community research and what young men were experiencing in the area. Young men on the 12th of July with their aspirations and/or lack of aspirations.
“East Belfast boy” was very successful, we had to turn people away every night. We don’t charge for tickets. Sometimes we work on donations but mostly is just free in. Board members didn’t even get in to see it, we really didn’t expect to have so many people. It was a massive success. It was only a couple of years later we were told a couple of the men working in the community centre had a bet that nobody was going to show up to this theatre production in their area. They were gobsmacked and admitted that they were wrong and pleasantly surprised.
Stefania – Why did you think it was so successful?
A lot of the issues you find in one community are relevant to many other communities and are also rarely explored within the local areas. We make a real effort to transform buildings – in this instance a somewhat dilapidated community centre – into what looks and feels like a real theatre which impacts on the local community and creates a word of mouth pull to our events. This was also part of the Eastside festival which helped.
A journalist (Robert) came along and wrote an article in the Irish News. His story says everything about what we are trying to do. He talked about coming into the venue to see the show and almost turning his car away as in the area there are murals, flags and is very well identified as a unionist, loyalist area which made him feel very uncomfortable. He made himself overcome the fear and went in anyway. The article said how fantastic the show was, but the most important thing was about his experience. After going in he met a person from the Arts Council, myself and the writer/director Fintan and some of the people from the community centre. As he walked out, he realized he had left the programme behind and he went back to get it and he describes it as “it felt like going home” because he had met such nice people and felt so welcomed there. His opinion of what he was about to experience had completely changed. To me that says everything about the power of art, and how transformative it can be.
Stefania – How do you overcome the barriers in groups especially people who would not consider themselves as actors or theatre experts?
Karen –There are a lot of barriers when it comes to theatre as it is surrounded by snobbery. There are rigid rules in theatre but in our projects, we try to make it accessible. I am not suggesting that our projects would make people go to the theatre more, but we bring the theatre to them.
We always present the productions in the community, but we try to transform the space into a theatre space. We worked in West Belfast- Poleglass- on a show about suicide, there was an epidemic in the area at the time amongst young men in particular. “I Never See the Prettiest Thing” was staged at the Brook recreation centre, a massive sport centre in the middle of the community, and we completely transformed the space. We brought in a full light kit, projectors for digital imaging, full set and staging and made it as professional as we possibly could. Another journalist interviewed us and said I didn’t even know this theatre existed. She thought she was in a real theatre. We like to transform spaces. 99% of our audience would have never been to a show so it is important for our audience to see something in their area which has changed the community into something different.
Stefania – How do you think the creative process can help healing trauma at both individual and collective levels?
Karen – I have real difficulty with this question because I’m not sure that it can. There are obviously art therapists who do fantastic work. And art can be very therapeutic and can be used to help people overcome trauma. We would never claim that we do that. There are some processes that claim to be healing trauma and I feel very uncomfortable with that, as I think they can potentially re-traumatise people. In our workshops we are always careful that people are not playing themselves and if someone wants to bring their story, we are careful that somebody else would play the character to create that distance. To understand you have different choices in life, you need some sort of distance. If you are emotionally involved, it is very difficult to come up with options. I know some people use art and theatre as a form of therapy, but it is not our approach.
The intention is not healing trauma but I am aware in the piece we did about suicide the audience were very affected but in a positive way. We had comment cards and everyone came back with positive feedback about the show and on how people related to experiences of suicide somewhere in their lives, family or friends. One of the youth groups that came along to the production said that even if a lot of young people had experiences of suicide, they were never able to talk about it before the show but did talk openly after. Social theatre has the power to make people more aware and create opportunity for discussion. If it makes a difference to some of the participants and audiences that’s good enough for me.
Stefania – Is there a particular project or engagement that you want to talk about in relation to this conversation on art and peacebuilding?
Karen – I have named quite a few. One takes us to a different level. Before the pandemic we worked with young men and what makes some of them join paramilitary organisations and we had really started getting into the depth of some of the issues. We had a show called “Time of my life”. The Department of Justice became really interested in this piece of theatre as some of them came to see it in the community organisations. They and PSNI funded us to tour it. In 2019 we went to Newtownabbey, Dundonald, Carrickfergus, and other community organisations. The plan was to take it into the North-West, Derry was interested but because of the pandemic we had to cancel it.
It looked at how little some of these lads have a lack of hopes, lack of aspirations, education system letting them down, community organisations letting them down. Debt and drugs being massive issues that lead them into getting involved with paramilitaries. We also collaborated with the youth detention centre.
We looked at all of these issues during the discussions after the performance and it was very interesting to look at the different perspectives the various audiences had. When we invited statutory bodies to participate, their input was very different from the young people in the community centres. It indicated the massive gap between the perspectives of what happens on the ground and the perception of statutory bodies. They are trying to influence the issues which are very far from their reality. The people from the local community could watch, laugh, empathise. The statutory body would sympathise but felt they couldn’t laugh. The suggestions on what can be done were more effective from the community, while the statutory bodies were confined to policy issues. The relationship is top-down. It’s a pity the programme was interrupted but fingers crossed we will be able to continue because it had a real potential to impact on both the community level and on policy.
Stefania – Could you share some of the learnings you have encountered in your years of experience?
Karen – One of the learnings is about how a lot of the problems we are trying to deal with are systemic. How can we influence policy? That’s tricky, it is not easy to do, and you need to know how the system works to have an impact on it. That is probably a challenge and a learning for the future.
In Forum theatre we talk a lot about power. Who has power? When we are doing our workshops, we deal with power at a very basic interpersonal level, it is not legislative theatre which tries to impact on policy.
To go back to the language used -often the discourse goes towards “we are all be the same, we are all human”. That really annoys me. We are not all the same, and we shouldn’t. We should celebrate the differences. I was asked to do some workshops in a diverse parent group. They all lived in the same area and their kids go to the same school. The kids play with each other and have no issues with diversity, the parents didn’t know how to talk with each other. Do I say hello to the woman with the scarf? With the fear to offend, we do not communicate.
I think we need some more honesty with this kind of work as none of these issues are going away any time soon.
One learning that I think we all forget too often is how important it is to have fun with what we are doing. Working with Women’s Groups taught me this more than anything. The groups tend to come into the room talking about their worries – caring for children, grandchildren, lack of money, health issues etc. And for the short time they are concentrating on the games and exercises in a workshop they forget about all of that and have fun. As adults we forget how much we learn from enjoying ourselves.
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