Teenagers Act Out Tragedy to Reduce Tensions
By Anna Smolchenko, Special to The Moscow Times

Moscow Times
Dec 8 2004

Mike Solovyanov / MT

Actors performing the scene where a Russian boy, Yasha, is killed
trying to stop fighting between his Ingush and Ossetian friends.

A diverse group of teenagers with no acting experience has taken to
the Moscow stage with a play aimed at overcoming ethnic tensions
between Ingush and Ossetians.

They came from Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Moscow and St. Petersburg
— and had only met one week before the show.

The play, “The Time Is Right,” staged at the Central House of Artists
on Stary Arbat on Nov. 26 was no commercial production, but a drama
therapy project organized by the nonprofit Podval theater studio.

The 15- to 19-year-olds first met in a recreation center near Moscow,
where they got to know each other and took a crash course in acting.

“I don’t know how much it has to do with theater, but I do know it
has to do with love and faith,” said Yulia Shevelyova, the director
of Podval, introducing the teenagers’ performance.

The group uses art therapy techniques, role-play and training to
reach out to children and teenagers.

Podval takes its name from its home in the basement of an old
building on Ostozhenka. Shevelyova, a singer by training, and Vitaly
Vorobyov, a former engineer, founded the group in 1986. For the last
11 years Podval has been using drama to break down barriers between
Lithuanians, Poles and Russians living in Lithuania; Azeris and
Armenians; Jews and Russians; Catholics and Protestants in Northern
Ireland; and most recently, Chechens, Ingush and Ossetians.

The Beslan school attack in September that left more than 330 people
dead, including many children, reopened old wounds between the
Ossetian and Ingush peoples, who share bitter memories of interethnic
clashes in 1992. According to Podval, in that conflict 350 Ingush and
192 Ossetians were killed and more than 30,000 Ingush and 5,000
Ossetians were displaced from their homes.

The play, staged three months after the Beslan tragedy, brought
together Ingush and Ossetian teenagers to speak out against hate and
violence. Wearing blue, white and red T-shirts, the colors of
Russia’s national flag, they sang and danced variations of the
Caucasus lezghinka, at times intertwined with rap, and Russian round
dances.

The play’s storyline begins in August this year, just before the
Beslan school attack. On a trip to Moscow an Ingush boy, Amir, meets
Astemir and Ezira, a brother and sister from North Ossetia, through
his Russian friend Yasha. Amir falls in love with Ezira and is eager
to win her heart.

The tension between Amir and the girl’s brother is palpable, and when
the Beslan tragedy unfolds, it crushes the last hopes of the Ingush
Romeo. Fueled by mutual suspicion and grief, the Ingush and Ossetian
characters resort to threats and violence. They only stop when their
Russian friend, Yasha, is killed after trying to stop the fighting.

“Yulia Semyonovna [Shevelyova] prepared the play’s basic storyline,
but the words and dances were ours,” said 16-year-old Amir Matiyev,
from Nazran, Ingushetia, who played Amir.

Onstage the teenage actors, in lines they wrote themselves for the
play, slammed police corruption and posed several searching
questions.

“Why do we have to feel like foreigners in our own country’s
capital?” asked one actor, who played an Ingush in the play.

“As long as you pay, you can smuggle whatever you like, including a
nuclear warhead,” said another character.

“Why did television lie about the number of hostages?” asked a third.

“What else can a man do who has lost everyone overnight?” asked
15-year-old Ezira Dzioyeva from Beslan, playing the part of Ezira,
referring to the North Ossetians who have said they are ready to take
up arms to avenge their relatives.

Matiyev said that two of his friends had died in Beslan, but he had
never felt any hatred toward Ossetians, Russians or any other ethnic
group.

After finishing the performance, Dzioyeva started to cry. “I played
myself,” she said in the wings. “It wasn’t hard.” She said that she
and the other actors had tried to express what they felt and that the
play “reflects all our realities.”

Like some of the other teenagers in the play, she said it was her
first time in Moscow. “Tomorrow we are leaving,” she said with tears
in her eyes.

Vladimir Pozner, Channel One television anchor and president of the
Russian Television Academy, told the audience before the performance
that the play hoped to show a way to heal ethnic divides. “There is
nothing sillier, more stupid and shameful than rejecting or disliking
another person because he speaks a different language or has a
different skin color,” he said.

Pozner, who is a Podval trustee, hosted two television programs in
the early 1990s that brought together teenagers from different parts
of the Soviet Union affected by ethnic conflict, including witnesses
of a tank incursion into Lithuania and pogroms in Baku, Azerbaijan,
and Osh, Kyrgyzstan. “It’s through the kids that we can find
solutions that adults fail to find,” Pozner said.

The play was sponsored by Charities Aid Foundation, a British-based
charity that has been working in Russia since 1993, as part of its
response to the Beslan tragedy.

Through its LifeLine program, CAF has raised some $2.5 million for
medical treatment for victims of the Beslan tragedy, including
plastic surgery and the purchase of artificial limbs. It is also
offering longer-term help, such as psychological counseling.

More than $53,000 was raised for the Beslan LifeLine drive by
Independent Media, the parent company of The Moscow Times.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress