Community Center: Let Them In!
Theatre Becomes Legislative in Wijchen (NL)

Wijchen, April 2001: "The cops always chase us, no matter what we do. They treat us like criminals, frisking us in front of the whole neighborhood. And we're just looking shelter for the rain." Anyone who has seen the images of the video project on the Headlines Theatre website (http://www.headlinestheatre.com) on the one hand and the quiet, clean and tidy south side of 37.000 inh.-town of Wijchen on the other, must think we're in the wrong motion picture. The above statement of a 15 year-old does not seem to fit into this context. But this is exactly how young people in Wijchen view their situation. And they're not the only ones: most of the adults, the elderly, school teachers and the press talk about young people as only causing trouble, being involved in drug dealing, terrorizing and threatening the neighborhood. As we entered Wijchen with a team of 5 people last March 28, we held each other's hands and hoped we'd survive this place.

On that day and the next we did a series of 5 image theatre workshops to get the real story from all those involved. Images of fear, suspicion and local government overzealousness, but most of all of prejudice. Within the already densely populated Netherlands, Wijchen-South has areas where people are crammed together in a chess game of buildings. The urge for privacy leads to an almost complete stop of communication. All of the groups in this play have the weirdest ideas about the others. These groups never meet, so xenophobia had a chance to develop without a foreign soul around.

The town of Wijchen, being very concerned about this, asked us last January to initiate a dialogue, to begin with the creation of common images and to lauch a community building process. That's fine, we said, but what are you goint to do with the ideal images the people will present you with? First the mayor said he would be happy if the people would just resume communication, but we said: this is legislative theatre so we have to take them seriously. So we agreed on the implementation of the proposals presented by the chamber in the square. A spark of enthousiasm entered the town hall as politicians and civil servants began to anticipate the outcome of this project.

The working process
Of course, it was fast. We had to throw the book away and we broke all the rules. We tried to compress a process that is designed to take weeks or months into eight days. We combined the workshops images to a common real image ourselves: we wrote the script and our actors played. it was not ideal, but it sufficed. We took a major risk: all of the participants were sceptical, the local press tried to destroy the project before it even started and the people in the town hall got the jitters. This could go either way.

On the night of March 28, we knew that we'd struck gold. Twenty youngsters (we had projected 10) from all over the suburb joined us in the workshops. They painted an image of neglect, of a society that tolerates young people as long as they keep their mouth shut. They had been assigned a hang-out place in a park, protected from the weather only by a small roof, floodlit and visible for all to see. We saw it, it looked like an open cage in a zoo. So they refused to go there and looked for places near the shopping mall, preferably on a schoolyard, where there is some privacy. They admitted they now took their fun out of annoying and threatening people. It doesn't matter what we do anyway, and it's nice to be in the newspapers, it's a form of respect. If the town would give them a dignified place to be, there would be no trouble anymore.

The adults that joined the workshops, almost 50 in total, remained very suspicious but expressed their feelings that young people had a tough stand in the neighborhood and more space should be created. It was especially notable that the elderly, who are living in a housing project for senior citizens right across the spot where most of the young people would "linger", were very firm in their support. They expressed their doubts about the fact that the local community center did not offer any space for people under eighteen. This was to become a major issue. But the elderly also expressed their fears: young people would damage their cars and threaten those who would object to the noise after dark. But they promised to attend the premiere night of the Forum play.

"Death at the hang-out"
was the provoking title of the play. In 35 minutes it summed up all the fears, prejudice and political cynicism that had destroyed communication during the passing year. Our actors, joined by one of the youth workers, worked their heart out to get a grip of more than 15 different characters. They also rehearsed four songs to the soundtrack, which was composed in only 24 hours, there was light, there were props, it was a "dazzling show" (so the local newspaper), basically written by the people during the workshops. After the curtain fell and the lights went on, interventions poured out of the spect-actors.

Towards the end of the performance, solutions took shape. They were not yet fixed, as the second performance was stil to come. The closing image consisted of around 25 people standing on stage, expressing their confidence in a common solution. The young, the old, the police, the mayor, everyone was there. But the best part happened while we were clearing the stage: people who were enemies just a week ago engaged in a dialogue. There were small groups talking to each other until an hour after conclusion.

On the night of April 10, most of the people returned to take the next step. The performance was now more solution-orientated. Four proposals were accepted by a crowd of 90, the most important being that the community center had to be opened for young people. The proposals were immediately projected on a screen, so that the minutes of this meeting were already written and acclaimed. Local government officials now rendered their part of the bargain: they promised to start working on the proposals and a committee was formed by the audience to support and control the process.

Conclusion
This project was unique in sofar that we were faced with a completely heterogenic, even hostile community. Of course we couldn't overcome all the differences in 8 days. But finding a common denominator among people with different interests is just as much looking for social desire as working with homogenic groups, seeking for creative solutions for shared problems. In this process, people recognised they had something to share in the first place. At this point it should be reiterated that Dutch society has lost much of the homogeneity of the past generations. The image we are getting more and more during workshops is that of people standing back to back, all looking in a different direction. The challenge we are facing is inserting something in the center of the circle of backs, inviting people to look over their shoulder and noticing that they're not alone.

Currently we are in dialogue with community workers in Amsterdam and Rotterdam to start a similar project as in Wijchen, but on a larger scale. The Dutch government has proclaimed the importance of social cohesion. We feel that Theatre of the Oppressed can be a powerful tool to recreate and enhance this cohesion. We will keep you informed.

Under Pressure 6, April 2001