Driving Social Change
John Martin, artistic director of Pan Intercultural Arts says:
“The Brexit referendum revealed deep splits in UK society. Close to the top of these came issues of migration, especially of refugees. The result seemed to give licence to a sector of society to insult and even attack refugee communities.”
For many years Pan has worked with groups of young migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, traumatised by the experiences of war, abuse, torture and the journeys undertaken to escape them. One symptom of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can be that imagination is reduced as the person seeks to deal with existential problems, which later causes difficulty to plan a life, trust people or express the desires for the future. John says:
“The arts are a terrific way to re-claim creativity through drama games, vocal improvisations, role play and creating a safe space where people’s ideas can be shared, developed and grown in a group.”
Pan Intercultural’s artist facilitators are from a diversity of backgrounds and trained in music, improvisation and physical theatre.
They work happily with many languages in a group, through demonstration, playfulness and encouragement without the encumbrance of interpreters:
“We work only in English with plenty of demonstration, clear slow instructions, mime, physicality and copying. We allow other languages if there are peer-translators, and it is really needed, but avoid subgroups forming based on language. However, we encourage participants to improvise in their own language, tell stories, bring songs in their own language so that they can feel the freedom of the flow of their language.”
A pilot project Building Bridges took place in a London college. The participants were split into two groups – migrants and individuals from the local area. They workshopped apart, then joined together to share ideas and discuss “otherness”. The groups explored what makes up identity and how people react to other identities. They looked at hate speech and positivizing speech and what it is like to live in a pluralistic society like London.
URB_ART spoke to John Martin, Artistic Director, and a founder member of Pan. Pan Intercultural Arts (www.pan-arts.net) runs projects for refugees, unaccompanied minor asylum seekers, female survivors of trafficking and young people close to criminality.
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