Following the war, Dzemal University moved into the only site they could afford, an old Austria-Hungarian army post, which had been badly shelled during the war. Some of the buildings were mostly rubble. University offices and classrooms now occupy the renovated buildings. The University is  strapped for money. The library for the School of Humanities is pitifully stocked. The English Department library had perhaps 150 books, mostly donated, so the selection was quite random.

I was invited to present two weeks of acting workshops to help inaugurate the new drama department's acting program. This is the only actor-training program in Bosnia except for the brilliant program in Sarajevo. In addition to my invitation to offer acting workshops, the University has invited professional trainers from Sarajevo, Croatia and Slovenia to begin the training of acting students. During my work with the students, I had conferences with the university's Director of Drama and the guest movement trainer from Slovenia, regarding the program and the special needs of the acting students. I modified my workshop to supplement and enhance the work of other faculty, to best contribute to the students training and development.


I conducted daily acting exercises and put the students through improvisational experiences dealing with team building, concentration, focus, and imagination. The exercises were Stanislavski based, with variations by Augusto Boal and Sternberg. Because the make-up of the class was a more perfect mix of traditionally antagonistic nationalistic groups, Catholic Croats from Croatia and Bosnia, Muslim Bosnians, and a Serbian Orthodox Catholic.

  I focused my work on activities dealing with team-building and conflict resolution as well as voice/body awareness and use of imagination. For example, one exercise dealt with dealing with problems in which the solution might be discovered through conflict and antagonism, and could also be dealt with without conflict and confrontation. The students quickly distinguished between the two approaches, but recognized that the solution could be achieved without conflict.

The literature faculty asked me to lecture, as well. I taught Shakespeare's A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM to the senior literature majors, using elements of the Shakespeare in Performance approach I have helped develop for the past twenty years in a summer institute in Stratford upon Avon and in London through the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I spent the second week teaching Tennessee Williams "A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE" with the same approach. Although unaccustomed to active participation in literature classes, the students responded positively, and actively.

Two of the drama students, Bruno Lovric and Martina Kartelo, began play scripts based on my playwriting assignment. Two sessions near the end of my time at the university were focused on staged readings of and improvisations based on their scenes. Both have agreed to continue developing their plays, using their fellow acting students to give feedback through live readings. I expect to correspond with the young playwrights, and to respond to their extended writing. The class agreed to present the plays in a workshop production when I return, hopefully, in mid-May. This is the first dramatic writing either of the students has attempted. Not surprisingly, considering that they have lived through a war in their own cities, their subjects are serious and their treatments, unsentimental. These are young voices which should be heard.

Martina's play deals with a pregnant teenager addict's confrontation with a gay man, both waiting the results of tests for AIDS at a clinic. They meet again later after she has learned that she is HIV negative, and he positive. Her impulse is to gloat, mindful only that she would not die, but begins to modify her selfish joy by the gentle stoicism of the doomed man.

Bruno's play takes place in the bombed out Eglise de la Sacre Coeur, in Paris, following a nuclear apocalypse. Two starving people, a man and a woman, each having believed there was no one else left alive, to confront what may be the only other living human.

Three years ago, as part of a previous Faculty Grant, as trauma training team leader for a project of Training Workshops International (TWI) for the Children, I trained staff and volunteers at schools and orphanages across Bosnia in drama techniques for dealing with children traumatized by war and its aftermath, including the loss of parents. On this occasion, I returned to Mostar's Egyptian Village, an orphanage for children who have lost both parents, and after briefly training the acting students from Univerzitet Dzemal Bijedic, I took them with me for two sessions with the orphans. We introduced them to a story, and in small groups led by the acting students, built puppets from old newspapers to represent the characters. On the second day, we had the children work with the students to enact the story using the puppets they had created.

Dr. Elbisa Ustamujic, Vice-Chancellor of the university, and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, at my suggestion wrote a Memorandum of Cooperation between the university and the Egyptian Village orphanage, systemizing a program in which university students will continue their regular work with the children in creative puppet workshops. I suggested, and Dr. Ustamujic and orphanage director, Sabaheta Kadic, agreed to expand the program to include students in the Teachers College.

I purchased play scripts and videotapes as part of the grant, and donated  them on behalf of Catholic University. I shipped new and used books specifically requested by faculty at Dzemal Bijedic, as well as boxes of donated books from my collection and from Dr. Steve Wright, and colleagues in the English Department. These contributions from Catholic University will nearly triple their drama and literature collection. Much more is needed. TWI for the Children has donated books which began their collection, and will coordinate with Dzemal Bijedic to bring additional teachers to serve in this understaffed school in the future. Through this organization with its in-country staff, I was able to make the necessary arrangements to carry out the terms of the Faculty Grant. Learn more about the International Studies Projects.

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