TWI for the Children

Professor’s Theater Techniques 
Help Heal the Pain of War 

By: Catherine Lee

    Associate drama Professor Roland Reed found out on a Monday morning last month that a  grant would pay for his trip to the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Scrambling to wrap up his spring semester courses, he boarded a plane the following Friday, headed for the Balkan country scarred by civil war a decade ago.

    Drama Professor Roland Reed greets children at a Bosnian orphanage where he has given workshops helping them deal with the trauma of war. 

Approaching Sarajevo, Reed’s plane flew over Mount Igman and landed at the city’s airport. The professor collected his suitcase and was driven by car to the city of Mostar, south of Sarajevo, where, as part of a TWI for the Children Project to provide teachers to Bosnian Universities,  he would work with drama students at a Muslim university. In his pocket, he had the name of a 15-year-old orphan he hoped to contact. 

Reed has been to Bosnia seven times since 1998, applying his theater skills to serve a populace still recovering from the aftereffects of war. 

On this trip, as he did during a visit to Bosnia in March, Reed taught a class of 12 students in a new acting program at Dzemal Bijedic University on Mostar’s east side. On all his previous trips, the 66-year-old professor has conducted workshops at schools and orphanages, teaching drama techniques that help children and their caregivers deal with emotional trauma. For Reed, the work has become a labor of love.

A director and playwright who has taught at Catholic University for 17 years, Reed will teach two CUA graduate playwriting courses and Theatre 1 for drama majors in the fall. As part of his research, he’ll spend several weeks in England this summer, teaching two theater courses that are part of the Shakespearean Performance Summer Institute — a program he started 21 years ago while an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. 

Bosnia and Herzegovina.

He says the experience of going back to Bosnia year after year has enhanced his teaching at Catholic University. The knowledge he gained in Bosnia led to a course that he co-taught in 2000 and 2001 with a Catholic University education professor. The interdisciplinary course showed drama, social work, education and psychology majors how to apply acting techniques to their disciplines.

Modest about his accomplishments in Bosnia, Reed says, “I’m constantly flying by the seat of my pants. When I go back, I try to look for real change in the children. Sometimes it’s hard to know if you’re doing any good.” But judging from his correspondence with orphans and university students and the comments of those who have watched him work there, Reed’s teaching has had an impact.

His son, Jason Reed, a Christian youth minister who first got his father involved with the Bosnian orphanage project, says, “He treats the kids with great care and compassion but he doesn’t coddle them. He tends to treat them as though they’re older and they rise to that.” 

Helping War Refugees Jason Reed, who attended Catholic University from 1989 to 1991, was serving as the youth director for a Lutheran church in Springfield, Va., when he started going to the Balkans in 1994. At the time, the war had been underway for two years and the younger Reed actually couldn’t get into Bosnia. Instead he went to Croatia, where he helped Bosnian refugees acclimate themselves to 
a new life. 



In response to the country’s need to help disadvantaged children, Jason’s church had partnered with Training Workshops International (TWI) for the Children, a humanitarian organization whose projects include summer camps for children and trauma training workshops for caregivers at Bosnian orphanages. Knowing that self-expression is one of the first things that shuts down after a traumatic experience, the organization sponsors drama programs that allow trauma victims to express their feelings.

Drawn to his son’s work, the older Reed, who is also Lutheran, went to Bosnia for the first time in the summer of 1998. He volunteered his services with TWI for the Childen and began teaching drama skills to workers at Bosnian schools and orphanages. The drama professor generally employs an interpreter to help him communicate with children and their caregivers. His university students speak English, and in restaurants and grocery stores he’s able to get by with his somewhat limited Bosnian and German. When all else fails, he says, he relies on “doodles and mime gestures.”

Reed, who grew up in Newburg, Mo., directed theaters in Nebraska and Florida between the time he earned his master’s degree and his doctorate. In 1965, he started a children’s theater academy in Lincoln, Neb., and ran it for two years. In Bosnia, he drew on his professional experience, but the emotional needs of the orphanage workers demanded that he use his skills in a different way.

In Bosnia, where he says there’s still “a lot of despair,” Reed applied the techniques of Brazilian political playwright Augusto Boal, whose book Theater of the Oppressed grew out of his work with street people in Rio de Janeiro. Reed also employed movement exercises and the improvisational practices of Viola Spolin, co-creator of the techniques used by Chicago's Second City comedy troupe. 

One of the orphanages where Reed has worked is the city of Mostar’s Egyptian Village, partially funded with donations from Suzanne Mubarak, wife of Egypt’s president. During his March visit this year, Reed employed cooperative play at a two-day workshop involving orphans and his Dzemal Bijedic university students. 

At the orphanage, a university student recited a story and then the orphans created puppets from old newspapers to represent the characters. Reed and the drama students returned the next day to help the children act out the story they had heard.

The professor first started working with the university students, whose classes are held at an old, partially bombed-out army post, during his March trip. He taught drama exercises as well as team building and conflict-resolution strategies to the students, who represent different nationalities. 

When he met with them again in May, he focused on readings, discussions and improvisations related to plays written by two students in the class. Both students had started writing the plays during Reed’s March workshops, and had e-mailed him drafts and revisions of their work.

On his earlier 2003 trip, Reed had started facilitating an agreement between the Muslim university and the orphanage that he hoped would allow undergraduates to continue working with the orphans. But he didn’t know until he returned to Bosnia last month whether the agreement had been put into practice. Reed learned that not only had the agreement been approved, but that education majors from the university had been visiting the orphanage since he left in March.

In an e-mail sent back to CUA during his May trip, Reed described the scene that greeted him when he arrived at the orphanage with 12 of the education students. “The orphans immediately came running with their school workbooks,” he wrote. “What followed were tutorials all over the room. It was wonderful to see the loving connections between the university students and the children.” 

Comforting a Friend:

One of Reed’s experiences last month left him feeling sad for the teen-aged orphan whose name he had with him on the plane to Bosnia. The drama professor first met the orphan, Ines, in 1998 at an orphanage in Zenica, a small city northwest of Sarajevo. The orphan’s mother had left her a year earlier so she could marry an American soldier and move to Texas. In 2000, Ines wrote to Reed, telling him that, because of a new government decree, she had to leave the orphanage in Zenica, where she had grown close to the staff and other children, and move to an orphanage in Mostar. After checking around Mostar, Reed finally located Ines at a Catholic orphanage in the countryside. He and his wife, Sylvia, who accompanied him to Bosnia, spent an afternoon last month with Ines, now 15. Reed’s young friend told him that she wants to become a nun. 

Asked why he keeps going back to Bosnia, Reed says he’s not sure. He talks about the impact of the experience on his playwriting. He’s currently working on an adaptation of a 16th-century Croatian play; it will be presented at CUA next spring and then taken to an international theater festival in Dubrovnik, Croatia. But there’s more to it than that. It has something to do with the professor’s empathy for those less fortunate, says his son.

“My dad’s action said something about how important the women were to him,” says his son. “That’s how he is with the kids in Bosnia. That’s why he’s doing this.” Click Here to return to 2003 Success Stories

 

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Entered: 03/03/2008