Between home and homeland: facilitating theatre with Ethiopian youth

Abstract

The article discusses a community-based theatre project facilitated with a group of Jewish Ethiopian youth in a boarding school in Israel. The intention is to investigate how far a specific group of black immigrants are able to use theatre for their own needs in such a location. It begins with the presentation of the Jewish Ethiopians as a marginalised group in Israel. It then reconsiders the politics of the boarding school as one of the settings of community-based theatre in Israel in light of the Australian model of boarding schools for the Aboriginal children and the Australian government's recent expression of regret for this policy. In the second part the article focuses on the creative process from the play scripting, to the public performance and its reception. The analysis is based on the discourse of diaspora that addresses issues such as ethnicity/race, nationhood, identity, displacement and belonging, which are of major concern here and assist in understanding the complex diasporic condition of this group of Ethiopian youth. The article presents community-based theatre as that cultural intervention that manages to problematise the ambivalent and displaced lived experiences of these young performers as diasporic subjects, and provides them with a critical, reflexive practice with which to confront their ‘betwixt and between’ daily life.