Theatre as the healing space: Ping Chong's Children of War

Abstract

This paper examines the empowering/re-authoring function of Children of War, a play that was presented in Fairfax, Virginia in December 2002. Children of War is one of the instalments of Undesirable Elements, a community-based oral history series that is the result of a collaboration between Ping Chong and various adults and children. Undesirable Elements has been in development since 1992 in different communities around the world. In the autumn of 2002 Chong worked closely with six young refugees (from Somalia, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, Afghanistan. Kurdistan and Iran) who now live in Northern Virginia, and with a therapist (who is herself a refugee) from the Center for Multicultural Human Services (which co-produced the project). The play comments on both past and current political conflicts in the homeland of each participant, and on the effects those conflicts have on their personal lives. Through monologues and dialogues, it evolves as a woven tapestry of their family histories and of the violence, torture, mutilations and massacres they endured.The paper examines the therapeutic effect of this project—how, for example, the participants' recollections were used to lead them into self-reflection, communication and negotiations that often resulted in insights. The goal is not, however, to evaluate the production in psychotherapeutic and medical terms. The intention, rather, is to show that the piece created a site for expressing the ‘unspeakable’, and, symbiotically, a kind of communal healing, a kind of understanding, that allows both participants and audiences to re-author those horrific experiences.