Sunday morning before the first group had to go home, after a very short night of goodbye party, the group spent the last hours together on reflecting the time they had experienced together.
Johan Neijenhuis, the Dutch head of the project, opened the “Evaluation” by asking everybody to share their opinions honestly and openly with the group in order to give the organisers the chance to learn from mistakes.
Semi, German group coordinator, took over the moderation and started the session with a game. One participant was supposed to tell a statement and stand in the middle of the room – all the others had to take a position in the space according to the person in the middle, close if agreeing or distant if disagreeing. So most people where squeezing in the middle when the statement was “cooking together is good for group building”. Particularly individual were reactions to the statement: “There was no real socialisation and many people always stuck to their national group.” Many people stayed clearly distant to this opinion. At least in theatre groups the mingling and communicating with each other went really well, one said. One agreed that certain people had been integrating less but others instead had a very good contact to everybody in the group – it depended a lot on the personality.
For the second game Anita, Dutch group coordinator, asked everybody to split randomly in four groups. The task was within a few minutes to create a living sculpture representing “the ideal intercultural group”. The the resulting living sculptures had the titles: “Energy”, “Dreaming Culture”, “No War” and “Peace” (have a look a the image below!) Before break there was an open talk about the communication among the participants. It had turned out that the different languages were no problem at all, many people even started speaking English with people from the same country after two days.
Everybody was glad to have the chance to improve their English. Finally the group talked about the issue that at the performance of the Turkish director’s group in Nijmegen there was less audience than for the other performances. The organizers were very sorry about that fact and promised to learn from it.
After the break each participant brought one item that should symbolize something they are going to take home from the project weeks. There was a rose, presented just after the show standing for the great moment of sucess, a camera representing the images that will stay, a programme booklet, a key that has opend new doors, a pair of glasses standing for a new vision on things.
In the end there was room for a personal comment of each one. Here some extracts:
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I had a fantastic time, I have met a lot of extraordinary, funny, nice people!
- Theatre was the reason for all of us to be here. We jumped from pages to stages. I personally have enjoyed the time with everybody here and I hope we will stay in contact!
- This project has shown that the prejudice saying that people speaking different languages do not understand each other is not true! I will remember every smile and every tear!
- I had very different expectations. I thought we will sleep, eat and rehears together but in fact we have done so much more together.
- I have learned a lot about other cultures.
- The project was a very good experience for me, I have never been in a big group like this, that was so well connected!
After the last words everyone held the others hands in a big circle raising their arms to a giant crown – what a beautiful closing image.
Kirsten Wiese
