Raccoon Community Building Space Project, Queens, New York City: Balkan Theater Group

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718/784-9121
fax: 718/784-1858
a n n o u n c e m e n t s

THE BALKAN THEATER GROUP PROJECT 2002/2003

The Balkan Theater Group was founded under the umbrella of the Reconciliation and Culture Cooperative Network (RACCOON) in the summer of 2002 with the objective of creating a new, original play based on experiences of and input from the participants, members of the expatriate former Yugoslav community in greater New York. It has been meeting once a week ever since to hold workshops at the RACCOON SPACE in Long Island City, New York.

Jasmina, Marjorie, Duska

From the beginning, the Group (BTG) adopted the play development method championed by Marjorie Melnick Heymann, a renowned director with broad experience in experimental theater. Ms. Melnick Heymann’s varied career has included directing Up!, one of the first feminist plays in New York City, starring Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman, as well as You Deserve What you Take, starring Joanne Chesimard, a leader of the Black Liberation Army, at the time of her incarceration at the Women's House of Detention on Riker's Island. She has directed numerous productions off-off Broadway, The Brooklyn Bridge off-Broadway, and such classics as Marat/ Sade, Under the Milkwood, and The Fantasticks in regional theater. Her recent dramatization and staging of Grace Paley’s short stories, Three by Grace (Paley), at the Theater for the New City in New York drew praise as a mixed media production uniquely adapted to Grace Paley’s style. But, above and beyond work in traditional theater, Ms. Melnick Heymann’s devotion to political and social consciousness has always made her interested in bringing theater into the lives of those not ordinarily touched by it, and she is well known for her work with prison inmate populations, with whom she developed the "Skills Through Drama" therapeutic process based on theatre techniques, and work with parents and children. Her work has been featured in such publications as the New York Theater Review, Radical Teacher, and The Journal of Group Psychodrama and Sociometry. We are fortunate that Ms. Melnick Heymann has been volunteering her time and sharing her experiences in conducting our workshops.

The Balkan Theater Group project for 2002/2003—development of a new and original play—is a three-stage process.

In Stage One participants learn the basic elements of the actor’s craft, so that they can believe in the characters they are playing, feel private and relaxed in front of an audience, and be free to express a wide range of emotions. The fundamentals of stage acting are compressed into six acting training sessions, at the end of which the participants are ready to begin the improvisational process.

In Stage Two the craft learned in Stage One is applied to acting in improvisations based on conflict. The improvisations give the participants a chance to use their own words, personal experiences and history to create fictional characters and plot. This is the critical stage of the process. The improvised scenes are recorded and later transcribed. These transcripts form the basis of the play. This stage of the process takes several months.

The resulting script is fictitious, but it is based on experiences of people in our own community. The process of its creation is meaningful to the participants in itself.

However, our ultimate goal is to share the script with invited and/or paying audiences. We hope to affect a larger community (the audience) by making it empathize with our experiences and understand the people whose culture and history may be different, but whose humanity is nevertheless universally shared. This will be Stage Three of the project: an intensive rehearsal period for four to six weeks leading to performance.

Dusanka Miscevic

Time Schedule:

Beginning with Summer 2002 and ending with December 2002, we have completed Stage One (twice) and have conducted numerous workshops resulting in several hours of taped improvisations.

Plans for year 2003 are as follows:

January:

Creation of a short video demonstration tape featuring the work we have done so far.
An article featuring our group and the ongoing project in the RACCOON Newsletter.
Work on the script begins.

February:

A BTG promotional party at RACCOON Space, to share our work with the community. We will show our demonstration videotape and conduct an abbreviated acting training workshop to demonstrate that our work is fun and that no prior skills are needed. We hope to attract new participants.
A new cycle of six acting training workshops for new participants begins.
Improvisations in weekly workshops by the core BTG group continue.

March-May:

The project continues full steam with weekly improvisation sessions.
The script is created by the end of Stage Two.

May-June:

Stage three begins. We are ready to share the fruits of our labor with the community after an intensive period of rehearsals.
Production of an hour-long videotape, recording the entire process, which can be shown in public to demonstrate this unique conflict resolution method.

For all inquiries regarding the Balkan Theater Group Project 2002-2003 please contact Raccoon Space Office Manager Deanne D'Aloia.

map and driving directions
43-32 22nd Street, Suite (buzzer) 301 in Long Island City, between 43th and 44th Avenue subway to 23rd Street, Ely Avenue

This project was made possible by a generous grant from The New York Foundation