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Encouraging the Community to Have Fun

Back in the 1970s a group of young people in Belfast set out to alleviate their boredom and disaffection with the Troubles by establishing a live music club where musicians and audiences could mix, regardless of their cultural background. Punks, Rockers, Protestants and Catholics came together to promote ‘what we deemed as the easiest bridge of communication between prods and taigs, music’, says one of its founders, Petesy Burns, Chair of the Belfast Youth and Community Group.

This and other initiatives in drama, visual arts, literature, photography, community video and film which began to stir at the same time have inspired the evolution of more than 100 community-based arts groups in the city today. While the arts cannot claim credit for the historic Northern Ireland Peace Accord in 1998, it is entirely fair to say that they have played a supporting role in establishing a climate for coexistence, peace-building and reconciliation.

The key to this work is not necessarily just about throwing people together from different backgrounds and environments, and hoping that the arts will magic away the barriers and differences between them. It’s about building up self-confidence in individuals and in their communities; about developing a strong sense of self-worth, so that relations are less strained by insecurities over identity and difference. In the context of Belfast, where the city has been divided by intimidating and isolating physical barricades between communities for the past two decades, the need to build up a sense of security in one’s own back-yard is vital before one can feel secure being in anybody else’s.

Achieving this has everything to do with participation and empowerment: the people of Northern Ireland have lived at the centre of a media circus for more than 25 years. Creative projects allow them, finally, to take control of the images and perceptions of their home, to offer their own commentaries on their communities, to share their opinions and create their own solutions, to have a sense of ownership in the wider process of development which is going on about them. In this context, the arts become participatory democracy in action.

One example of the transformation which can be wrought by creative activity is Belfast Carnival, a new project developed by a community arts organisation, The Beat Initiative, to encourage community-wide celebration and build a positive atmosphere and image of Belfast. a thousand people paraded when the carnival was first staged in 1995. Since then it has built from a one-person operation to an organisation which involves up to 30 artists and which works throughout the year with some of the most socially excluded groups in the city. David Boyd, its founder, was recently presented with an award recognising his role as a social entrepreneur. His local nominees for the award commented that: ‘Amid bombs, bullets and sectarian mayhem he has consistently brought newness and alternative futures to the people of Belfast.’

There have been some ground-breaking community theatre initiatives which have enabled the people of Belfast to review their history from different perspectives. The Stone Chair, set in a Belfast graveyard, looked at the Troubles from the perspective of those who lay buried there. It inspired another group to investigate the history of their own predominantly Catholic area, Dock Ward, resulting in several productions which have made an enormous contribution to raising morale in the local community. One of the great, transformational experiences, it is said, is enabling Protestant people to play Catholics and vice versa.

Neighbourhood Open Workshop, one of the early pioneers of community artswork in Belfast, set up The Barricades Project with a group of teenage Protestant girls from one area making a video of an imagined encounter with a Catholic girl from a nearby housing estate. The second stage of the project brought the participants together with a group of girls from the neighbouring estate. Collectively they devised a play about their shared experiences.

A women’s centre on the largely Protestant Cregagh Estate in Castlereagh, Greater Belfast has set up a writers group, The Spell Weavers, which runs weekly classes for women and has published collections of their work, which has had huge impacts on their self-esteem. ‘Local people stopped the women in the street to talk to them about their work and friends, neighbours and family saw them in a new light.’ The group also started running workshops in photography, drama, ceramics and craft. Each member of the group has contributed to a wall hanging on the issue of conflict which they see as the embodiment of their project and of coexistence: each woman created her own square and the designs, though discordant, come together to create a harmonious blend of colour and texture.

The Tale of His Shirt Stretched across the board The vast greenness spreads before me Its aerial view A series of fine lines and borders. It’s when I observe It’s then I am challenged As I see the faded outlines Where sweat and tears Once soiled the landscape. The power in my hand I smooth a lifetime of Creased Irish greenness And under my own steam Make a hole in the fog Releasing the blur on my vision And as I create the dividing lines For arms that will carry arms I tear away the labels And trace seams it seems Were hand made - man made As I wander up and down The front link past tinker and tailor Finding myself In the company of poor men Wishing for beggar man or thief Wishing for smoothness A chance to hang This Green Burden up. Pat Turner of the Cregagh women’s writers group, The Spell Weavers, wrote this poem after interviewing a Royal Ulster Constabulary wife. ‘It struck me that if only we could iron out the problems of this green country as easily as that green shirt,’ explains the poet. (Taken from the audio-tape ‘I Know A Woman’, published by The Spell Weavers)

Northern Visions, a community media centre in central Belfast, has worked with a diverse range of community groups, including children, women, travellers (self-directed nomads) and the long-term unemployed, running training and workshops to enable them to make their own films, videos, documentaries and dramas. An important facet of their projects is handing over editorial control of the videos to their participants. A recent project brought together youngsters between the ages of 8 and 14 from different cultural backgrounds to record interviews within the community and create original film dramas and animations.

A small but thriving photographic studio and gallery in central Belfast is home to Belfast Exposed which holds a library of more than 100,000 images captured by participants from many different backgrounds during its community photography projects. The pictures tell a story not of a people overwhelmed by misery and violence, as the international media projects, but of a vibrant city. It is not that the Troubles are absent from the works, but whilst the menace of violence is ever-present, they project images of people living life despite the threat: children playing around the barricades, women enjoying the spirit of carnival; an old man playing a violin in a demolished suburb. Belfast Exposed has enabled people to go out and take the pictures which they feel are important and in so doing, changing our perceptions of Belfast.

In 1970s when the first public funds for community arts activity became available in Northern Ireland it seemed like more of a calculated risk. These days with well in excess of one million pound available for community art work -including peace and reconciliation funding from Europe- it is beginning to look like a serious investment.

David Grant, Director of the Lyric Theatre in Belfast studied the impact of community arts on community relations, and came to the conclusion that: ‘One aspect of the Troubles which has influenced policy thinking in the arts has been the passage of time. In 1978, we were not as resigned to the prospect of their seeming interminability. The high-cost of long-term solutions seemed less attractive. The implications of this for community drama are that community projects are now perceived as less transitory and long-term development seems more desirable.’

But if any hard data was required to testify to the value of arts in community building in Northern Ireland, it emerged last year from a report by François Matarasso of the British research agency Comedia. The study showed that 93 percent of community arts participants in Belfast who participated in the survey felt more self-confident. The highest levels of learning were for communication skills and working with others. Nearly half said their involvement had changed their perceptions. 81 per cent said they felt less isolated. Almost two thirds said that they had visited new areas and developed a better appreciation of other’s cultures.

Apart from anything else, the arts are enjoyable and inspiring and encourage the community to have fun, which has its own benefits when reality bites. In the NIVT Community Arts Awards Scheme review (1989) it is said that ‘a community which celebrates together in harmony may find a greater inspiration to organise itself when it comes to some of the harsher issues of living.’

REFERENCES

Playing the Wild Card - A survey of community drama and smaller scale theatre from a community relations perspective. David Grant/Community Relations Council. 1993

Playing Our Part - Arts and Community Development in Northern Ireland. Conference Report. Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust, 1990

Taking Risks for Peace. Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust, 1998

This article has been written by Helen Gould, coordinator of Creative Exchange, the forum for cultural rights and development, an international NGO dedicated to promoting the role of the arts in development, empowerment and rehabilitation.

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