In Their Own Words
"You can't just have participation at the performance, if you don't have participation in the development of the structures of the management, and the getting material, and the organising of the performance - you have to be participatory at every level of the work otherwise the participation at the performance is just like playing games. It's pretend participation, it's not real. It's not real "activisiation", even though it may appear to be, and you can write nice reports about it, and you can put nice pictures about it, you know, the audience being very involved - but actually they may have been involved sort of physically, but they haven't been involved socially, and psychologically and culturally, so that seemed to me to be very important." Jonathan Chadwick, Director - Interview
"[The scenes] were based on true stories, and people recognised the truth of the stories; and when people started reading you could feel that in the audience, or in the people sitting round - because we were in a sort of kind of Nissen hut "that there was this sort of feeling of enormous - "This is us!" - this extraordinary feeling that these people are reading our stories. Of course this was very compelling, so compelling that some people had to leave the room because they were sort of broken by it, and recognised too closely what the story was." Jonathan Chadwick, Director - Interview
"It's interesting because then they [the audience] didn't have to talk... they didn't have to say it, but hearing somebody else say it meant that they were relieved from having to say it because they've had to say it so often." Jonathan Chadwick, Director - Interview
"But by acting them out it lifted them as well as connected them, and it was that tension between the lifting and the connection which made the work powerful for the people watching it, because they could see and they could feel that it was their story, but somehow it was everybody's story as well, so it touched that dimension." Jonathan Chadwick, Director - Interview
"The idea is to tell a really intimate story, to say that if you miss someone, it is the same. If you miss 5000 Albanians and if you miss 1000 Serbs, the pain is the same, you know?" Jeton Neziraj, Co-Director - Interview
"We asked them not to write a play - we wanted them to be discrete scenes. That was very important because it was very important for me that the actor is someone who can take a number of parts. So this was sort of trying... it's not really trying to break down an illusion, it's just trying to use an illusion, you know, this person is that woman - but in a successive scene she's a little girl. And I know that's really basic, but it's very, very important in terms of what the actor is doing - it's showing how you can undertake a role and then come out of it, and that symbolically was very important because it's something that we're inviting the audience to look at in terms of the roles they were playing in their own lives. And the victim is a role, and the mother of the victim - Oh, yes, that's interesting - am I still a victim when I'm a mother? You know? I'm a protestor; I'm a complainant; I'm all these things, but am I still a victim? You know? What's the role of victim-hood? And can it move, can it change, and what does it mean to make it change?" Jonathan Chadwick, Director - Interview
