Evaluation

Making contact with Travellers is not easy. Their experience of other people is often quite negative so it took a long time to win the trust of the young people involved. But one of the most important things we all learned was that Traveller culture has wisdom and an ethic that is quite challenging to contemporary materialist culture. In the first year of the project we were envious of those project partners who had managed to arrange a full scale Forum Theatre event – for us it had seemed hard work just to meet and organise some participatory drama workshops. The visits arranged to the university, however, really did seem to open up horizons for the young Travellers.

We tried to plan the second year of work in Wrexham more carefully to ensure a final Forum Theatre event – but when we arrived at the school, the parents and other children who were to be our audience had all gone out for the day to the seaside. This was disappointing, but the final session then took the form of preparing the children to be a Forum Theatre company in their own right and present their work to other children in the school. After six sessions with the students (and because their class teacher had been really enthusiastic about using drama at other times as well) these children were quite capable of creating and making short Forum Theatre pieces of their own.

Because of the law surrounding the photographing of young people in the UK it proved impossible to video most of the sessions, but we managed to film a little bit of the final session in the school in June 2006. Students documented their own work in notebooks, essays, journals, and all recognised a transformation in their own initial views of Travellers. We have learned a lot from these encounters and have many moments to reflect on. The most memorable moments occurred in the middle of our first visit to St Anne’s in April 2006, when a little girl stood up, enraged by the prepared Forum Theatre scene before her, stepped into the performance and said to one of the characters “I am a Traveller girl and you can’t say things like that about Travellers. That’s racist.” Another moment that we shall all remember came when a Traveller boy, aged 10, said to one character “How can you live your life hating people? It must be so miserable. The world is wide enough for us all.” These were very serious moments, but we also shared much laughter as part of this project – especially in what we came to call the “rabbit solution” scenes, where we showed how to escape from bullying by dropping to the floor, making bunny ears and running away very quickly (highly recommended). We have been asked by both Cheshire and Flintshire to continue working alongside the Travellers. One possibly unintended consequence of the project has been a shift in the UK students’ perception of what being in Europe is about: for many of them, the experience of being aware of European collaboration has been a very important surprise. We learned much from taking part in video conferences and looking at the material on Minerva, as well as from the challenge of working with Travellers.