Theatr Powys in Kosova

In October 2005, Theatr Powys travelled to the Kosovan city of Gjilan and spent two weeks working with local schoolchildren and their teachers. Assisted by a grant from Wales Arts International, the Company worked in six schools in and around Gjilan, with The King, The Crow and the Girl, a junior school TIE programme that had toured schools in Powys the previous term.  

The Company worked closely with teachers throughout the fortnight and held a professional development seminar in the second week exploring how drama might be used as a learning tool in classrooms so starved of resources. 

The visit was the brainchild of Artistic Director Ian Yeoman and Shkelzen Berisha, an Albanian actor who had worked with the Company in Wales, devising and performing The King, The Crow and the Girl. The project represents a milestone in the continued international relationship with artists and educators in the former Yugoslavia established by The National Association for the Teaching of Drama (NATD), of which Theatr Powys is a member.  

As well as the six company members – Ian Yeoman, Shkelzen Berisha, Margaret Higgins, Naomi Doyle, Olwen Medi and Chris Batten – the Company were joined by fellow NATD members Steve Nolan and Maggie Hulson, two highly experienced drama educationalists and long standing associates of the Company. They participated in the programme in schools and were central to the teachers’ seminar. 

Theatr Powys also enjoyed the invaluable assistance of Qemajl Dushica and Ardian Hajdari both of whom are international members of NATD and are teachers at Abaz Ajeti Secondary School, Arberia Gjilan.  Qemajl and Ardian were not only two of the teachers whom we worked with but assisted in co-ordinating the project as a whole.

The Programme 

The King, The Crow and The Girl is a full day participatory Theatre in Education programme. Drawing inspiration from Sophocles’ Antigone, it seeks to address the concepts of nature, culture, need and leadership. 

Young people participating in the programme are framed within the drama as crows; witness to events within the human city in a post war situation. It is the crows who protect and support the young human child - and the crows in the end who confront the King and challenge the nature of the leadership he offers her. 

The fictive context of the programme was slightly adapted given the necessity to be working in both English and Albanian. Shkelzen Berisha was to be primary facilitator of the young people with Theatr Powys personnel providing high levels of imagery and input in English as “refugee crows from another war torn environment” within the fiction. 

Following the arrival of Naomi Doyle and Olwen Medi, the Company incorporated the Welsh language.  On the arrival of Steve Nolan we also incorporated Spanish.  At the culmination of the work in schools, all four languages were at play within the programme. 

Out of necessity, the Company only took the bare minimum of props, costume and CD to offer music and soundscape, when the electricity was functioning. Young people and their teachers in Gjilan responded magnificently to the Company’s request to collect together materials that could be used to signify a large crow’s nest.  On the first day, in a terribly deprived school, we found tree branches, twigs, straw, wool, cornstalks and grasses - neatly arranged in the corner of an empty, cold classroom.  These materials served their purpose admirably throughout the two weeks.  

“It was an extraordinary experience sharing and remaking the work with the young Albanian students. These young people had no previous experience of working through story and drama whatsoever.  Their teachers had never experienced working in this mode. The young people’s ability to step wholly into the fiction however; with no scepticism, with a remarkable lack of self-consciousness and with a huge degree of social commitment and mutual support was enormously empowering of the work we undertook together. There exists a deep, collective experience of the war and of life in a deeply deprived post war condition.  Our drama became redolent of the need to share and question that experience, It allowed a very high level of discussion and negotiation; our understandings being negotiated, defined and re-defined over hours that in the very best sense of the expression often felt like lifetimes.”