El Salvador I

El Salvador has been the starting point and inspiration for Erik Ehn's Yermedea, which relates to its poverty currently and over the course of colonial history while also paying attention to the entanglement of the US and other colonial forces. Although Kym and Alejandra have extended their conversation towards all of Latin America with a particular interest in the indigenous peoples all over the region, the landscape of El Salvador with its mountains and waterfalls seem to speak specifically to our desire to incorporate the idea of Pachamama, the Mother Earth or Mother World, despite the fact that she is a goddess usually revered by the indigenous people of the Andes. Additionally, the images in this video, of El Salvador as Paradise, also seem to translate into a theatrical vocabulary that may serve us well. There is something about the fog and clouds and the way they obscure and/or penetrate the environment we may want to investigate.

On the other hand, the image of these waterfalls may also gesture towards images of waterfalls of blood (possibly constructed in red string or some simple material as design component for Yermedea), since such a beautiful place has also produced incredibly bloody, unimaginable torture, murder, and rape: Paradise and Hell may be the same place after all. Below, please find two documentaries from the 1980s that cover the civil war in El Salvador at that moment in time. The first one, Names of War (1984), focuses on everyday life during the war and features a lot of interviews, also with child fighters. You can also find the filmmaker's journal of the trip here. 

The second documentary, In the Name of the People (1985), is a feature-length film, narrated by Martin Sheen, and follows the lives (and deaths) of guerrillas and peasants in the liberated areas of El Salvador and details the problems of daily life and military actions.

submitted by Kym

Women, War & Peace

Women, War & Peace is an extremely powerful five-part special series, which we showed an excerpt from during our info session in May. It was produced by THIRTEEN and Fork Films, funded by a multitude of international supporters, and aired on PBS in October and November of 2011. The series covers stories of women caught up in war and fighting for peace all over the globe. All five episodes are worth watching (and the official website supplies more great material and follow-ups) but we especially recommend these three episodes:

Pray the Devil Back to Hell 
~ a documentary about Leymah Gbowee and the women of Liberia and how they altered the history of nations

Watch Pray the Devil Back To Hell on PBS. See more from Women War and Peace.

The War We Are Living
~ a documentary about 2 Afro-Caribbean women in Colombia fighting to keep their mining community afloat after civil war

Watch The War We Are Living on PBS. See more from Women War and Peace.

War Redefined
~ a documentary about the positions and predicaments of women and children in today’s war zones

Watch War Redefined on PBS. See more from Women War and Peace.

Grupo Yuyachkani

Please watch these two videos of pieces by Ana Correa and Augusto Casafranca of Grupo Yuyachkani, a Peruvian theater group formed in 1971, as featured in Acting Together on the World Stage, a documentary film that highlights courageous and creative artists and peacebuilders working in conflict zones. Having grown out of a five-year initiative of Theater Without Borders, Brandeis University, and filmmaker Allison Lund, the film features theatrical works and rituals that reach beneath people's defenses in respectful ways that support communities to configure new patterns of meaning and relationships. Thus, these videos may give us more clarity around what Erik is trying to do with Soulographie in general and they also may help to inspire your own aesthetic impulses moving forward. 

Both videos provide a profound yet theoretical basis for our work in progress, a key concept being the question of what is gained from the act of re-telling/witnessing a story or the many stories of people we have never met and we initially may feel have little in common with us.

These videos can also help you understand the experience some of you had in the first two workshops for Yermedea with respect to audience responses. It's absolutely okay for us to enter this work without certainty about the final "outcome." Something else is at play and these two videos allude to that fact.

submitted by Kym

What happened at Dos Erres

Recently, This American Life aired an incredible program about the massacre at Dos Erres. It tells the story of Oscar Ramirez (pictured) and how he discovered that he is in fact a survivor of the massacre carried out by Guatemalan military in the village Dos Erres in 1982. After investigators and anthropologists followed up on some rumors of a well filled with bodies, they discover at least 162 bodies, 67 of those victims had to be under 12 years old with an average age of 7. By and by, the events of Dos Erres are uncovered.

Please be advised that this program contains reports of extreme violence. Yet, it is important to listen as this program shows how people are connected and disconnected throughout history, how the dead are still bearing witness to past atrocities and call unto the living, how the verbalizing of violence in the frames of witnessing by victims but also of confession by perpetrators still has a physical impact after many years.

Listen to the story here. This program was developed in cooperation with ProPublica who feature the story "Finding Oscar" with photos, videos, and a timeline. Read it here.