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Mott Communications Officer Maggie I. Jaruzel interviewed Foundation grantees in the Western Balkans who helped coordinate the recent “Truth in Translation” tour through the region. These grantees also attended performances and participated in related "Talk Back" sessions and workshops. Mott grantees share their thoughts and observations below.

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• Country: Kosovo 
  
• Performance Sites: Pristina National Theatre, Mitrovica North in Zvecan 
  
• Mott grantee affiliated with tour: Balkans Investigative Reporting Network in Pristina (BIRN) 
  
• Staff person interviewed: Jeta Xharra, country director, BIRN
  

The play was brilliant –- and I say that as someone running an NGO who also graduated with a degree in screenwriting and drama. It captured the audience from the start with the five actors speaking at the same time so you could find out their backgrounds very quickly. We hadn’t seen anything like that before in theatre here. It generated social debate.

Jeta Xharra

They had a lot of technical and logistical hurdles because the play was in English, but translated into Albania and Serbian. We’ve never had that before. I brought my parents, who speak Albanian and my friend who is Serbian. We never would have been able to all come together because of the language barriers.

Another thing, live music on stage doesn’t happen in Kosovo often, and we hardly ever see black people. That’s especially true for the students who were brought in from outside the city of Pristina for the play.

For some students, this was the first time that they have ever been exposed to this topic. The drama was entertaining, even though the things they were talking about were so deep and painful – people who died or were missing.

Nobody here in Kosovo could tell the actors that ‘you don’t know what I feel like’ because the actors do know. They are all coming from very diverse backgrounds and they have experienced the pain.

There were parallels to what has happened in the Balkans to what happened in South Africa but there are also limitations to those parallels. For example, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa, there was the political will to do that. That’s not the case in the Balkans. There’s no [TRC chairman Archbishop] Desmond Tutu in the Balkans region who could take up the charge and there was never a complete change of the people in power like in South Africa. Here, some of the nationalist ideas that sparked the war are still alive among the leaders of the Balkans, who are still in power.

We’ve never seen plays like this before. No one ever comes to Kosovo because Kosovo is the poorest territory of the former Yugoslavia. It was very important for Truth in Translation to come to Kosovo because we are so isolated. Kosovo is not considered a ‘hot spot’ for theatre. We don’t even have 24-hour electricity here.

The play showed us that we can do more than we realize; that it’s possible to do this kind of work without it being seen as heavy and non-interesting for the audience. People here in Kosovo are tired of hearing a lot about war. They want to escape it. But Truth in Translation was dealing with it on an intelligent level.