One-way ticket, autobiographical play that changed lives

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Life is not easy, it is full of trials, interesting, difficult, tragic. These five people carry five different destinies, five different traumas that these people carry with them, deal with them and would like to be freed from. Coming here from different parts of the world for different reasons, carrying different stories, they meet at the airport. Migration, poverty, cancer, acne and suicide are topics that you will find in their autobiographical stories as a part of the Erasmus Plus project, ATENEA.

One of the actors came from Bosnia as a child almost forty years ago. Her parents separated. Her mother took her daughter and came to Slovenia. At the time, she was in the second grade of primary school. All her friends, everything she knew and loved remained in Bosnia. She was like a flower that had been transplanted. Through poetry, she tells about what she experienced, how she was received here, what prejudices children from Bosnia had to deal with.

Another actor is Slovenian. She was born in Venezuela, where lately people are living badly, after the current president, Maduro, came to power. She is a dancer and had a dance school in Venezuela, but she came to Slovenia through the repatriation program just over two years ago. She is now employed at the Association for  Development of Voluntary Work Novo mesto, where she teaches Slovenian, translates, participates in social projects at home and abroad, helps Roma children in the day care center, and participates in dance competitions. She presents her story in the play One-way ticket through dance.

We also met another actor coming from Bosnia, too. She is a psychologist by profession and is working on her doctorate studies, also. Her story is her battle with cancer, a disease that is not only physical but also has a very important mental side. She tells a story about how she became her own patient, talks about her inner struggle, self-treatment, psychological methods, how to help yourself when you are told about a terrible disease.

We will also meet an actor who came to Slovenia, namely as a volunteer, but stayed in Slovenia and continued studies of media production. He is a musician who had his own band in Bosnia. His traumas, which he wanted to present, seem insignificant and even funny compared to the experiences of other performers, but for a young man who is creating his place in society and building his self-image, even acne can be a very big problem. He wrote a song about depression and sang it accompanied by a guitar. Music helped him a lot in his fight against depression.

At the end, we will meet the last actor, one who has Slovenian roots but has grown up and spent his youth in Montenegro. His story begins one morning, when he wakes up late, and receives the news that he doesn't have to hurry up for school but that he can rest.   This situation catches him unprepared because he knew how important school was to him and his parents. The story of the struggle of a young person who had to go through the trauma of family lost and his father committing suicide will let you think about all those things that happen to us, but we still have to continue living.

The performance One-way ticket was created within the framework of the international project Atanea, in which the Society for the Development of Voluntary Work Novo mesto also participates. It started in Spain. The father of autobiographical theater is Domingo Ferrandis, who started working with vulnerable groups and achieved excellent results with them. The goal of the project is to enable vulnerable groups and individuals, people with traumatic experiences, to integrate into society. The partners of the Atanea project came from Spain, Italy, Lithuania, Greece, Slovenia and Germany, and the One-way performance, which they saw in Novi Mesto at the end of April, moved them to tears.

The authors of the play are all the actors who present their stories in it, and the play itself was created under the mentorship of Snježana Blagojević and the expert guidance of dramaturg Andreja Kopač. "The play was created in stages. In the first stage, we had to establish a suitable relationship with the group, establish trust, so that the participants could open up and trust us with their experiences which they otherwise did not talk about. It wasn't simple, many wanted  to quit and leave the group because it was a lot of emotional work, sharing and trust. The methodology used while creating an autobiographical story was very helpful. It allowed freedom for any person to express the way that they feel, to tell a story in a way that was the most suitable for them, to transfer the message that they found important. It was an ice- opening experience, a story of fighting stereotypes, overcoming prejudice and recovery. Art was always a universal language that everyone understood. That is why parts of personal stories were told in their native languages; Bosnian, Spanish, Slovenia. On the other hand, there are stories that are an important tool to raise awareness of so many topics that are not just individual but also collective. Traveling together and creating a story from scratch was a great way to make a wonderful connection between the beneficiaries and make sure that they overcome the fear of performance and recovery.

Wonderful feedback and personal transformations of our beneficiaries, actors and heroes was just a clear confirmation that artistic methods are sometimes the most effective when dealing with traumatic experiences of people coming from different background because they can be their true self and reach out to the audience in the most human and emotional way that touches us all, and that is our vulnerability.

Snjezana Blagojevic is a social worker, mediator and project coordinator at the Association for the Development of Voluntary Work in Novi Mesto. In addition to social work with children and adults, she mostly coordinates projects related  to culture, social integration, as well as mentoring of volunteers. In the last couple of months, she has been a mentor to the group who had  performed almost the only autobiographical play written, performed and promoted by not professional actors, coming from different cultural backgrounds not only in Novo mesto, but also in Spain.