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My research site in Sarajevo has been Pontanima, an inter-religious choir, and there had been a few dramatic occurrences since my last visit. It had been problematic discovering just what had happened and what the choir was like now via internet communications hence the necessity of this visit. As always with these trips, my days were fairly free to roam around and to write (occasionally), since my informants were only available in the evenings. I did manage to fill all of my evenings with a combination of formal and informal ethnographic interviews and observations of yet another choir rehearsal. Most importantly, I think I now have a decent grasp of where Pontanima is now as a unit and how they got there.
An added bonus during this visit was that the MESS theatre festival was on and I was able to attend a performance by one of my friends. It was a piece entitled Land Without Words, and it was an intense bit of figurative theatre featuring Lucy Elllinson as the sole performer and directed by Lydia Ziemke. The plot, as such as it was, involves an artist who has returned from a visit to Afghanistan where she had sought inspiration but instead found a hopelessness or impossibility of portraying such horrors in art. What followed on stage was essentially an uncomfortable break-down as the artist's sense of worth and identity are shattered and never reconciled. A case of Durkheimian anomie, perhaps? I'm not normally a fan of this type of theatre, but it was powerful and moving in ways I'm still trying to discern. The team behind the production were a little nervous about performing this in Sarajevo, the first place of recent war that they have performed, but the audience was very receptive.
