“The first thing you notice once you enter the Melissa Center is the atmosphere. As if you are visiting a warm home, you feel you can live there. I loved from the first moment the energy, the colors, the atmosphere and the smell of homemade food. This space is human and I value the notion of humanity in every aspect of life”, Katerina Polemi, musician and facilitator at Melissa Center.
Μέλισσα (Melissa) means honeybee and the Melissa Network Center stands for all that this could symbolize. Refugee and migrant women come together in this unique place to interact, create and support themselves and each other. It is not just another refugee shelter, it is a house. Home to dreams, hopes and pain of many women who visit it every day to find a refuge and escape from their daily routine, which may be hard and full of despair. However, in there, there is room for every feeling, every case, every nationality, every age and religion. Today, I visited the Center to discover more about one of the most successful projects of the Center, partly funded by CARE, the Drama and Movement Therapy sessions, and the girls behind it, Katerina Polemi and Thaleia Portokaloglou.
So, what is Drama and Movement Therapy?
“During the sessions, women are invited to become the protagonists of a story and use spontaneous dramatization, role playing, and dramatic self-presentation to investigate and gain insight into their lives and inner emotions. The scenes either approximate real-life events or are “fairy-tales”, stories of imagination in which they are invited to find their way and reach what we call redemption. Drama and Movement Therapy overpasses the language barriers by nature. What we do here focuses and is communicated via our body”, says Thaleia.
As they explain, the participants are mostly young women, coming from Syria, Afghanistan but also African countries like Nigeria and Ghana. They all want to leave Greece and to be reunified with their families who are in different countries. Their dream is to study and work. “They crave to be educated and be creative”, says Katerina, and Thaleia continues on the challenges that this special profile of the women brings along: “The challenges are great. Every time is different. Every time is a first time. First, the language barrier. There are always two interpreters with us and sometimes it takes too much to communicate something really simple. Second, the trauma. I feel we go and work inside an open wound. It is extremely striking how we are not engulfed by this wound, how they are not engulfed by this wound when we touch it. Because we do touch it and instead, this process creates a powerful feeling of strength and unity. Us and them both”.
“It is a therapy method that uses movement and theater techniques trying to connect someone’s self with the inner emotions and with the others. Trust exercises, games and activities using items such as balls or just our body aim at their concertation, cooperation and actual connection with each other. It can be something simple, like having an eye contact or hug each other, or more complex activities like storytelling and story making. The body is considered to be part of the soul”, says Thaleia.
During the session, I see the impact of the process on the women’s behavior myself. At first they are hesitating to move. They feel awkward and it takes some time to actually start blending in. “The check-in process, which is the first thing we do in every session, invites everyone to express how they feel today via a movement. At first, this was very difficult for them. ‘You are asking me to express myself using my body?’ Their body is a very heavy locus. It is incriminated and has great tension. We talk about young women who are at the pick of their sexuality that is perceived as something bad as bad as it is for them to use their body to express themselves"
When I asked them to describe a special moment, Katerina described that moment of redemption in every session when these women are all of a sudden freed.
“There is a moment during every session that a switch is taking place...."
"...It is as if you have a river and a barrier, and this barrier all of a sudden is coming apart in a harmonized way, not disruptively."
"The water starts flowing and this is great, no matter what this water contains. Joy, pain, frustration, anger. When this happens, the energy changes and you leave yourself to be part of this river. When we manage to make them be part of this river, when they were actually going against the river, it is a moment of freedom. There is room for every kind of emotion”.
The Drama and Movement Therapy project is currently partly funded by CARE, as part of a series of projects supporting refugee women implemented by local partners. I had the chance to attend the session and no words can describe the dynamics between the participants during the session. My last question to Thaleia and Katerina concerned their dream about this project. “Culture is very important. Maybe nobody never asked them until now ‘how are you’, ‘what do you want’, ‘what is your dream’. We hope we keep cultivating their need to be heard and it would be great to work with some of the girls who are attending the sessions regularly to do something outside Melissa Center. To give them the chance to communicate now with people outside the womb of the Center”.
By Vangi Dora
Find out more about our work in Greece here.