Dear colleagues, I was not there, just watched in on Television, the performance of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in Ramallah last Sunday. Something happened in Ramallah that is by all criteria: political, organisational, cultural, physical, etc. impossible. A group of young palestinian, arab and spanish musicians performing with Daniel Barenboim in a place where they could never be together. Till the day before the event utter uncertainty about whether it would actually work. After 5 years of work on this project (starting in Weimar, taking "West-Eastern Divan" from one of Goethes literary works and continued with yearly workshops in Sevilla with its historic tradition of a productive collaboration of jews and arabs centuries ago) equipped with Diplomatic Passports by the Spanish government they actually came to Ramallah. A musical demonstration of amazing quality (Beethovens Fifth) performed by 15 to 30 year old musicians from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and Spain....a glimpse of the future of people living together in productive collaboration with implications far beyond Ramallah. But what a place to have it take place! This reminded me so much of the events in Rome (that lead to Harrisons book "Practice of Peace") and again in Cypress this year. Palestinians and Israelis meeting in a foreign place, on the invitation of a foreign government. There are peacemakers all over the place using such similar methods as Music and Open Space Technology and others. My dream is to have a divergent crowd at the Practice of Peace Program November 30 and December 1 and 2 in Berlin (not to forget the celebration of Harrisons 70th on the 2nd of December, when he will actually have completed seven decades of his journey on this planet). Greetings from Berlin mmp
Michael M Pannwitz, boscop eg Draisweg 1, 12209 Berlin, Germany ++49-30-772 8000 www.boscop.de www.michaelmpannwitz.de Check out the new Open Space World Map now with 312 resident Open Space Workers in 57 countries (working in a total of 115 countries worldwide) www.openspaceworldmap.org * * ========================================================== osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of osl...@listserv.boisestate.edu: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist