Center for the Living Arts

Under the umbrella of the 501(c)3 not-for-profit Center for the Living Arts, Healing the Wounds of History develops and implements innovative approaches to transforming and healing historical trauma in the individual, family and the collective through the use of drama and the expressive arts.

Healing the Wounds of History is a process in which experiential techniques are used to work with a group of participants who share a common legacy of historical trauma. Developed by psychotherapist, drama therapist and theatre director Armand Volkas, the process is based on the premise that there can be no political solutions to intercultural conflict until we understand and take into consideration the needs, emotions and unconscious drives of the human being. Healing the Wounds of History helps participants work through the burden of shared historical legacies by transforming their pain into constructive action.

Armand Volkas’s work has received international recognition for bringing groups in conflict together as well as cultures who carry collective trauma:

*Descendants of Jewish Holocaust survivors and The Third Reich

*Palestinians and Israelis

*Japanese and Chinese on the legacy of The Nanjing Massacre and WWII

*Koreans on the legacy of comfort women

*Tamil and Singhalese in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan Civil War

*Armenians and Turks

*Turks and Kurds

*African-Americans and European-Americans on the legacy of Slavery

*Muslim Palestinians and Lebanese Christians and the factions involved in the Lebanese Civil War