Center Podval, Moscow

PF supports the non-profit “Center Podval”, (the Basement), named for its location in central Moscow. The Center helps children, teens and even their parents deal with problems and societal issues through theatre therapy and other methods of active, integrated engagement with each other and their audiences. Podval's programs, developed by its young members and staged for audiences of thousands over the years, have focused on role-playing as a path to understanding and ameliorating intolerance, prejudice, ethnic tensions, and discrimination against the disabled.

The work of the Center is not only theatre therapy to help teens develop a personal value system, but to also focus on HIV/AIDS prevention. Podval Center is the only such organization in Moscow working to prevent the spread of this disease among the young by conducting game seminars on this topic in schools, staging plays for teens on the subject and organizing discussions. In this regard, PF is funding PODVAL's program on HIV/AIDS prevention, “Who Is Next?” a powerful play, performed by Podval youth to audiences in high schools, orphanages, and youth clubs, bringing the full scope and tragedy of the disease to young people. The play centers on a sixteen-year-old boy who contracts the disease, and is abandoned by all those whom he loves. It vividly relays the consequences of ignorance, intolerance and discrimination. The play is well received because all of the actors, as well as the characters they play, are young.

Another play staged by Podval, “The Time Has Come,” brings together teens from diverse, even warring ethnic groups from Russia's (Chechnya, Ingushetia, Osetia) and the world's hot spots (Armenia and Azerbaijan, Georgia and Abkhazia, countries of the former Yugoslavia). At first it seems impossible to imagine these opposing young people together in the same room, much less writing and staging a theatrical production side by side. Yet the intense week-long program takes these fifteen to eighteen-year-olds one step closer to realizing that war is not the answer to conflict resolution. During the seven days, teens who considered each other as enemies are helped to learn to speak to each other, to forgive and how not to use weapons to prove who is right. They conclude that war in not an option and that they must learn to find other ways to agree.

The Podval Center is actively engaged in conducting the “Discovery” training program, which is a set of active training events, targeted to develop various group and personal qualities. The program's events suggest how to work in a group, develop leadership skills, and overcome personal complexes and fears while respecting others' opinions and feelings. When the event is completed, usually successfully although failure is permissible, it is discussed in a circle. This unique course, which is flexible and can be adapted to many groups, was pioneered and brought to Russia by Professor Jean Berube and other trainers of Gallaudet University, the world's only university for the deaf. “Discovery” training has been done in schools, universities, prisons, boarding schools, orphanages, with the deaf, blind, deaf-blind, with people suffering with cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis, in children-parents groups, and even with mainstream high schools students not only in Moscow, but in Saratov, Ekaterinburg, St. Petersburg, Chekhov and other cities. Some schools in Moscow start their school year with “Discovery” with the help of Podval Center so that all newly formed classes go through the training program. Teachers participate together with new students to see how they act in unusual situations. “Discovery” at Center Podval has helped thousands of people believe in themselves and taught them to find a way out of the most hopeless situations, and continues to help build trust, patience and respect for others.