ZIVILI DANCES FOR PEACE IN BULGARIA.

ZIVILI ethnic dance troupe has tested its faith in art's unifying power in the refugee camps of Bosnia and Slovenia. The U.S. company will return to the Balkans this summer to take part in an international arts gathering for the region's youth.

Zivili will perform and conduct workshops August 5-20 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, as part of the UNESCO International Year of the Culture of Peace. Its repertoire will represent all regions of the former Yugoslavia. The company, based in Columbus, Ohio, may also be involved in reconciliation events next year in Budapest, Hungary; Bratislava, Slovakia, and New York City.

"We feel strongly about the issue of keeping the culture separate from the politics," said executive director Melissa Pintar Obenauf. "We feel that music is a great healer that unites people. When we conduct workshops, we get people to dance together and bond together with an element of community."

Zivili was founded in 1973 to preserve and celebrate the folk traditions of the country then known as Yugoslavia. Its name comes from the Croatian toast that means "To life!" Obenauf and artistic director Pamela Lacko Kelley developed a colorful repertoire that encompassed songs and dances from Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Slovenia. In Zagreb, the Croatian capital, the pair studied embroidery and village singing techniques, acquired fabric for authentic costumes and brought home traditional dance steps.

As war broke out in Croatia in the early 1990s and the former Yugoslavia began to fall apart, everything changed. The company's subtitle, "Songs and Dances of Yugoslavia," became "Songs and Dances of the Southern Slavic Nations." The directors could no longer travel to the war-torn region.

In 1997, the twenty-five-member troupe made a two-week tour to refugee camps, orphanages and centers for the abandoned elderly in Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia and Bosnia. "The people in the camps said, `Thank you for saving our culture,'" Kelley recalled. "They could no longer do it. They were busy saving their lives."

Zivili ended each show by inviting audience members to request favorite songs and to dance to music played by the ensemble's tamburitza orchestra. Elderly people at a center in Sarajevo wept as they listened. Bosnian refugees stood in stunned silence as Zivili performed Mark Morris's The Office, an ethnic-flavored modern dance that can be seen as a metaphor for the systematic elimination of humankind. The performance was presented in an open field in which war victims had been buried.

"After we came back from the refugee camps, our will to satisfy our mission was stronger," Obenauf said. "The transformation of people was so obvious."

When Zivili performed for 8,000 refugees at a camp in Slovenia, a woman who had been an attorney in Sarajevo railed at the troupe's directors for thinking they could accomplish anything by performing for an hour in a hopeless place where she had done nothing but scrub toilets for six years. At the end of the performance, however, she and others got up and joined in the dance with faces glowing and bodies energized. As the company boarded its bus, the woman shouted, "Tell your government what happened to us today is better for us than bread. You have given us one happy day. You have fed our souls in a way that bread does not."