 But I think we also want to take the time that Africa does not always get in conversations in any context. So I'm grateful that we have a special session just about what's going on in Africa and how cultural work reacts and interacts with cultural policies there. We have a wonderful panel and I want to begin with a couple of thoughts, so bear with me if you will. I worked for 10 years on a latecomer. I'm hardly in Africa yet, but I've worked in the region for 10 years. And my job now is with Sundance Institute East Africa, which is part of the Sundance Institute Theatre program. Many of you are familiar with the Sundance Institute Film Festival. But there is a theater side and we are one of the few American professional theater institutions that has any kind of international initiative period and that has the intensity and longevity of a 10-year program of interaction and exposure in exchange with a region in Africa. So as without being redundant for people who already know the obvious, Africa is a big continent and there are over 50 countries. The individuals who are on this panel have worked and represent work about and in a few of the countries, but not hopefully. Plus, there's a huge range of work in Africa which surprises people. People are always asking me, really they have theaters? Yes, they have theater buildings. Yes, they have a range of theater from a theater that we recognize as Western and theater that comes from African traditional performance. Theater that interacts with utilitarian goals such as education or other social change imperatives. So there's a huge range of theater. There are Africans who are making a living, doing theater. They have 700 people a night in their theaters or more. We were just in Ethiopia. One of our panelists is from Ethiopia, one of the guests in the house was from Ethiopia. It was 1,400 people and all young watching a play. There's a very young, excited audience in Ethiopia. There are lots of questions that come up in any kind of interaction in Africa, especially for those of us who are not African. And those questions are imperative for us. We can't possibly work there without reflecting on them. So the rigor of interaction in Africa is something that is constantly challenging and it brings up many, many questions both for us as cultural workers and for any kind of interactor and certainly intervener and certainly for the artists who work in Africa themselves. So what are some of those questions? There are questions about reciprocity and continuity, about compatibility of process and goals. And there are questions about assumptions that people bring, history, about the vocabulary we use, and utilitarian use of art. So I'll just give a couple of personal anecdotes before I turn it over to the audience. One of the anecdotes I want to share is a conversation that I had with Ngubi Watyango, who is a wonderful, wonderful Kenyan playwright, public intellectual artist who is now based at University of California, Irvine, with his writing and translation project. And he quoted to me something by M.A. César, a great African, martinique, poet and political theorist who was part of inventing the movement in Africa. And he paraphrased it, but I'll quote it because I had to go look it up. It is a good thing to place different civilizations in contact with each other. That whatever its own particular genius may be, a civilization that withdraws into itself atrophies, that for civilizations exchange is oxygen. All of the work that we do as part of Sundance Institute in East Africa has certainly been oxygen for those of us from the United States and hopefully, as I understand it, for those of our colleagues in Africa. But as Ngubi reminded us, because it was very important to him when he concluded the quote, as long as he said, as long as they are equal. And he put his fist together just like this. And that is something I've never forgotten, because certainly the exchanges in Africa have not always been in any way equal. So, the question of power, status, resources, constantly coming up. Another example I wanted to give was an anecdote, is that when I first arrived, I was introduced to Stephen Ronghezi, who runs in Darius Center in Uganda, and I was just being introduced to him by Philip Arnaud, who runs the Center for International Theater Development. He said, you should meet this gentleman. And I said, hello to Stephen. And then he said, oh, so you're doing a theater workshop. What are you going to teach in your theater workshop? And I, fortunately, had done my research, research. And I said, yes, well, theater coming from the word theotron, which is the Greek and Latin meaning to see, meaning the theotron, the spectator space, meaning the invention of Greek, meaning western theater. We're not doing a theater workshop. And I knew, and I eventually have taught, at Macarena University's Music Dance and Drama program, and the word he preferred was drama, because drama for him included all of African performance tradition. So vocabulary can be so simple and so quickly a misunderstanding of basic assumptions. The other, and last anecdote I want to share is a concept I've constantly referred to my mentors, and from Peace Building in the Argentine Acting Together project, Do No Harm, a concept that definitely comes out of the, I know, peace building world, and probably out of the public policy world as well. And one cannot spend any time in Africa without being reminded of the anecdote of how the Rwandan government used art in the creation of the genocide, because it was the singers and the songs and the art and the posters and the language on the radio that ignited that genocide. So artists are not benign, whether they are artists inside the country or whether they are artists who are doing some kind of visitor outsider status. So all sorts of problematic issues come up, and I want to turn to our panelists now, and I think they all are going to help us understand what is particular about Africa, what is particular about the role of arts and policy in Africa. I hope they'll tell us what is both problematic and what is successful about their exchanges. And the first people I would like to introduce are Ping Chong, who is one of America's leading theater artists, the artistic director of Ping Chong and Company, who has worked on his piece, Cry for Peace, voices from the Congo, and his collaborator, Karol Jo... Jojowsky. Jojowsky, I studied Polish. And a university arts presenter at Syracuse University. Okay, we can roll the slide. I'm not an expert on Africa, but I have a curious fate with the Congo. But I will start with my relationship with Karol here, which is that in 2008, 2007 rather, I was invited to work on a oral history documentary work about Syracuse, the city of Syracuse, and the people who live in Syracuse. And I've been working for 20 years with different communities across the country and internationally to give voice to marginalized communities in which they speak for themselves. So this is a story theater without actors. This is a story theater with members of the community speaking for themselves. So this was the first relationship I had with Syracuse Stage, which is a child of Syracuse University. That's a good way to put it. But in earlier, I worked on a piece on the Congo called Blindness, the Irresistible Encounter of Light. And I was interested in the history of the Congo and the history of King Leopold in the Congo, which is a story that most of you probably know about already. And so I did research in Belgium. I did this project with Kent State as a project for students to understand something about history as well as learning about theater. So what was I seeing? The slides are going really slow. I can see the head. Yeah, because we have such a tight timeline. So I already had a background of knowledge about the Congo. And at the time when I went to Belgium, we met people, former colonialists, the royal people, folks from the Royal Congolese Museum in Tiberin outside of Brussels. So I also had hope to go to the Congo. But at the time, people said, you really need to have contacts to really go to the Congo. And what you need to know is that the Congo, which is the size of Western Europe, has almost no roads in it. So contact is still down through the Congo River. And then after Tales from the Salt City, I was a Syracuse stage, the drama tour is Syracuse stage of Kyle Bass, who said that a member of the Congolese community in Syracuse was interested in doing a piece of reconciliation project. And Kyle said, since I had done Salt City, came to me and asked me if I was interested. And since I already had a great interest in the Congo, I came and I met with the community. And that's where Carol comes in. So let me be really honest about our intention. We didn't create this piece or engage this project to affect public policy in the Congo or the US. We created it as a vehicle for change through the retelling of an astounding story of reconciliation. And that begins to open up for me a really interesting question about the difference between the desire to impact public policy compared with the power of peace and reconciliation projects, which actually might do that, right? So I feel like I've become an accidental diplomat. What really started as an altruistic action on part of Kyle to help this community find a way to tell their story to other Americans in their own way has opened up this amazing engagement with hundreds of people in surprising ways. And we haven't even had the world premiere yet. So Kyle paired up with Ping, who he knew from his experience would make an elegant piece of haunting story theater. But one of the most important reasons for pairing up with Ping is that we knew from seeing other undesirable elements pieces that Ping would not lose the links to the source of the story and that he, as an artist, is committed to a process that requires the storyteller to own their own story and their truth is told themselves on the stage. And that they own the reaction of their own stories. So we have Cyprian, who came out. He's the leader of the Congolese community. An incredible charismatic leader who knew that if he could find a way to tell a story through a lens that was more American and taken from a theatrical point of view, he would have maybe a chance at showing something new that he could tell about this amazing mission that this group has in Syracuse for reconciliation. They came to me and asked me if I would commission, which I said yes, I would. I was lucky. I just stepped down after a 10-year deanship and the chancellor had given me some sort of wedding present money in my new position as the university arts presenter. So I had some resource to be discretionary to pick some projects that I thought would be sustainable over time and make real impact. And this fell into my lap five weeks after I said yes to this new position. So, and then we have a secret weapon at Syracuse. We have Nancy Cantor, who many of you know as a public intellectual who speaks from a very deep place about the impact that the arts have on the possibility of changing the world and the mission that she has for Syracuse students to learn to be citizens of the world. So we have this amazing resource of leadership at the top who believes in this work and has proven that by giving us resource for projects like this. And this is only one of my five or six projects for them. So I think that universities may just be the last bastion of patrons of the arts and commissioning. So support at the top of the leadership ladder is essential. We are pretty lucky to have not just her passing notice but public evidence of her deeply held values and that drives us to do things that are a little bit beyond the ordinary. When I returned from the Congo last year and recounted some really scary stories, she just looked at me and said, I hear you that you can handle this and fear is the wrong reason for us to go out of course. That's from my chance. I think in the largest sense Nancy probably does believe that public policy can be affected by the arts but that really wasn't our initial reason for doing this. It opens up this question that we're all talking about. What is public diplomacy and cultural diplomacy anyway? I'm still listening to hear that answer today and I'll play you and I don't have that answer but I actually think I've done it but I don't know the answers to that question. The light for night. Yeah. It's a process, it's a theory, it's a policy, it's an outcome and if it's an outcome how do we know when we've achieved it? I really want to know that. And what else are we looking for here? Are we trying to get our projects exposed? Is it about the performance? Is it about the process? You have to understand that for me I have a particular lens. I'm in a university with a committed agenda of community engagement and I'm struggling with these questions and particularly in a university setting where my primary goal is to engage students' minds and hearts hoping to inspire them and then what happens with it and how do we responsibly react and support them when they are inspired and how do we incite them to action in a really responsible way? I struggle with that. So now we have Kyle, we have Ping, we have Cyprian, this incredible charismatic presence and we go to the Congo. We decide that because Cyprian, this is where, why does this react, what has this got to do with Africa? Cyprian from the very moment he entered this conversation told us that his dream was to take the story back to Goma to take it back to the country where he was born and that he loves and he wanted a way to do that in an elegant way. So we're still trying to figure out how do we do that? I'd love to know, let's have a show of hands. How many of you are going to pay me tuition to send your children with me to Goma on the eastern edge of the Congo? Okay, I'll take your money, sir. Right, so that's, you know, we still have the issues of in local parenthesis and the perception that we have to responsibly care for those students that are under our tutelage and I'm looking for a way to find a way to be able to bring this back to Africa on behalf of this Congolese community remembering that they can't go with us, they're refugees. So we also then have our secret weapon, Tang and Kyle, who hopefully will help us do a narrative project that will draw out the stories. That's Kyle when there's Tang, yeah. Let me just look at my time because, okay, half a minute. I want to tell you something really exciting. About a month ago, Nancy Kanzer and our provost, Eric Spina, announced that quite for peace would be the freshman experience of Central University students. That means that 3,500 undergraduates will be required to go to see cry for peace voices in the Congo in September of this coming year. We'll spend the summer putting together electronic references for them to help them become, give them a context for this experience. There are people in this community that think this is crazy, that this is way too difficult information for 17-year-olds. So it's too difficult. But you know, we all know they watch on television, right? And we also have a stated mission to actually bring it back to our locale. I would say that everything that is told in our peace, which there are difficult, difficult stories, that if you walk seven blocks from the university into some of the hardest neighborhoods of state New York in a pretty protected place, every single one of the issues that we bring up is absolutely on the streets, right in our area. So we'll take it from the abstract, a place where they can say, oh, isn't that horrible that that happens in the Congo? And hopefully find a way to turn it around. In the meantime, we'll also be looking for projects that we hope will help engage those few really engaged and important way students who become inspired to incite to action. We'll find a way to support them in projects over the course of the semester of the year. So we have a pretty ballsy agenda, I think. But again, we have some amazing support. I do want to really, really quickly also say that we're really grateful to Pingchong and the Pingchong companies. They've invited Cry for Peace to be part of Undesirable Elements Festival. Undesirable Elements in in October at Lamama Theater in New York. This will give us a chance to see if we can tour this. But I should mention that when we do it in October, we deliberately connected it with Congo Week, which is October, which is to raise consciousness about what's going on in the Congo. And so there's a whole bunch of events going on in October and going on for some time. This is partly in relationship to an organization that's here in Washington called Friends of the Congo. So they'll be involved in this as well. I have three minutes left and I have a three minute video. I'd like to just introduce this by saying that we were really gratified to be invited by Derek and by Cynthia in September of 2011 to come to Georgetown to present a workshop on work in progress on Cynthia and we had an amazing experience and one of our students from the Newhouse School came with us and did the short video that we're using for some of our promotions. So I'd like you to see that. You'll get to meet some of the cast members through this video. So can you run that? We were told not to name any tribes in our storytelling, which was a challenge. Which was a challenge. The folks in the piece were not professional actors. They're never professional actors unless they happen. They're telling their stories but if they happen to be that's just part of the thing. The whole point of the show is about real people telling their own stories. So here's the question. Why wouldn't you actually give the show to some entity organizations in Congo and let them do it? We're working on that. You were talking about the issue of bringing people from Sierra Leone. Initially when we first started the project the idea was we could bring these people out and tell their story. But then we realized that wasn't really real. When we do the dual premiere in the fall the local PBS station is going to film it. So we'll have and retell it on five stations maybe more. We'll have that then that we'll be able to use in that way so that we can use the specific piece and not have to agree at work. But I think it's an opportunity. It's a template for the kind of work that young people can do around narrative projects that draw out stories and call attention to big issues. I think that's why I'm still looking for a way for Syracuse students to be able to do that because I think it's a template. I should just mention one last thing which is that it's also a very low budget project so it's very possible to do it. It can be done in a big thing. We've done it in 700 seat theaters in its work. We've done it in all of it. In the community center. So it's totally flexible which is the beauty of it. And have you found that the reconciliation among the Congolese community that you described when you were here in September, which was so great, but is that continuing? Is that enduring the impact of this process? Well, we're in hiatus right now so we haven't really continued the project yet. Well, we haven't. At the University we've been in conversation with the the leader of that community with other members. I've done speaking engagement screen in other members of the community, not just with some good people. It's been interesting to see a different lens when you start to dig deeper into that community and have more access to that community and they start to trust you more to help with some of those activities as opposed to changes. Yes, I think that's really one of the most striking things when you talked about how the process of doing this had brought those two to see the different sectarian and there was also some talk about potentially, about the impact of that on their relatives and friends back in the Congo that was having an amazing ripple effect. Is that still true? Are there stories that we hear? So, I'm sorry I'm going to move us along and I know there are many questions for both Paine and Perot and I hope that you will take advantage of the opportunity to speak about them further. I just want to say that in the minus list of the challenges there's these things that just came up in the process, amplifying local voices and these are goals of the public policy world. These are not art points at goals necessarily are the goals of the board foundation the goals of open society the goals of the US State Department amplifying local voices spaces for creating contacts for public dialogue global citizenship and a personal note who tells their own story is a question that are in the public policy discussion and we're hearing them reflected by the work of these artists. So, the next person I would like to turn to to introduce is Deso Yeni Madison she's the chair of the department of performance studies and director of oral history and performance of social action with the program of African studies at Northwestern University. Thank you I am thrilled to follow your presentation because it helps explain my own. I am also on faculty with the department of anthropology and I only mentioned that to say that my work is really grounded in what we know as performance ethnography. So, I see my theater practice as inseparable from field work down. So, my work in Ghana was really a ten year process was really understanding the work of local human rights activists and how they employ performance tactics as a means of changing interventions upon enlightening their own communities around issues of human rights and human rights abuses and then as a teacher I see my students as my kind of theater company and I see my performance work as a kind of performance pedagogy as well as that work that entails kind of social scientific methodology around field work. But how we then take those verbatim stories from local activists and then that falls within the rubric that I think is very important in the world itself around issues of representation. We've seen those representations where you've got either torture porn or poverty porn but we don't see those kind of local eages who are hidden whether they're hidden in villages or their voices are just silenced whether it be on a panel whether it be in their own home places wherever but the courageous kind of eloquence at which they make come along and we would never know who they are but this kind of work and the kind of work that we're all involved in here in terms of estimating that work and using the power and alchemy of theater to theatricalize that to put it in a frame and then put it within a public space is not only impactful of a kind of awareness of policy within local communities that awakens the attention of government officials and so on and so forth but can start a social movement I really believe that and I also want to talk about how local activism when it is artistically framed what the kind of purpose and vision of that kind of work is and I do believe that there is this kind of individual empathic meeting of my students with local activists that they may not know or ever meet but I also want to say that that work also for me and for many of my students and I think for many of us when I'm hearing in this room that there are some of us it's hard for us to kind of shed our vulgar Marxism and it's hard for us to kind of shed the romanticism of agit prop theater and instrumentality is not necessarily such a bad word but it reminds me of Toni Morrison's phrase when she said art must be political but it must be irrevocably beautiful at the same time or it falls off as harangue at one level and pornography at the other level so I see them as one informing in this kind of wonderful reciprocal way the other so we ended up from this field work doing two shows and please time me I've got I don't want to go over my five minutes doing two doing two shows one was called isn't a human being or a girl and the other was called water ride and isn't a human being or a girl were the narratives and oral histories of local activists who were intervening on a cultural practice where women were basically sent into shrines as concubines for shrine priests well many many felt that this was absolutely human rights abuse and it was but as I spent more time I realized that this practice and the courageous and eloquent ways that activists were changing this practice there was another contingency and that had to do with poverty and I didn't want to go into this whole discourse of globalization and politically kindly and neoliberalism I really want to be an artist but I cannot be avoided and my body in that presence while all of this was going on implicated my own country so there was a connection between human rights discourse and human rights practice and abuses with American foreign policy rights being dumped in the north which means local farmers could not afford to plant their goods and sell it concerns around fair trade all of that may be a long distance relationship to issues of human rights but I found out that however small or distant the village is there's a correlation between human rights and poverty I wanted to figure out what that was in this performance and make a beautiful rhetorical narrative about that and the other project was a project called Water Rights and the stories there around water democracy and the activists were concerned around how resources water resources are being used was quite fascinating but then again I felt wow transnational corporations what is this happening again it's this this very difficult and complex partnership around economic forces human rights and art and how to merge that so you have this beautiful performance but that this beautiful performance also does something and it also questions our own policies and our own kind of concerns around what we must do in countries where where much of what we do and what we don't know about what we do impacts a very small story thank you very much just a couple things that hit me once again that are not necessarily your goal but are the positives of this kind of work in the agency and therefore human capacity building you're supporting the local conversation you're recognizing the paradox of instrumentality and you're also talking about work that recognizes complexity rather than providing simple answers to complex situations and now I would like to introduce Belayne Ablunay who is a professor of theater at Avisabha Bay University Thank you Hello everybody First of all I would like to thank the organizers of this conference with Robert Pellevito who has invited me to share my experience on the opportunities and challenges specifically on the actual intersection that's the public policy in Ethiopia First I would like to underline one point because most people think that when they African theater they think that African theater is the same and they could think one vessel which is completely wrong because Ethiopia is different from other African countries in many ways one historically Ethiopia is different because Ethiopia has remained independent she's not colonized and remained independent for so many years while other African countries have been colonized by the Cancals that makes it different and it also informs the gesture traction the other is the alphabet our own unique alphabet we have our own national language which we use officially to teach education in high schools also in universities also the medium construction is English at the university level but mostly we work in Amharic language and most of our theater practices is done in that language which has its own alphabet unlike other African countries so this in a way makes it difficult for foreigners to understand the third tradition of Ethiopia because mostly it's done in that native language which is not published otherwise we have really a long theater tradition mostly really going in the direction of western theater because our modern education has started within the line of the western education form so Ethiopia has a long cultural diplomatic relationship with the United States of America for so many years even our library the big library in the Asada University is called Kenned Library unfortunately in the 1970s when this revolution has begun then the country completely shifted the eastern bloc which the military which has taken the power actually the revolution was started by students to really because they were filled up with the long touch of monarchy and system and they were going to have democracy in Ethiopia unfortunately the military region of the time took the power and then declared socialism as its own ideology and completely then the artistic practice completely shifted towards as you all know to this kind of agitant form propagating the society's ideology to the people so the theater was ordered by the government to really do a kind of straight you can say summarizing the people no artistic value needs at that time I was this time late with my experience because at that time I was the student of the university the theater department at that time was a university and I was part of that movement that uprising which were known to have democracy established in our country so unfortunately as I told you earlier the military region took power and suppressed any voices any voices and even in prison some of you may have heard about this red terror which was discrimination which gave so many uses at that time so the paradox was when the public theaters run by the government around 5 or 6 big theaters run by the government all of them were staging this and the government officials the government employees were ordered to see those performance otherwise they were labeled as anti-government anti-revolution something like that so at that time paradoxically our department was free and we were doing because most of our staff were foreigners coming from South Africa Beijing and other African countries as well so we are producing place that have the contents of this pan-Africanism as well as place that date with apartheid system this was done for two things one we were obliged our country is the city of this African Union and we are really as champions we are helping other African countries to be liberated from colonization so we are obliged to voice the injustices the evils in those countries on the other hand it was a kind of an outlet for us to do those production dealing with this apartheid and anyway after the fall of the Dengue region then the new women came into power I mean defeating the Dengue region after fighting for so many years and then and well so what is the situation like has it changed for good well for me it's difficult to say because the culture of fear and the culture of silence that has been there for so many years is still there it's difficult for us to any kind of play or to mount any kind of play dealing with political issues there is a kind of human right abuses that's where you are on there is a conflict that is going on in the country and as our friend from Baghdad said most of the topic characters have been engaged with commercial and locality for the topic is allowed I mean yes there is no pre-censorship like the military region but there is post-censorship there are places bad and also there is self-censorship in a way ok apart from that our university department has been engaged with theater for development activities ok in that area our department has it's different from that because one it's done through research by going into the people two it doesn't give any solution it doesn't try to teach or educate the people it just kind of copy the problem to the people and to discuss on the solution so in that area our department has done so many production in the areas of gender inequality corruption a kind of health issue, HIV AIDS street children the problem of street children so many things but the problem is our department is unable to take this production to the people one lack of time because the students have to go to their ladies through the partition time second there is lack of budget and third related to the transportation transportation problem so this production which really took us 5-6 months to produce simply about for it ok the last thing which I want to mention is the opportunities that we have had last April that for the first time the American Theater Group the Sundance Theater Institute came to to conduct a state director's workshop which is made by Roberta and her staff and they stayed for one week and we have a fruitful discussion with our department staff and students and even they even go further to help us by talking with the American Embassy to continue this relationship with the Sundance Theater Institute American Arts Center obviously this is a scholar of Ethiopian theater and it has a great deal more to say hold on to second ever hunt another professor from Addis Ababa University I just wanted to say that yes we did meet with the U.S. Embassy and we were the first professional American Theater artist to visit Ethiopia in over a decade and the U.S. Embassy is very interested in facilitating so what is the gap then not to ask yourself where is the big gap if Ethiopia has been so isolated and there is an interest in breaking back down that isolation what's not happening to make that possible really in some sense it was coincidental that we ended up there with some sort of larger cultural diplomacy role around really quickly and then we'll go I just want to say about the current situation in Ethiopia since 1991 we have ethnic politics as an official base of the politics in the country ethnicity has become the base of politics so this base it is you cannot officially speak of the national identity of Ethiopia I'm going to give you a living example myself I used to be a lecturer and researcher in the Ethiopian literature and folklore department as well as head of the department I told you I used to be because I have been dismissed of my duties and rights in the department at the University because simply I wrote in protesting against the intensification of academics in the University they closed our department the multi-ethnic the multi-national department Ethiopian literature and folklore was closed instead they erected three ethnic based departments departments of Amhari language and literature departments of Tabrinia language and literature in Ethiopia we have more than 80 or 89 ethnic groups language and cultures and folklore our department used to study to give us all the multi-national culture of folklore and literary heritage the law, the rich literary and the decades gone now they closed it and I wrote later in protest of calling this department the upward and lower parliament to the government I did this just a day before I came to America to present people in American comparative literature association conference in Providence as a result I was dismissed while I was here so what's the rules now I cannot go back to Ethiopia definitely they will put me in jail this is discrimination thank you Abrahman I know that there is thank you for speaking openly Abrahman and the line I know it's very difficult in Ethiopia recently and at great personal risk you are here with us and we so appreciate that and of course it just bears mentioning that Ethiopian community here in Washington DC is probably one of the larger and we would like to have a more conversational about the Ethiopian community here in Washington DC the situation in Ethiopia now and now I would like to turn to Dr. Daniel Banks who is my colleague who is co-director with the board who is also co-director of DNA Works and faculty, MA and applied theater at City University of New York I'm just going to ask that anyone who is willing and or able would like to stand up for a moment and just take your arms palms up breathing in and then same thing palms up, pulling down just notice we have bodies in this room there's stories, there's trauma there's memory, there's language there's history, one more time palms up, breathing down focusing on your own self your own story, your own body and down this question, what would you like to say to the world what would you like to say to the world this was the question that was asked for seven weeks in a row of 30 different youth in the Budaburam refugee camp in Ghana, made up primarily of Liberian refugees from 10 different schools 3 different youth each week and you can sit down now please oh you can stand I'm going to keep standing because I can't thank you and it was a workshop that my students and I led I brought a group of 10 students from NYU to the NYU and Ghana program in 2006 and we were joined by 10 students from the University of Ghana we did this collaborative workshop we were invited into the refugee camp to do this collaborative workshop I want to say first of all I tend to almost always only go where I'm invited I don't attempt to bring to work in to any place other than somebody who feels that it's right for their community I also, I have all these notes of things to say I also want to say that within this realm of applied theater or of applied arts working with youth or working in communities I really try to avoid language learning or empowering these are, across the world there are complex systems of signs and languages and expression people's voices sometimes get suppressed but sometimes they choose not to use them because of politics we really focus on just creating opportunities for self-expression and leadership so to me these are about giving people opportunity for self-expression and leadership and I do that whether I'm working on an ensemble piece with professional actors or whether I'm working in this refugee camp and you know we all have our own language to describe it so I'm certainly not listening to someone else's language I'm just talking about the language that I feel comfortable with as someone who has as a youth who is on the receiving end of a lot of well-intentioned work and the ways and the times in which I felt comfortable using my voice or the times that I chose not to use my voice because of the environment that was created and in no way taking anyone on although you can take me on there is this question of collecting that JJ brought up yesterday so I'm going to talk a little bit about it my own discomfort with photographs and documentation of the article in theatre topics that being said it is one way to communicate something to a gathering like this so I do have a slideshow photo so you can get an image of what it looks like to be in Lutoborom if you'd like to play the Lutoborom slideshow movie please that would be great not the slideshow perfect hopefully it will work as a new format you can just play it in a little bit hopefully so the Lutoborom refugee camp is 25 square miles it has 55,000 actually it doesn't exist anymore in the refugee camp it was decommissioned by the UNHCR a few years ago when we arrived there and again we were invited in there were murders of young children and they were murdered in such a way which ethnic group they were from they could not be buried by their own particular ethnic groups so that meant that people from Liberia were either commissioning people in Ghana or sending people to Ghana also to kidnap children there was still even though the war was supposedly over and repatriation was happening you'll see some repatriation posters in the background there was still what is it called not consequences but things were being done to avenge certain families and behaviors in the war or protests or whatever so we walked into this environment where young people were profoundly unsafe and and I won't tell you about the full the workshop because that's actually in the acting together anthology that Brandeis up and Cynthia Cohn put together with colleagues but this question what did you what would you like to say in the world produced some very interesting musical books such as we're all one people no matter where we come from no matter where we are I mentioned that the refugee camp was partially Liberian, mostly Liberian but there were also refugees from Togo and other parts of African continent in that camp and another beautiful some book that they put together was Liberian sisters let's come together and find a better future this was all pretty much on the eve of forced repatriation back to Liberia what I want to focus on I want to focus on reverse questions which were about positive it's a positive side to doing this kind of work a negative side to doing this work and then I have a sort of a lingering thought after that the positive side absolutely I'm sorry I didn't catch the photo you may have seen a picture of four young women standing working together the tallest of the women who looked like she was taking leadership her name is Lydia as soon as we left Ghana she began to email my students and I asking us for money to help her finish her schooling because even though they were in a refugee camp they still had to pay for uniforms and books and etc meanwhile they are not they have no official status in Ghana they are not allowed to work in Ghana officially they have to pay to be in a refugee camp they have to build their own houses so it's a double bind and this is with the blessing of the UN as I mentioned the camp is no longer there a lot of people have been repatriated back to Liberia but not everybody is so quite a few people living on that land but if no longer has a refugee camp status they have even less resources than they had when they first arrived Lydia kept very beautifully she was the only several students decided they were going to break the rules and instead of only coming once for 3 hours she came every Friday for 3 hours even though other people from her school were supposed to be coming in her place they did come but she just kept coming and you know we eventually realized that there was a refugee camp there wasn't a lot for them to do so we encouraged people to come so our workshop at 25 or 30 people would often be 50 and then the young children came and then we brought a student from NYU to come and do activities outdoors with the young children after we all warmed up together everyone's welcome there's always room for everybody we have internet flexibility and capability of responding to anyone who comes to us so what ended up happening was we did after talking about it amongst ourselves we decided that we were going to send her the money that she asked for we recognized her leadership these were NYU students they were not all from means but they did recognize the privilege that they had and when we sent her the money she eventually graduated she was repatriated back to Liberia and she had another actually one of the leaders from the organization that brought us in in Monrovia created a youth safe house because as you may have read in the newspaper when Ellen sort of Johnson took over there was only one electric light bulb in Monrovia on one street light that was it the country was still in ruins and they created this safe house where students could go after school do their homework use the arts as a form of self-expression use the arts as a form of coming together and being safe and and one of my students and two of my students created an NGO to fund that youth safe house with their help and then Alfred and Lydia decided they wanted to have leadership of it entirely on their own so my students said absolutely and transferred the NGO to them and they are now self-funded self-run and Prentice and Danielle have now founded another NGO to help youth around the African continent help asking the international so one of the positive sides was that that this could this could have a life of its own and take off and really the mission of leadership and self-expression could continue one of the I would say the negatives is that we really had no capacity as a group of artists of addressing the relationship of these refugees to get to the larger Ghanaian society and we weren't there long enough to actually do that and so and then and then also we haven't been able to in any way contribute to those who have been left behind we've sent books from the NYU library that were discarded in these little gestures but no real sustainable action and so my lingering question is it's clear to me and I'm going to show a quick video clip that we provided relief and hope in the moment in that environment it's also clear to me that we didn't know how to do something more long-term than that but how do I balance my as an artist working in these areas how do I balance my concern for sustainability with incremental moments of self-efficacy that happen both for my students and for the youth in the refugee camp and we do know some stories, some wonderful success stories that have happened on there may be more and what I really want to show you now is a quick video clip it'll only be about two minutes and when you get to the interview we can cut off this is in the East Rand in South Africa which is an equally poor destitute environment where we did a three-day workshop which is the East Biqua Community Theater which is the oldest community theater existing in South Africa with two this is just a small composition which shows you the form of work that we do with two poets and two women from this community theater and it was performed for a group called Youth Against Violence who were formerly incarcerated youth who had come together so as not to have recidivism I'm showing you this because I want to show I think it's something that Carol you referred to I want to show I want to show I want to show the moment right what happens in the moment I understand about sustainability and the need for deliverables and all of that stuff but what about what happens in the moment please thank you self-scripted, self-directed ensemble and devised theater I don't consider myself an Africanist really any longer except that I continue to follow the distance frankly that's because I felt eventually you must spend time living in the region or in the country or in whatever piece of the world you're interested in if you're going to continue to be an expert and I didn't see an opportunity to do that so I sort of backed out of that now I'm an old Africanist but the other thing is I have I've been in the policy world I've probably spent about 13 years in government when I haven't been in the academy and so and I'm not in the theater world except that my husband and I have tickets to the major theaters around town and when I can get away in the evenings we go but I just want to say a couple of thoughts and maybe I can do it from the point of view of somebody who's been at the policy level and and so let me just say that I have always thought and continued to think that the arts and I'm not just talking about theater I'm talking about poetry and literature and music and sculpture and textiles in Africa are very important elements in intercultural communication and that communication is important in my view and it's not a view I think that may be widely shared but it's very important for policy makers for two reasons and I think you've touched on one of them maybe the instrumental reason the instrumental reason being that if you can understand in some depth in some profound way the peoples that you're dealing with then you can engage them in ways that are more effective both for you and for them and I don't think that happens very often amongst policy officials I don't think it happens very often because that's not the way they're trained maybe this is beginning to change now but I often have been tempted to ask people American diplomats serving in Africa or Latin America or anywhere how long have you lived in a region how long have you been associated with a region but not as a diplomat or representative of a large institution but on your own because when you're on your own you're exposed in a way that you are not when you're protected by an outside institution and that's it seems to me from my experience how you really learn if it's language if it's culture if it's day-to-day norms of behavior that seems to me to be essential and I don't think that that happens all that much since you made you made disagree but that certainly was my experience it even is a problem here in Washington DC because in my experience again if you've spent your life in the Department of State as a diplomat you probably never spend any time on Capitol Hill and they're about as far apart as Africa and the United States I mean different cultures you know it's tribal it's I spend time on both sides so I can tell you and I can see people sometimes talking like this but it's much it's much more dramatic so it seems to me there's an instrumental basis for knowing people I have to tell you a story or two my first massive experience by the way the African theater was in a bush was in a village in Malawi and some of you may know about the theater company I think it's a university or college theater company in Malawi that goes around and presents plays in the villages they say the villages for a few days learn what's going on in the villages what are people talking about and then in the local language in this case Chichewa presented a play and it was such a place to be because the village arranged itself you could see that norms and values just in the way they arranged themselves around the central area where this play was taking place and then a play was about sexual harassment I guess that had been a big issue in the village but it was very effective it was effective for me as an outsider not even understanding the language just to see how it was done the interactive, the wonderful engagement of the villagers I mean this was live for them but anyway that's almost instrumental but I think there's something more important in my view about understanding other peoples through their theater through their literature and whatever and that is you can call it empathy you've talked a little bit about how you want your students to have the sense of being in one world and then you can see and learn and know other people if not by living with them at least in their expressions of themselves with their voices with their own performances and so on it's a way of creating that understanding that empathy I think there's something even more fundamental and that's an aesthetic appreciation of the value of other peoples wisdom and experience and knowledge and their ability to express themselves in a whole range of media media I certainly found that in Africa I found that in other parts of the world I spent a year living in Latin America I spent a lot of time in the Middle East that's one of the joys of being an international person or a person who travels most of us are becoming international these days but to stop and listen and see and engage I've always tried to seek out if not the theater because that's not so easy sometimes but the poetry or the literature of the places where I'm going I did this for somebody who's named and recognized years ago I traveled to India and I was in government traveling to India in all of South Asia with Secretary Clinton when she was First Lady and I remember all the CIA put together all these briefing books and they couldn't be more boring or irrelevant frankly I could get hundreds of better briefings in my experience pardon me if anybody's here if you can get better from the account it's a talented unit has been the cultural element how are people expressing themselves what are they concerned about what is their insight, what is their wisdom and so on and I remember taking a book with some of that along with me on this India trip gave it to Secretary Clinton and she read it and actually checked the footnotes that really impressed me when she went to Latin America I remember saying you must go and see Georgie Amala Georgie Amala was a great writer in Brazil almost got the Nobel Prize I think he's died now but I loved his literature that was such an insight if I were to go with somebody today who had a CIA briefing book to Africa, let's say to Eastern Africa I don't know how many of you know this I would say, read the song of the week it's a great poem by it's hard to get because I think he died without a copyright and it's one of the most beautiful and insightful poems I guess it was written in the Trojan language I've got copies but I've had troubles getting copies you wanted to do it in a class you might have to Xerox it I guess there's enough out there so that's not theater because sometimes theater is not as easily accessible but it seems to me that's what's missing in our public policy in our far and fierce world today and I think it's missing sometimes because people don't realize that it's there and how important it is and it's missing because the incentive the incentives are maybe not there to learn in Ghana, years ago in Ghana when I was a public official I arrived the cultural affairs officer was putting on an evening of the talking drama which was a wonderful experience I mean I knew nothing I did not know what to expect but you could hear the drums talking and he said to me, you know this isn't much appreciated sometimes by the embassy because you're stepping out of the embassy while it's going and so I think we have a bit of a dilemma here in our diplomatic service and perhaps even more broadly and I'm not saying that's peculiar to the United States I suspect it's true in other countries as well but I just pose this as a problem theater and literature to get to know people when you haven't had a chance to do it in any other way but making that happen and not just the sort of human rights theater because I think that's important but I think that doesn't take us to the deeper level unless within those expressions the deeper level of life in these countries and among these people are there so it's just the thought I had and an dilemma that we face I leave it with you because I think you're probably all part of the solution to that thank you Grace who will come up with some solutions and it's your I think I have a couple ways I really apologize, thank you all very much thank you for inviting me, it's been a pleasure and gee, I hope we can do a lot more of these things with the school department service involved not just Cynthia but a lot of I don't know I'm gone thank you all very much so we do have a do we? I don't know, do we have two minutes to have any questions from the house? okay, so questions from the house anybody I just wanted sitting here hearing about this incredible project with the Congo and having done two projects in the Congo with the US Embassy one of which was a month long project where one of my dancers who was so entranced by the country and got so involved in our first project was invited back into the full month with full embassy support working with a hundred storytellers, physicians, dancers and costumers creating a dance that was embedded with the view of ending gender violence the whole idea was the brainstorm of the cultural affairs officer at the US Embassy who had been living there with his family and just was overtaken with this problem in the country but people in the Congo communicate through dance, they communicate through song, we can get Congolese to come together and create a new production based on this particular problem then they can take it around the country they can use UN planes and go to Goma and go to much smaller places and we embed a new way of thinking through their own language and so what I'm hearing, I think it's maybe the theme of this entire conference about the disconnection between the State Department the vehicles that might exist for people doing brilliant work and then taking it that much farther because I've just been very lucky that Battery Dance Company has had these relationships and have been able to go to these places and met really fine, talented, brilliant, visionary American Foreign Service officers not always but occasionally and this is a case in point. I just heard from Austin Richardson in Chasla on Thursday we've been working together since last year. And the person who's going there