Last class of the term with the directing students. After reading 36 papers telling me how students would direct their play in realism because it is about real life, I managed to bring home a point that I have no idea (really) what it means to be real on stage and that directing is not about imitating what some guy in Russia dreamed up 200 years ago, but what you want to dream up today. The young man in the green sweater who played a lovestruck woman brilliantly earlier this semester says, well, you really changed how we see.
This seems to be the main way that I can be useful right now. I am trying to encourage process because what I see of directing here tends to center around executing a script - blocking charts, assembling props lists, kind of thing. But there's no training in, vocabulary for, or rehearsal time to internalize a world or event. So I ask questions.
Other way I think I can be useful here - to be a catalyst for people to do the things they want to do anyway. It could be enough that the students wrote the paper. Or that Philip wants to bring his play to schools. Or that Stella wants to write a proposal to open a vocational sewing project for war affected girls in the north that earns them income in a way that is mutually beneficial to her garment business. I think I can offer permissions by practicing continued engagement, by continuing to be here.
Victorious is the name of the three year old girl who has moved in with us. (Muzungu, do you also have a child who is three years?) Victorious is learning English - very fast. The kid is way smart. Yesterday she learned "what is your name?" And when you repeat the question, she screams "Victorious!"
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
asleep
somehow slept through sunday. flattened down as if by a firm hand. the children came in and covered my floor with grass and letters. as if that fairy tale where the woman sleeps for a hundred years and she wakes up in thorns, wakes up to nothing she knew.
Tonny, one of the actors in our show, got a job heading PR for UNDP in Juba, Sudan. They vote for their independence from Northern Sudan in two months and his job is to interface between UNDP, the local gov't, the local people and the international community. He leaves next week so we saw him off Saturday.
a pork joint near Lake Victoria. A big hole in the ground, with brick and a grill and giant giant logs on fire in front of the grill. Not underneath. Underneath a giant hole so the pieces of pig can drip boiling grease. Dip pig in salt, in onion and eat. hot. A small shack by the side of the road full of people. We called ahead to place an order.
Then Lake Victoria and the sunset and the full moon rise. Full moon in the leaves of a palm tree. Lake Victoria huge like the sea. There are men fishing in low boats, thin sillhuettes against the islands. Small waves, and then bats. The water gets deep immediately. Is deep already. And in the dark, a thousand moths bash themselves against light bulbs, but we don't know their names.
Tonny, one of the actors in our show, got a job heading PR for UNDP in Juba, Sudan. They vote for their independence from Northern Sudan in two months and his job is to interface between UNDP, the local gov't, the local people and the international community. He leaves next week so we saw him off Saturday.
a pork joint near Lake Victoria. A big hole in the ground, with brick and a grill and giant giant logs on fire in front of the grill. Not underneath. Underneath a giant hole so the pieces of pig can drip boiling grease. Dip pig in salt, in onion and eat. hot. A small shack by the side of the road full of people. We called ahead to place an order.
Then Lake Victoria and the sunset and the full moon rise. Full moon in the leaves of a palm tree. Lake Victoria huge like the sea. There are men fishing in low boats, thin sillhuettes against the islands. Small waves, and then bats. The water gets deep immediately. Is deep already. And in the dark, a thousand moths bash themselves against light bulbs, but we don't know their names.
Friday, November 19, 2010
what next?
So today, I returned to Mulago. My roommate Rose kindly kept me company. I admire her practicality, so it was great to have her company and insight.
Friday is screening day at the Uganda Cancer Institute. A series of health workers and survivors spoke to the 40-50 people, giving testimonies, giving instructions on how to breast self exams, on healthy diets, giving general info about the disease and treatment. Then the invited people from the audience to come up and teach to see if the info is being communicated clearly, which I thought was a wise strategy.
A lot of ngos have used theater to raise awareness on AIDs and the woman, Margaret, who runs the survivor group here wants to use theater to raise awareness for breast cancer. Cancer is so new here and the funding for non-infectious diseases is only beginning to get more attention. I am going to write a script for her this week. This week is also the two year anniversary of mom's death, so a nice gift to me to feel like I have something to do with my hands. This woman Margaret impresses me. She's sweating of flu and running around processing papers, assisting with screening, outlining the play. She mentions that her cousin took her to a church who wanted to pray for her instead of a mastectomy and she tells the preacher, no I'm going to get this treatment. It's not the defiance that impressed me. It's the explanation she gives. Everyone wants to help. They don't want you to have to go through something like getting your breasts cut off. They just don't know how to help.
The other project that I committed to today: I'm working with some members of Theater Factory to tour a comedy about post-election violence in Kenya to schools, Crazy Storms. To give students a picture of theater as rigorous and as local (not just Shakespeare). Theater Factory is a weekly comedy show that's been running at the National Theater for 7 years. They create an impressive 14 new sketches each week based on newspaper articles. Their work is tight and professional, with vital and imaginative physical comedy.
I came home today and before I had even taken my backpack off, bent over my computer and was attacked by children. A 5 year old begins combing my hair and the three year old smudges her thumb firmly across my forehead. Can you ask her why she is doing that? It's the sign of the cross. She says it's so bugs don't bight you.
Friday is screening day at the Uganda Cancer Institute. A series of health workers and survivors spoke to the 40-50 people, giving testimonies, giving instructions on how to breast self exams, on healthy diets, giving general info about the disease and treatment. Then the invited people from the audience to come up and teach to see if the info is being communicated clearly, which I thought was a wise strategy.
A lot of ngos have used theater to raise awareness on AIDs and the woman, Margaret, who runs the survivor group here wants to use theater to raise awareness for breast cancer. Cancer is so new here and the funding for non-infectious diseases is only beginning to get more attention. I am going to write a script for her this week. This week is also the two year anniversary of mom's death, so a nice gift to me to feel like I have something to do with my hands. This woman Margaret impresses me. She's sweating of flu and running around processing papers, assisting with screening, outlining the play. She mentions that her cousin took her to a church who wanted to pray for her instead of a mastectomy and she tells the preacher, no I'm going to get this treatment. It's not the defiance that impressed me. It's the explanation she gives. Everyone wants to help. They don't want you to have to go through something like getting your breasts cut off. They just don't know how to help.
The other project that I committed to today: I'm working with some members of Theater Factory to tour a comedy about post-election violence in Kenya to schools, Crazy Storms. To give students a picture of theater as rigorous and as local (not just Shakespeare). Theater Factory is a weekly comedy show that's been running at the National Theater for 7 years. They create an impressive 14 new sketches each week based on newspaper articles. Their work is tight and professional, with vital and imaginative physical comedy.
I came home today and before I had even taken my backpack off, bent over my computer and was attacked by children. A 5 year old begins combing my hair and the three year old smudges her thumb firmly across my forehead. Can you ask her why she is doing that? It's the sign of the cross. She says it's so bugs don't bight you.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
excess
I walked into a sign a couple days ago. I was walking by the hole I fell in a few months ago and thinking too hard about how I'm so clumsy and I don't like the way I make a spectacle out of my injuries because it doesn't feel honest when I walked into a sign and had to sit down for awhile. Light concussion. Nauseous. Fuzzy. Irritable.
It sucked, but it was useful in making me stop. Walking home, I noticed how people sit alone by the side of the road under trees. A woman roasting white 1/2 corn cobbs to sell for cars and the sweat over her face.
I sit with my roommates and talk about their plans. Stella wants to open up a shop where she employs people to sew who don't regularly have access to income. She talks about her time visiting prisoners and the effects of their imprisonment on their whole family. She talks about girls in underpriveleged areas. How can her fashion business position itself to give back to her community (how to define her community)?
(I am interrupted here by the two young girls I live with. One is 5, the other is 3. The 3 year old only speaks Luganda so the 5 year old translates for me. The two like to pretend they are lions and they jump out from behind my bed and growl at me when I enter my room. The 5 year old says she is asking - muzungu, do you also have children who are three years?)
We watch tv here. Badly dubbed soap opera from south america or india. Dubbed into english with cartoon voices. There's one I like thats east meets west set in developing India and Brazil. There's a character who is schizophrenic and his family is ashamed about his disease and then other members of society have to sensitize them to his condition as an illness that can be treated medically. All the men are in love with Brazilian women but have arranged Indian wives. The rapid switch from incense and robes to sky scrapers is fascinating and makes me think about what people are navigating here. The sitting under trees by the road. The prevalence of cell phones with no real mail system and undependable email - extension of oral culture.
One of the things I do with my time is to work as a guest artist at Makerere, the local University. The one that Obama's father attended. The students make skits and I throw a couple of basic drama concepts on the table. Today the skit was about a woman who marries a man in her clan, even though it is against culture and then they have a baby which is a stick, or maybe a chicken. In the skit, one of the characters prays to rid the father of the curse of his daughter, and this young man's performance is amazing, a 3 minute chant ending in gutteral sounds. Get out.
(I am interrupted here by the young woman who works in our walking in with a plate full of fried grasshoppers. For reals. They're really good. Like crunchy fish. Salted and cooked with onion.)
There's also reality TV here. Where contestants come from various African countries. The country to country gets fierce. In Africa Big Brother, the man from Zimbabwe was voted off as the runner up and then (according to my friend) the president of Zimbabwe gave him some large sum - like $200,000 - as a consolation prize.
Concussion, Monday, anyway. I spent the night in some sort of cathartic tantrum. I can't remember content. But I woke and started writing. All of a sudden: writing.
It sucked, but it was useful in making me stop. Walking home, I noticed how people sit alone by the side of the road under trees. A woman roasting white 1/2 corn cobbs to sell for cars and the sweat over her face.
I sit with my roommates and talk about their plans. Stella wants to open up a shop where she employs people to sew who don't regularly have access to income. She talks about her time visiting prisoners and the effects of their imprisonment on their whole family. She talks about girls in underpriveleged areas. How can her fashion business position itself to give back to her community (how to define her community)?
(I am interrupted here by the two young girls I live with. One is 5, the other is 3. The 3 year old only speaks Luganda so the 5 year old translates for me. The two like to pretend they are lions and they jump out from behind my bed and growl at me when I enter my room. The 5 year old says she is asking - muzungu, do you also have children who are three years?)
We watch tv here. Badly dubbed soap opera from south america or india. Dubbed into english with cartoon voices. There's one I like thats east meets west set in developing India and Brazil. There's a character who is schizophrenic and his family is ashamed about his disease and then other members of society have to sensitize them to his condition as an illness that can be treated medically. All the men are in love with Brazilian women but have arranged Indian wives. The rapid switch from incense and robes to sky scrapers is fascinating and makes me think about what people are navigating here. The sitting under trees by the road. The prevalence of cell phones with no real mail system and undependable email - extension of oral culture.
One of the things I do with my time is to work as a guest artist at Makerere, the local University. The one that Obama's father attended. The students make skits and I throw a couple of basic drama concepts on the table. Today the skit was about a woman who marries a man in her clan, even though it is against culture and then they have a baby which is a stick, or maybe a chicken. In the skit, one of the characters prays to rid the father of the curse of his daughter, and this young man's performance is amazing, a 3 minute chant ending in gutteral sounds. Get out.
(I am interrupted here by the young woman who works in our walking in with a plate full of fried grasshoppers. For reals. They're really good. Like crunchy fish. Salted and cooked with onion.)
There's also reality TV here. Where contestants come from various African countries. The country to country gets fierce. In Africa Big Brother, the man from Zimbabwe was voted off as the runner up and then (according to my friend) the president of Zimbabwe gave him some large sum - like $200,000 - as a consolation prize.
Concussion, Monday, anyway. I spent the night in some sort of cathartic tantrum. I can't remember content. But I woke and started writing. All of a sudden: writing.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Mulago
Today I joined a group of women from Seattle looking to develop connection with cultural workers here. Today they were touring the cancer ward at Mulago and one of the women was hoping to connect the community outreach people with theater makers in the hopes that theater could be used as a tool to sensitive people to cancer and spread information about diagnosis and treatment.
Mulago is the largest hospital in Uganda doing amazing things with limited resources. Challenges include: people are not familiar cancer, so they often come late to hospital. When they do come, they often need good time to raise the funds for medication. There is a program to give people free cancer drugs, but often there is enough for only 5% of the patients. The hospital will have some drugs and not others and it will be on the families to buy that drug independently. Or people have enough money to pay for 3 rounds of treatment, but they need 6. By the time people are ready and willing for treatment, they are often in stage 4 cancer.
I thought cancer treatment was brutal, but cancer untreated appears to be a rough way to go. One woman with breast cancer offered to show us her breast. These kinds of offering of witness amaze me. Hair like fire. Two grown daughters in light green dresses tend her on the bed. She smiles with her whole face, taking careful time to greet visitors. Her breast eaten pink. Eyes smiling open.
Most of the care in this room is palliative. People usually stay one or two weeks.
Outside, it rains. Air through the open glass slats smells cold and clever.
The hospital has better success rate with lymphona, Burkitts. A cancer that strikes children here peak age 7. A mother pours milk through a tube in her son's nose. Asleep on a tiny bed with a yellow t-shirt written on "children are the future". This one, if detected early, has about an 80% success rate.
But it's difficult to track the success here because there is no real way to follow up with patients after they leave. If they are cured, we never hear from them again. If they pass on, we never hear from them again. There is some initial planning for a program that can track patients through text messages since most people here have a cell phone, or know someone who does.
The two buildings are relatively clean and well kept. Apparently, a legislator in the federal government had advanced lung cancer and had to get chemo at Mulago. He complained to Parliament that the ward had cockroaches and even rats and so the government invested money to start a cancer center. Growing numbers of oncologists. Growing numbers of partnerships with US institutions (mammogram buses parked outside from Yale New Haven and Dana Farber). It's a big project - making cancer publicly visible and building the infrastructure to treat it. A lot to accomplish with fitful funding, but moving forward.
I learned a small program offers patients or family members of patients the ability to sew dresses and other clothes for sale, since they are often leaving jobs in their villages to come here to Mulago.
Every Friday, they offer a free clinic for women to come and screen for breast and cervical cancer. I am coming back this Friday to learn more about developing a small outreach theater project with survivors.
Mulago is the largest hospital in Uganda doing amazing things with limited resources. Challenges include: people are not familiar cancer, so they often come late to hospital. When they do come, they often need good time to raise the funds for medication. There is a program to give people free cancer drugs, but often there is enough for only 5% of the patients. The hospital will have some drugs and not others and it will be on the families to buy that drug independently. Or people have enough money to pay for 3 rounds of treatment, but they need 6. By the time people are ready and willing for treatment, they are often in stage 4 cancer.
I thought cancer treatment was brutal, but cancer untreated appears to be a rough way to go. One woman with breast cancer offered to show us her breast. These kinds of offering of witness amaze me. Hair like fire. Two grown daughters in light green dresses tend her on the bed. She smiles with her whole face, taking careful time to greet visitors. Her breast eaten pink. Eyes smiling open.
Most of the care in this room is palliative. People usually stay one or two weeks.
Outside, it rains. Air through the open glass slats smells cold and clever.
The hospital has better success rate with lymphona, Burkitts. A cancer that strikes children here peak age 7. A mother pours milk through a tube in her son's nose. Asleep on a tiny bed with a yellow t-shirt written on "children are the future". This one, if detected early, has about an 80% success rate.
But it's difficult to track the success here because there is no real way to follow up with patients after they leave. If they are cured, we never hear from them again. If they pass on, we never hear from them again. There is some initial planning for a program that can track patients through text messages since most people here have a cell phone, or know someone who does.
The two buildings are relatively clean and well kept. Apparently, a legislator in the federal government had advanced lung cancer and had to get chemo at Mulago. He complained to Parliament that the ward had cockroaches and even rats and so the government invested money to start a cancer center. Growing numbers of oncologists. Growing numbers of partnerships with US institutions (mammogram buses parked outside from Yale New Haven and Dana Farber). It's a big project - making cancer publicly visible and building the infrastructure to treat it. A lot to accomplish with fitful funding, but moving forward.
I learned a small program offers patients or family members of patients the ability to sew dresses and other clothes for sale, since they are often leaving jobs in their villages to come here to Mulago.
Every Friday, they offer a free clinic for women to come and screen for breast and cervical cancer. I am coming back this Friday to learn more about developing a small outreach theater project with survivors.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Centre Christus
I traveled to Kigali to go to my friend Evas' wedding to Elijah. Beautiful and a story that needs to be told in itself.
And also. The next day.
Evas' pre-married home is a few blocks from where I usually stay when I visit Kigali, a Jesuit retreat center called Center Christus. Located close to the airport. It's where the first killing in the genocide happened. 17 religious men and women.
OK. I'm a little shy to tell this story. I went to Center Christus on Sunday for mass because their mass has beautiful music. I came late and people were standing outside the windows or had lined up chairs outside the doors. I sat in a free chair on the cement pathway outside the door and a small boy in a batman t-shirt put ripped pieces of a green and yellow leaf in my hand. The bits of language I could hear I couldn't understand, French. I think French. But the rhythm I know, in a quiet way. The boy returns with more leaves to hold.
It's quiet here. And I notice myself wishing for a way into this quiet or that I knew the names for things here. I notice I wish I could find someone to teach me. I remember noticing this as a surprise, like opening a box of once-favorite clothes you forgot owning. Maybe.
Unnerved. I wander the city, new cobble stoned. Clean. Vistas. Reminds me of Prague. Or Vermont, but I'm not sure why that one. I drink grape soda and write about a Clair Denis film I watched last week about globalization where a makeshift family of people who share an apartment building can't come together and also can't get out and they close the store Anthropology because it isn't of use to anyone anymore. It reminds me of the work of cultural exchange because of this myth of leaving the world as you know it to have some kind of unique and precious experience, but really there is no leaving the world.
And I find myself back in Center Christus in a round no-wall hut near the genocide memorial and an insistently living tree. And I sit with this - I wish I had a teacher - for a few hours. And the other things that come up. The sadness of the loss of life that remains underneath the spectacle of violence. What to give Evas for her wedding? What is peace?
When I got out of the shower yesterday, there was a Jehova's Witness from America having tea in the sitting room. Evas' sisters let her in because they thought she was a guest for the wedding. Her name was Abigail and she traveled with a Ugandan woman who had braces. So Evas' sisters, brother and uncle and I and the Jehovah's Witnesses squeezed into the living room and drank tea. I nervously tour apart and ate bananas. Abigail asked us to read a passage of the bible that promises a future of peace, of "exquisite delight in the abundance of peace". And I'm trying not to imagine that it's my job to save people from evangelism, but I find myself asking, but what is peace?
The thin wood of a bench bolted to the hut. What does peace look like and how is it enacted? The sound of traffic. Why this narrative of peace made visible in the image of someone dying? An airplane lands. I am spending time with my desire for a teacher. An uproar from the soccer match at Amahoro stadium washes down the hill.
When it is five o clock, I return to Evas' former home because we are going to visit her new home. We have 10 minutes, you should rest. I sit by the bookshelf. There is a book for GMAT. There is a book on weddings. And then there is a book of small plays about saints by the playwright I used to travel with here.
I am reading. Water on the floor. About the intent towards a structure of writing that is continuously opening to wonder, about closure as idolatry. Peace shaped as metaphor, metaphor as space of and between multiples, decenters the individual. Maybe I am praying for idolatry, not guidance. Something to rest in, not rest.
To the taxi bus. Up hill. High walled side of the road. Evas in a yellow dress. Pieces of wedding cake. We can't get the TV to work. Visitors. Peas. Black sofas. Outside, the cool dark. Red cement. The size of a new life.
And also. The next day.
Evas' pre-married home is a few blocks from where I usually stay when I visit Kigali, a Jesuit retreat center called Center Christus. Located close to the airport. It's where the first killing in the genocide happened. 17 religious men and women.
OK. I'm a little shy to tell this story. I went to Center Christus on Sunday for mass because their mass has beautiful music. I came late and people were standing outside the windows or had lined up chairs outside the doors. I sat in a free chair on the cement pathway outside the door and a small boy in a batman t-shirt put ripped pieces of a green and yellow leaf in my hand. The bits of language I could hear I couldn't understand, French. I think French. But the rhythm I know, in a quiet way. The boy returns with more leaves to hold.
It's quiet here. And I notice myself wishing for a way into this quiet or that I knew the names for things here. I notice I wish I could find someone to teach me. I remember noticing this as a surprise, like opening a box of once-favorite clothes you forgot owning. Maybe.
Unnerved. I wander the city, new cobble stoned. Clean. Vistas. Reminds me of Prague. Or Vermont, but I'm not sure why that one. I drink grape soda and write about a Clair Denis film I watched last week about globalization where a makeshift family of people who share an apartment building can't come together and also can't get out and they close the store Anthropology because it isn't of use to anyone anymore. It reminds me of the work of cultural exchange because of this myth of leaving the world as you know it to have some kind of unique and precious experience, but really there is no leaving the world.
And I find myself back in Center Christus in a round no-wall hut near the genocide memorial and an insistently living tree. And I sit with this - I wish I had a teacher - for a few hours. And the other things that come up. The sadness of the loss of life that remains underneath the spectacle of violence. What to give Evas for her wedding? What is peace?
When I got out of the shower yesterday, there was a Jehova's Witness from America having tea in the sitting room. Evas' sisters let her in because they thought she was a guest for the wedding. Her name was Abigail and she traveled with a Ugandan woman who had braces. So Evas' sisters, brother and uncle and I and the Jehovah's Witnesses squeezed into the living room and drank tea. I nervously tour apart and ate bananas. Abigail asked us to read a passage of the bible that promises a future of peace, of "exquisite delight in the abundance of peace". And I'm trying not to imagine that it's my job to save people from evangelism, but I find myself asking, but what is peace?
The thin wood of a bench bolted to the hut. What does peace look like and how is it enacted? The sound of traffic. Why this narrative of peace made visible in the image of someone dying? An airplane lands. I am spending time with my desire for a teacher. An uproar from the soccer match at Amahoro stadium washes down the hill.
When it is five o clock, I return to Evas' former home because we are going to visit her new home. We have 10 minutes, you should rest. I sit by the bookshelf. There is a book for GMAT. There is a book on weddings. And then there is a book of small plays about saints by the playwright I used to travel with here.
I am reading. Water on the floor. About the intent towards a structure of writing that is continuously opening to wonder, about closure as idolatry. Peace shaped as metaphor, metaphor as space of and between multiples, decenters the individual. Maybe I am praying for idolatry, not guidance. Something to rest in, not rest.
To the taxi bus. Up hill. High walled side of the road. Evas in a yellow dress. Pieces of wedding cake. We can't get the TV to work. Visitors. Peas. Black sofas. Outside, the cool dark. Red cement. The size of a new life.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Evas and Elijah get married
I travel to Rwanda to view my friends' wedding - Evas and Elijah. Gorgeous and the two radiate confidence as they pass from one house to another.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)