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Where Can We Run?
Story by ALISSON CLARK (BSJ '98)
Illustration by IGOR MORSKI
Opening night was just a week away, but the production was in tatters. The script was changing by the minute. One actress was in tears. Another had stormed out of rehearsal in UF's McGuire Pavilion after a shouting match with cast members. Director Mikell Pinkney called a 10-minute break from rehearsals of "Where Can We Run?" He leaned back in his front-row seat and let out a long, weary sigh.
The performance was to be the culmination of AIM for Africa: Rwanda, a College of Fine Arts program that took 10 visual arts, theater and nursing students to the country in April to address the aftermath of the 1994 genocide that killed a million people in less than 100 days. The UF students volunteered in clinics, painted murals, helped villagers create skits to share critical health information and listened as genocide survivors shared their stories. At the Children's Memorial in Kigali, they read the last words and causes of death of the genocide's youngest victims.
Back in America, they struggled with what they had seen.
"I had nightmares," graduate theater student Anedra Johnson says. "The first night I was back, [I] had a dream I was being attacked with machetes."
Beyond the horrors of the genocide, however, Rwanda held a message of hope. Its national reconciliation program, where survivors and genocidaires are encouraged to make peace, was a powerful example of forgiveness. The students wanted to do a theatrical production back home drawing parallels between the Rwandan genocide — where ethnic Hutus murdered Tutsi neighbors they had coexisted with for generations — and America's polarizing political and cultural climate.
"The 2008 [presidential] election was one of the greatest periods of divisiveness in our country in my lifetime," says Jill Sonke, director of UF's Center for the Arts in Healthcare Research and Education, who led the UF group. "In Rwanda, we got a glimpse of the extremes that can happen when that kind of divisiveness is tolerated — and how a culture can heal from those divisions."
Translating Emotions
Some experiences were difficult to explain outside Rwanda — like a workshop in the refugee village of Rugerero, where students led 100 villagers in basic theater exercises. The students led off with a lighthearted skit, acting out the dismay of a pet cat left home alone. Villagers responded with a wordless re-enactment of a woman being hacked to death and dragged away.
"It was shocking," Sonke recalls. "It was really complicated for me to understand how they could do that without visible emotion, as if they were presenting a scene from a birthday party. There was a moment when they were done where we didn't know how to react."
For their American production, the actors settled on a blend of monologues and ensemble pieces, including one that gave "Where Can We Run?" its name, taken from the last words of a young genocide victim. In that piece, which concluded the show, actors offered an answer to the question posed in its title. How can we keep the tensions that simmer beneath the surface of our day-to-day encounters from erupting in violence?
"Run to the light," the actors said. "Run to the power of peace, love, art, forgiveness, balance, healing: words that bring us closer together rather than rip us all to pieces."
The next Rwanda trip planned for summer 2010 won't culminate in a play. Rather, Sonke is considering a visual-arts exhibit. But for the actors and audiences who were part of "Where Can We Run?" the experience will resonate long after the curtain fell.
Learn more at www.arts.ufl.edu/CAHRE/news.asp or contact Jill Sonke at jsonke@ufl.edu or 352-273-1488.
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