One of Africa’s most renowned touring theater groups is in Los Angeles this week for a performance and a workshop that offers actors a chance to rethink their roles.
The Mashirika Creative and Performing Arts Group, which includes a mix of actors, artists, and theater professionals from Rwanda, is being hosted by the University of Southern California’s School of Dramatic Arts.
The USC school’s Applied Theatre Arts program teaches students to apply theater to non-theater settings, such as in schools and hospitals or in the name of social change. The teaching methods are drawn from the work of the late Augusto Boal, a Brazilian dramatist who developed the Theater of the Oppressed as a way of giving creative power to victimized groups.
Mashirika puts applied theater into practice, said Brent Blair, founding director of the Center for Theatre of the Oppressed and Applied Theatre Arts at USC.
The text of “Africa’s Hope,” the play Mashirika is performing Sept. 19 at USC’s Bovard Auditorium, is drawn from the testimony of genocide survivors from Rwanda and Sudan. The 75-minute drama is “a really difficult story told in a very beautiful way,” said Blair. “The drumming is just off-the-hook electric.”
Moreover, the play wasn’t the work of a single playwright. “They put theater together in an ensemble way,” Blair said. In some theater groups, he noted, there can be clashes of ego, but not in Mashirika.
The day after the performance, members will participate in a panel discussion on arts, reconstruction, and the 1994 Rwandan genocide; they will hold an open workshop on their methods at USC’s Massman Theatre on Sept. 21. The interchange of roles in Mashirika—members take turns acting, directing, writing, and producing—is something that actors can learn from, said Blair, who has worked with the group since 2007.
“A working actor sometimes gets pigeonholed,” he said. “The ones that get really creative, they start to create their own projects while they’re waiting to get cast in something.”
Performing theater in public spaces can rub against the lifestyle of working Americans who have limited free time and can’t take in a show. But Blair said applied theater can work here and cited as an example a production his students mounted recently outside the opening of a Metro stop in South Central Los Angeles. He pointed to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which celebrated its first anniversary this week, as another example: “Street theater is the new reality TV.”
The Mashirika performances and workshop are free; reservations are required.
