Archive for September 2011

As most of you know the border between India and Pakistan is one of the most heavily guarded in the world. The Kashmir Conflict has made the rest of the world hold their breath on more than one occasion. The battles pitched at the Siachen Glacier rank among the highest battlegrounds in history. Activists and artists touching on the conflict risk their well being. But Salman Rushdie, author of Shalimar the Clown, was used to that, the cynic will say. Nevertheless, sometimes zones of conflict produce amazingly beautiful images. And that was the case just two weeks ago, when NASA released this picture:

The thin orange line is the border between the two Asian countries. How amazing, how sad.

Brent Blair uses Theatre of the Oppressed techniques with genocide-survivors in Rwanda. Theatre of the Oppressed has a vast global reach spanning numerous disciplines, yet perhaps the least investigated aspect of the work to date has been its use in collective trauma, even while this becomes increasingly necessary in light of recent experiences of mass violence.  There is hardly a more fertile training ground for problematizing this branch of the work than in the post-genocide culture of Rwanda, where co-author Brent Blair has been applying and revising Theatre of the Oppressed theory, training and practice for survivors, therapists and witnesses of the 1994 Rwandan genocide since 2007.

Co-authored by USC colleague Angus Fletcher, this article advances several observations about the exigencies of practicing TO in a world where expressivity is minimized and where protagonist/antagonist conflicts remain unimaginable.  This article recounts the birth of a trauma-centered, Rwandan-born TO technique, The Museum of the Unspeakable.

In this video Brent Blair tells us how mechanisms of dehumanisation work, whereas in this one he touches upon the difficulties one can have whilst dealing with post colonial relations in professional work. Brent Blair is coming to Utrecht, the Netherlands to present two workshops. Check them here. These workshops are presented by Community Arts Lab Utrecht and Foundation Formaat.