Critical Stages (Dec 2020)
What Is This Thing, Drama? Plays for Dialogue in a Rwandan College Setting
Abstract
Between 2010 and 2017, a series of summer residencies at the University of Rwanda College of Education brought groups of American graduate students in applied theatre to Kigali to support the training of that country’s first cohort of secondary-school drama teachers. Workshops introduced the preservice teachers to such applied and educational theatre strategies and performance skills as process drama, Forum theatre, theatre for literacy, playbuilding and staging a show. Paramount in the planning, implementation and effectiveness of the program was adhering to best practices in Theatre for Development to avoid Freirean cultural invasion, honor the assets of the Rwandan participants and treat them not as legatees of genocide but, rather, as forward-looking undergraduates preparing for professional futures. Over time, these strategies created a trusting partnership, classroom and performance skills, and open dialogue about life in Rwanda and the United States. Given Rwanda’s legacy of post-colonial, lecture and testing-based education, the project’s most important accomplishment was to give the drama teacher trainees direct experience of theatrical activities that problematize the familiar, challenge right-and-wrong answers and elicit ideas that might otherwise be taboo, within the relatively safety of aesthetic distance. Initial participant responses often echoed standard discourses around national unity and progress, but in each iteration of the project, dramatic engagement allowed participants to challenge hegemonic ideas. Outcomes were ultimately constrained by limited funding, the fact that positions for Rwandan drama teachers never materialized, the drama major withered and the projected ended in 2017.
