The Lab would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to our community, sponsors, volunteers, participants and audience
for the incredible support and successful The Gathering.
In May 2019, The Lab inaugurated our signature event The Gathering as part of our city-wide, international CrossCurrents Festival. Over 400 visionary artists from over 40 countries came together to share performances and ideas addressing critical global issues.
This year’s edition of The Gathering offered our Georgetown University community FREE access to diverse programming centered around the contributions of our Global Lab Fellows including productions, readings, discussions and workshops focusing on climate change, immigration and indigeneity, with comprehensive live-streaming for all of our community.
2022 Schedule & Highlights
Welcome / Invocation
Location: Gonda Theatre
Connection + Celebration Event
Hopeful Encounters
Location Gonda Theatre, Devine, Room 035
Connection + Celebration Event
How We Go Missing
Location: Gonda Theatre
Performance
Andares
Location: Gonda Theatre
Performance
WELCOME/INVOCATION
Location: Gonda Theatre
The Lab team welcomes all participants to this 4 day intensive with ritual and rhythm. We honor each other and the space with acts of invocation, collectivity, and care.
Welcome – Derek Goldman, Artistic & Executive Director, Co-Founder, The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics
Emma Crane Jaster, Resident Movement Artist, Global Fellows Program Manager, Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, Prassanam/Presence
Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner (Payómkawichum/Kúupangaxwichem) Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University. First-generation descendant of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, specializing in Indigenous philosophy, knowledge and languages
Amb. Cynthia Schneider, co-Founding Director, The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics
Azar Nafisi, best-selling author (Read Dangerously, Reading Lolita in Tehran); Centennial Fellow, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University
James Thompson, Professor of Applied and Social Theatre; Founder, In Place of War; The Aesthetics of Care. “Care Is Where It’s At”
Ali Mahdi Nouri, UNESCO Ambassador & Secretary General ITI, International Theater Institute & Albuggaa Theatre Company
Ersian Francois, General Manager and Associate Producer, Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics
Manuel Viveros, Actor, Director; Inaugural Lab Fellow, musician with Chonta’s Sound & Others
HOPEFUL ENCOUNTERS
Location: Gonda Theatre, Devine, Room 035
Gather in small groups led by representatives from the Global Lab Fellows. Share your hopes. Meet new people. Welcome to The Gathering
HOW WE GO MISSING
Location: Gonda Theatre
This work explores the ways Native American people have, and continue, to “go missing.”
From The Anishinaabe Theater Exchange and Anita Gonzalez, co-founder of the Racial Justice Institute at Georgetown University.
This work explores the ways Native American people have, and continue, to “go missing” both physically and through lack of representation in the United States. How We Go Missing is comprised of two works, one solo performance, and one ensemble performance. In the one-woman show, we follow Lucy (an incarcerated Native American woman on death row) as she seeks connection in her final moments. With a lot to get off of her chest in a short amount of time, she discusses topics from love to her identity. Boxed in by beliefs, society, and the self. Do we make these boxes, or do the boxes make us? The ensemble work, done via the Indigenous dramaturgical practice of story weaving, plays off these same themes. This piece examines the erasure of Native peoples and explores the stories of missing and murdered Indigenous relatives and the impact on those left behind
Recommended as a double bill with Andares. There will be a discussion with artists from both projects following Andares.
ANDARES
Location: Gonda Theatre
Andares interweaves lives and stories of three characters of indigenous origins: Mayan, Muxe and Wixarika.
Woven from ancestral myths, personal anecdotes, and traditional music, Andares brings together the lives and stories of three characters of indigenous origins: Mayan, Muxe and Wixarika. The play shines a light on a range of realities faced by indigenous peoples in Mexico – land usurpation, widespread violence, community resistance – all at the crossroads of old and new ways of life. Meaning “pathways,” Andares is a sincere, revelatory, and intimate close-up on some of Mexico’s most remote corners and the astonishing stories of its extraordinary people. Conceived by Héctor Flores Komatsu after a year-long search in Mexico, Andares is both a deeply touching and fierce denunciation against a present that seems intent upon destroying what was once held as sacred.
Recommended as a double bill with How We Go Missing. There will be a discussion with artists from both projects following Andares.
Post-Show Conversation (How We Go Missing + Andares)
Location: Gonda Theatre
Anita Gonzalez, director of How We Go Missing and co-founder of Georgetown’s Racial Justice Institute and Héctor Flores Komatsu, director of Andares and Global Fellow ‘20-22 are joined by artists from both productions to discuss their work and the intersections therein.
Verbatim Bodies Workshop
Location: Devine Studio Theatre
Workshop
Pani Puri Workshop
Location: Gonda Theatre
Workshop
The Land Acknowledgement that Isn’t a Land Acknowledgement: Workshop
Location: Davis Center, Room 035
Workshop
Disposable
Location: Gonda Theatre
Performance
Incarceration, Innocence & Justice: Zandezi
Location: Gonda Theatre
Performance
Lab Shares: Tabletop Conversations on Notable Projects
Location: Harbin Tent
Connection + Celebration Event
Drowning in Cairo
Location: Gonda Theatre
Performance
Post-Show Conversation
Location: Gonda Theatre
Connection + Celebration Event
VERBATIM BODIES WORKSHOP, Devine Studio Theatre
From Lab Global Fellow Trà Bich Nguyen
Would you like to create your own artwork that lies between theater and performance art? Would you like to see how a “character” emerges from your own body and not from a script? Would you like to practice a few techniques in theater-making, and then experiment them with others? This workshop is for you! Theater maker Tra Nguyen will share her working hypothesis “Verbatim Bodies”, and lead a hands-on (also feet-on) session on creating performance using this method. Towards the end of the workshop, everyone will have created, participated in, or observed an original theater/performance work!
PANI PURI WORKSHOP, Gonda Theatre
From Aleya Kassam, Eric Wainaina, Rushab Nandha, Sheba Hirst, Henry Wamai, and Mshai Mwangola with support from the Nairobi Musical Theatre Initiative
Developed as part of the first cohort of musicals as part of the Nairobi Musical Theatre Initiative, Pani Puri is a musical in progress, that discusses interracial marriage in Kenya. In a wedding gone wrong, a brown-black love story illuminates the trials and tribulations of staying together across cultures, with music that invites us into Asian-Kenyan and African-Kenyan sounds. With support from the Lab, the writer-collaborators, along with Lab Fellow Karishma Bhagani, hosted a 29-hour workshop reading in Kenya, with Kenyan actors and musicians. Join Karishma Bhagani, together with Aleya Kassam, Eric Wainaina and Rushab Nandha in conversation about the casting, writing and rehearsal process. This presentation will also include a special documentary of footage from behind the scenes as well as snippets of the reading.
THE LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT THAT ISN’T A LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: WORKSHOP, Davis Center, Room 035
Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner (Payómkawichum/Kúupangaxwichem), Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University. First-generation descendant of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, specializing in Indigenous philosophy, knowledge and languages.
In this workshop, the audience will participate in a land acknowledgment process mediated by Indigenous research methods. The process will include reflection on transformative and restorative models of justice and collaborative relationship-building. The audience’s anonymous contributions to the process will be shared publicly.
DISPOSABLE, Gonda Theatre
What guarantees do working people in America have today?
From Global Lab Fellow, Jasmin Cardenas
What guarantees do working people in America have today? Do parallels exist between low wage temp workers/day laborers and career professionals? Over the course of two years actor and activist Jasmin Cardenas interviewed blue and white collar working people in a variety of fields to consider some of these questions. Voices of undocumented low-wage factory workers and educated professionals are brought to life in this Documentary theatre/Verbatim theatre solo play. (Photo Credit: Joel Maisonet)
Incarceration, Innocence & Justice: Zandezi, Gonda Theatre
From Mitambo Theater and Global Lab Fellow Lloyd Nyikadzino of Zimbabwe; Professor Marc Howard, Director, Prisons & Justice Initiative; Georgetown Students from PJI.
Is Prison a rehabilitation center or does it actually create more hardcore criminals from innocent people? Members of Georgetown’s Prisons & Justice Initiative and Zandezi artists discuss live excerpts from their provocative physical theater performance centering on the story of Philani who was wrongfully accused of a crime that he did not commit.
LAB SHARES: TABLETOP CONVERSATIONS ON NOTABLE PROJECTS, Harbin Tent(with refreshments)
Meet other artists and learn more about the work they are creating!
This Gathering exists online as well as onsite – there are many wonderful projects which we are honored to host in the online portal (check them out online or in the virtual viewing room in 036). This is an opportunity to meet the artists behind them and engage directly in small group conversations about the different works. Tonight’s Lab Shares include:
- Roya Sadaf and Aziz Dildare, Afghanistan
- Teresa Turiera-Puigho, Cultura i Conflicte, Barcelona.
DROWNING IN CAIRO
It is May 2001 in Cairo. Moody, Khalid, and their servant Taha are on the Queen Boat, a gay nightclub docked on the Nile.
From Golden Thread Productions and Global Lab Fellow, Adam Ashraf Elsayigh, playwright
It is May 2001 in Cairo. Moody, Khalid, and their servant Taha are on the Queen Boat, a gay nightclub docked on the Nile. When an unexpected police raid results in the arrest and public humiliation of the attendees, the lives of these young men are altered forever. Adam Ashraf Elsayigh’s debut production weaves budding romances, class differences, and familial expectations into a loving portrait of three men who all struggle to rebuild their lives against all odds.
Post-Show Conversation, Gonda Theatre
From Golden Thread Productions and Global Lab Fellow Adam Ashraf Elsayigh, playwright
Mai EL-Sadany, Managing Director, Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP), joins Sahar Assaf, director of Drowning in Cairo and Artistic Director of Golden Thread Productions, Adam Ashraf Elsayigh, Drowning in Cairo playwright and Global Fellow ‘20-22, and Salma Zohdi, Drowning in Cairo dramaturg, to discuss the play and its political implications.
Cultural Diplomacy Through the Lens of Hip Hop Culture: Why & The Urgency of Now Workshop
Location: Devine Studio Theatre
Workshop
Creative Writing and Climate Chaos Workshop
Location: Room 025
Workshop
Worker’s Teatro Workshop
Location: Room 036
Workshop
Risk Lab
Location: Davis Center, Room 035
Performance
Black Circus
Location: Devine Studio Theatre
Performance
How to Eat Mangoes
Location: Gonda Theatre
Performance
Lab Shares: Tabletop Conversations on Notable Projects
Location: Harbin Tent
Connection + Celebration Event
Performing Dangerously: 10th Anniversary Celebration
Location: Gonda Theatre
Performance and Community + Celebration Event
Resonant Bodies: Dance Party
Location: Harbin Tent
Connection + Celebration Event
Coffee Talks, Harbin Tent
Meet up with others to discuss the events of the previous day.
Cultural Diplomacy Through The Lens of Hip Hop Culture, Devine Studio Theatre
Led by Junious Brickhouse
As a fully actualized global culture, consisting not only of music, but also language, fashion, and traditions, Hip Hop is a uniquely effective vehicle for cultural diplomacy around the world. Next Level is an initiative of the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs (ECA) at the U.S. Department of State, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Meridian International Center that brings multidisciplinary teams of Hip Hop Artist Educators to communities around the world to engage in cultural diplomacy by means of empowering local Hip Hop artists to create sustainable careers for themselves and sustainable institutions for their community. Through the lens of Hip Hop, we are able to engage in meaningful cross-cultural dialogue and effect change in the lives of individuals and communities, including our own. This workshop will share observations and best practices from Next Level residencies and encourage participants to identify places in their communities of practice where these principles could enhance communication, conflict transformation, economic development, and artistic excellence.
Creative Writing and Climate Chaos, Room 025.
Led by Miranda Rose Hall, award-winning playwright, Founding Member Lub Dub Theater Co, NYC
Join award-winning playwright and Georgetown alum Miranda Rose Hall for a workshop about creative writing and climate chaos. The workshop will offer students a chance to imagine, write, and share fictional work about the realities of our times. We will focus on writing for performance, though writers of all disciplines are welcome.
WORKER’S TEATRO WORKSHOP
Led by Global Lab Fellow Jasmin Cardenas
Isaura Martinez, Organizer, & Co-Founder of WorkersTEATRO; Cynthia Nambo, and Cirila C. López Workers and WorkersTEATRO Members; Jasmin Cardenas, Director & Co-Founder of WorkersTEATRO (Translation support); WorkersTEATRO Advocating for Change y Abogando para un Cambio Mejor.
Risk Lab, Davis Center, Room 035
From Global Lab Fellow Ada Mukhina and collaborator Elina Kulikova
Welcome to Risk Lab! We are here to talk about risk in art. Be prepared for a series of artistic provocations that invite you to think, make decisions and take action. Risk Lab is a series of participatory real-time performances about risk in art and artists at risk. For each performance, Ada Mukhína (Russia/Germany) invites a new guest artist from a different corner of the world to join the audience in the theatre which is turned into a 360-degree video studio. The fourth episode of Risk Lab is developed especially for The Gathering in collaboration with Elina Kulikova, a Russian young experimental theatre-maker who often works with feminist and queer texts. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she went into exile in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Black Circus, Devine Studio Theatre
From Global Lab Fellow Princess Mhlongo and collaborator Albert Ibokwe Khoza, South Africa
Exhibits showcasing artifacts and actual people were popular in the western world during the colonial period. How do we deal with a shameful legacy that echoes into the present? Should we seek to erase it, bury it in the history books, or resurrect and acknowledge this difficult past? This work will dwell heavily on the early recorded study of black bodies as a “different species” to the white man. Performance artist Ibokwe Albert Khoza pays tribute to the spirit of Sarah Baartman and the many Africans whose lives and bodies were turned into a spectacle for white supremacist pleasure. We pay homage to our ancestry who gave up everything for the benefit of the world at large.
How to Eat Mangoes, Gonda Theatre
From Global Lab Fellow Afshan d’souza lodhi, of Manchester, U.K.
How To Eat Mangoes is a performative, interactive lecture from our resident Rishta Aunty who sells mangoes by day and matchmakes at night. This sensual piece takes the audience through the intricacies of the mango and unearths the hidden sexual core that sits in the centre of our beings. When our hands are enough to rupture skin, do we bring a knife to a mango fight? Are we afraid of getting messy, of truly digging deep inside flesh and tasting honesty? How to Eat Mangoes is a radical antidote to the narratives of destruction and death that we are being fed by the mainstream media.
Lab Shares: Tabletop Conversations on Notable Projects, Harbin Tent
This Gathering exists online as well as onsite – there are so many wonderful projects which we are honored to host in the online portal (check them out online or in the virtual lounge in 036). This is an opportunity to meet the artists behind them and engage directly in small group conversations about the different works.
Timbuktu Renaissance – Cynthia Schneider and Lamine Diarra, Mali
SPACES – Simón Hanukai and Lauren Cox of Kaimera Productions, France & international
Revelation – Karin Coonrod, KenYatta Rogers, Sarah Marshall, D.C.
Performing Dangerously: 10th Anniversary Celebration, Gonda Theatre
Inspired in part by Azar Nafisi (Lab Associate Artist and best-selling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran) and her new book Read Dangerously, this special evening of performances celebrates the courage and resilience of performing artists around the world who are creating courageous art in the context of danger. Additional participants include many long-time Lab collaborators such as Belarus Free Theatre; Heather Raffo (9 Parts of Desire); Mélisande Short Colomb with a live excerpt from her celebrated virtual performance of Here I Am; performances from Ukrainian Playwrights Under Siege and Ukraine Diaries; Kenyatta Rogers and Ed Gero as James Baldwin and Studs Terkel; Bill Rauch, Inaugural Artistic Director of the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center; The Lab’s In Your Shoes; live music, and much more.
Resonant Bodies: Dance Party, Harbin Tent
Resonant Bodies is an immersive and participatory performance celebrating the body as a culture-bearer and its movement as a tool for connection with the otherwise “other.” Amidst music, projections, and prompts, participants play games, mimic, repeat, respond, and dance. Words are only 7% of how we communicate. This is for the other 93%. Part of an ongoing research project in embodied listening, Resonant Bodies continues the Lab’s tradition of “Witnessing Across Difference,” In Your Shoes, and Performing One Another, to connect through music and movement, beneath and beyond words. Framing the ongoing work of theater and dance practitioners worldwide as an intentional tool for working across cultures, this project aspires to build empathy and trust through action and embodiment- replacing analysis with play and sublimating rage in dance. We celebrate reunions, resilience, and all that is yet to come.
Chonta’s Sound: Drumming Workshop
Location: Devine Studio Theatre
Workshop
Puppets for the People Workshop
Location: Design Studio
Workshop
SPACES: Duets – Elevating Personal Stories through Performance
Location: Davis Center, Room 035
Workshop
Theatre, Asylum, and Magic: Devising The Cassette Shop
Location: Devine Studio Theatre
Performance
Lockdown Memory
Location: Gonda Theatre
Performance
Our One Earth: Artists Engaging Climate
Location: Gonda Theatre
Connection + Celebration Event
The Walk: Artists Engaging Migration and the Refugee Experience
Location: Gonda Theatre
Connection + Celebration Event
Closing Rituals
Location: Gonda Theatre
Connection + Celebration Event
**ADD-ON EVENT: Yemandja [Special Ticketed Performance at The Kennedy Center at 8:00pm EDT]
Coffee Talks, Harbin Tent
Meet up with others to discuss the events of the previous day.
Chonta’s Sound: Drumming Workshop, Devine Studio Theatre
Mauricio Nieto Lugo, Edilberto Castaño, and Inaugural Lab Fellow Manuel Francisco Viveros
Explore two representative rhythms of the music and culture of the Colombian South Pacific Coast Region: El Bunde and El Currulao.
This workshop aims to present, identify and explore two representative rhythms of the music and culture of the Colombian South Pacific Coast Region: El Bunde and El Currulao. As a rhythm and as a rite, El Bunde is an important expression in certain Afro-descendant cultures south of the Colombian coast in the Pacific Ocean. Its cadence, the call and response in its song, and the relationship with life and death are part of its main characteristics. For its part, the Currulao encompasses an entire sound complex from which many of the rhythms that are enjoyed in the coastal towns of the Pacific Ocean in Colombia and northern Ecuador emerge. This hour and a half workshop has three parts (Colombian musical diversity, Ay oí, and Of river and sea, navigating the movement) seeks to approach people to the unknown Colombia.
Puppets for the People Workshop, Design Studio
Jessica Litwak, Artistic Director of The H.E.A.T. Collective, core member of Theatre Without Borders, Fulbright Scholar.
Learn the tools for building a puppet using simple materials and bringing it to life.
Join theatre artist and drama therapist Jessica Litwak for this fun, creative and therapeutic puppet-making workshop. Learn the tools for building a puppet using simple materials and bringing it to life. These playful puppet-building workshops have been done in conflict zones in and with traumatized populations in Palestine, Israel, India, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, and all over Europe and the U.S., with kids from age 4-18 and with all types of adult groups serve local individuals by encouraging self-expression and community building. The workshops have also been extraordinarily effective for training actors, drama therapists, Theatre of the Oppressed practitioners, theatre makers, social workers and human rights workers. First, a warm up serves to provide the participants with a context for the day. Each person discovers what sort of being s/he/they wants to create. Then we build the “brain” of the puppet; workshop participants use objects, pens, paint, and paper to draw and/or write, and this creation becomes the actual core of the puppet head or “brain”. After building this inner life for the puppet, the heads and faces are formed around the brain with newspaper, we find the face in the paper, and hold and mold the face with masking tape. Then the puppets’ faces are decorated. Finally, the participants become puppeteers, and introduce their new creations. Jessica Litwak is an Internationally recognized theatre educator, playwright, director, performer, puppet builder and drama therapist.
SPACES: Duets – Elevating Personal Stories through Performance , Davis Center, Room 035
SPACES is an immersive experience created by Kaimera Productions that merges contemporary performance with the ancient art of storytelling. At the heart of the piece, local residents share intimate real-life stories. By weaving these stories together with dance, music, and multimedia, SPACES transports audiences to a place where the magical and the quotidian meet. This interactive workshop, facilitated by SPACES Co-Creators Lauren Cox and Simón Adinia Hanukai, will explore this meeting of the magical and the quotidian, by guiding participants through the creation of art/story duets of their own. Participants are invited to come with a short (2-3 minutes) personal story in mind, that takes us to a place that they call Home. Come prepared to listen, exchange and create together!
Theatre, Asylum, and Magic: Devising the Cassette Shop, Devine Studio Theatre
Asif Majid, Lead Deviser; Nikoo Mamdoohi, Director; Tameem, Performer; Kartika, Performer; Sarah Priddy, Dramaturg; Mariele Fluegeman, Dramaturg
Luciar and Alé are two strangers who have an unexpected meeting in the most unlikely of places: a cassette shop. Their first conversation is weird, confusing, and complicated. However, it soon becomes clear that there is much more to their relationship than meets the eye… An original production, The Cassette Shop is a mix of testimony, ethnopoetic, devised, and documentary theatre. Created by a group of asylum-seeking Storytellers based in Washington, DC, facilitated by Lead Deviser Asif Majid. Hailing from countries as diverse as Iraq, Indonesia, The Gambia, Venezuela, China, and elsewhere, the group worked for over a year to create a production that is true to the experience of asylum-seeking, while emphasizing the hope and hilarity that is so often central to such journeys. Theatre, Asylum, and Magic: Devising The Cassette Shop offers an excerpted reading of The Cassette Shop, followed by a panel with the Storytellers and creative team, and dialogue with the audience.
Lockdown Memory, Gonda Theatre
Lockdown Memory is a performance – lecture using the new multimedia languages in dialogue with those of the stage, intertwining theater, video art and documentary films through a remote collaboration with artists from all over the world. Textual and visual notes, physical and musical scores, conversations in zoom and scenes from the daily life of the artists involved are the dramaturgical fragments in progress that bounce off the walls of an aseptic room in search of a single glimmer, that virtual window open to a world , which had to mark its own borders, due to the pandemic. The performers on stage relive the different moments and situations caused by the lockdown, giving voice to the delicate social situation of the countries of the artists involved: from the protests of Black Lives Matter in the United States to the social revolt in Chile, from the mass exodus from the Indian megalopolis to the return to normality, after the tragedy, in the city of Wuhan.
Our One Earth: Artists Engaging Climate, Gonda Theatre
Join us in conversations and projects centered around climate and the world around us.
Artists and activists engaging with the climate crisis and our relationships to the land, visioning ways of care share excerpts of their work, methodologies, and visions for the future.
Katie Pearl, Assistant Professor, Wesleyan University; acclaimed theater-maker; director of Ocean Filibuster; Co-Artistic Director of PearlDamour
Kiyo Gutierrez, Global Lab Fellow, Guadalajara, Mexico
Erfan Nabizada, youth climate activist from Afghanistan
Myiah Smith, Georgetown alum and performer in The Lab’s We Hear You: A Climate Archive
Moderated by Abner Torres Delina Jr., Global Lab Fellow, Philippines
The Walk: Artists Engaging Migration and the Refugee Experience, Gonda Theatre
Join us in conversations with projects and artists engaging with migration and how we move together across boundaries and borders, share excerpts of their work, methodologies, and visions for the future.
Moderated by Devika Ranjan, Inaugural Lab Fellow, Albany Park Theater Project
Excerpt of Oyeme performed by Daniela Fujigaki and Sarah Hernandez
Eric Swartz, director of Óyeme
Hilda Tijerina, Theater for Change Coordinator at Imagination Stage
Nickii Wantakan Arcado, Graduate Student with the Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues
Amir Nizar Zuabi and David Lan, The Walk
Closing Rituals and Imagining Forward, Gonda Theatre
Join us in celebration of four-days of worldwide artistry, creation, community, and gathering.
Come together to celebrate all that we have built in community with one another and look to the future together.
** THE ADD-ON EVENT: YEMANDJA
Attend YEMANDJA at The Kennedy Center as a special bonus event to The Gathering!
Inspired by her ancestors, her family, and Africa’s resilience, singer and storyteller extraordinaire Angélique Kidjo conjures up Yemandja, a timely theatrical work that is at once a family drama and historical thriller, redolent of Greek tragedy and infused with themes of love, betrayal, honor, free will, and the horror and injustice of slavery. Conceived by three-time Grammy winner Kidjo, and a stellar team of creative collaborators, Yemandja makes its D.C. premiere at the Kennedy Center in May 2022. Featuring a cast of eight performers and four musicians, this Kennedy Center co-commission is a work of magical realism that illuminates what happens when people are robbed of their culture.
DISCOUNT TICKETS WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR ATTENDEES OF THE GATHERING.
Throughout this multi-day event, artists will be joined by thought-leaders, policymakers, activists, scholars, and the next generation of change-makers for inspiring productions, vibrant discussions, pop-up performances, forums, and workshops. We will witness and explore projects ranging from migration and refugee issues to climate change to political polarization to freedom of expression to the role of the arts on health and well-being. We know Covid-19 makes planning uncertain, but we’re hoping to gather both in-person and virtually during this time period.
If you have any additional questions you can email us at GlobalLab@georgetown.edu
Performing Dangerously, The Lab’s Tenth Anniversary Celebration
Friday, May 6, 7:30pm
Gonda Theater, Davis Performing Arts Center, Georgetown University
Inspired in part by Azar Nafisi (Lab Associate Artist and best-selling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran) and her new book Read Dangerously, this special evening of performances celebrates the courage and resilience of performing artists around the world who are creating courageous art in the context of danger. Participants include many long-time Lab collaborators such as Belarus Free Theatre; Heather Raffo (9 Parts of Desire); Mélisande Short Colomb with a live excerpt from her celebrated virtual performance of Here I Am; Diaries from Ukraine, featuring youth voices from the war; and more.
