2007 – AOW Summary

ARTS IN THE ONE WORLD: CULTURE AND IDENTITY

Shape and shape shifting –
How the arts and culture help destroy/create the sense of self and other

A Conference at CalArts, Jan 25-28, 2007

Lectures, readings. performances, panels and workshops on the issue of cultural participation in the forming, freeing, manipulation and conquest of personal and social identities and histories. This conference is the local anchor of our ongoing artistic exchange with Rwanda; we center on the enormous shifts in that country post-genocide, where there has been a moratorium on the teaching of history while a move is made to abandon the terms Hutu, Tutsi and Twa in light of a reconceived notion of what it is to be Rwandan. Art is a key element in making this shift cultural as well as legal, denotative. Our conversation will expand outward to examine identity-in-motion in a range of contexts.

Premise: that epochal changes in perception may occur rapidly, and that art workers participate in these shifts both knowingly and unknowingly. The answer to the question “what must we do” is elementally tied to our sense of who we are (as we are, so must we grow). Movement towards a coherent planet requires a practical celebration of diversity, diversity requires self assertion, which requires nuanced vehicles of expression; nuance requires the layering of memory and memory requires organizing symbols and myths. Art, for the sake of the one world, needs to know its practices regarding identity.

Our goal: to share work, ways of working, and ideas – in particular as they relate to the negotiation of borders (national, economic, personal, artistic…), conflict transformation (opening space to allow full participation in one’s creation), the recovery of historical memory (held in discourse, in imagery), and coexistence (polymorphous).

Sincerely,

Erik Ehn Dean, School of Theater

Arts in the One World Panels and Presentations, January ‘07

Conference Notes

1/25/07

We come from all points of the earth to reflect and share each other’s company, reflecting mutual commitment to faithful consideration of the gravity of peace.

CalArts – a network of six schools (Film, Dance, Critical Studies, Art, Film and Theater). Theater hosts this conference but cooperates with all the other schools in brining this together. Be alert to ambient art. Dijana – pozorište – the space that asks for alertness.

If you meet someone, or come across a topic of special heat for you, we encourage you to control your agenda; set your priorities and gather a group to meet in the cafeteria, for example. Sunday morning for example, when a performance workshop is offered, might be a productive open space for non-performers wanting to go into greater depth on a topic. (Performers, know that there is this outlet.)

If you need to gather your senses, you might consider Ed Davis park, which has some nice, short trails… it is south down the hill from the hotels, about a fifteen minute walk.

There is an information table, and an information wall. Feel free to take or leave what you will as you will. I draw your attention to the Peace Journal, which contains addresses and articles relating to last year’s conference.

The chief capital by which this conference is supported is willpower. Many people have contributed in extraordinary ways. In addition to the hospitality committee (students with HC marked on their name tage), Leslie, Barbra and Christy (with whom many of you have had contact) offer their support…

Intro

The subject of this conference is culture and identity – how art in particular contributes to the creation and destruction of the sense of self and community. Art is seen as neutral in this sense: it may be put to good or bad use. The topic emerges from the Institute’s interest in the cultural study of genocide – the elemental crime against identity. At CalArts our sense of genocide derives especially from our Rwanda exchange, and our investigation of the events of ’94; this genocide acts as our focal point, the seed of our mandala, as we seek orientation in a dizzying field. Today therefore centers on Rwanda, and subsequent days radiate from this point.

In the Book of Urizen William Blake describes a cosmos constructed by a God of Reason. On this path, the essential features of being are unable to contact one another. Love withers, empathy becomes pity, justice is embittered, and the only offspring capable of surviving is violent revolution – even this burns itself out in airlessness.

Identity as a construct, as a willed and conscious imposition, shares features with this history. Genocide, where our best and most natural sensations are set against each other in grim competition rather than cooperating towards our salvation… genocide is the fruit of a world founded on reason. The tragedy of the contemporary age (the genocidal era) is not that we have gone mad, but that at every step, conscious choices are made that deliver us up to the symptoms of madness. Art, when it counters, does so by creating safe spaces for waiting, for witness, for union – spaces that may be approached by but not made by reason. Impossible spaces – the infinite complexity of simultaneity, of an empathy of peers, of metaphor. Art is made of metaphor. Text and subtext; the second and third dimensions; the narrative and the still; the random and the deliberate – live in inconceivable identification. This unreasonable, volatile, perfectly risky space of metaphor, is peace. In all our outrage and manifesto, contradiction and yearning, peace is the house we occupy and open, like breathing opens, a place where even painful wisdom pushes to possibility, to knowledge past reason and affinity across divides. [Art is the pinhead on which dance our necessary, unreasonable angels.]

We take on difficult subject matter over the course of the next few days. The conference moves at a steady pace over long hours – you will see me looking often at my watch. I invite you to regulate your own pace; take measure of your endurance. Some panels are concise – although they deserve their own day or days. Convert panelists to people through side conversations; create a rebel meta-conference as we go. I invite you to populate the conference, in the sense that you find ways to make it human. And lastly, if you are seized by nostalgia even as we begin – if it feels like we are going when we should be staying, take comfort in the notion that we are building something over time. We repeat presence, making community of like souls over time.

The notes that follow are taken by different people, in different ways; they are the reflective surface of the pool, rather than the swim we swam – but of use, reflectively!

-ee

Uncovered Over the Course of the Day

Touchstones:

1. o That art may be a tool for recovering memory.
2. o That memory provides narrative construction for the facts of the past; this narrative is at the core of both our identity in the moment and our momentum into the future.
3. o That there was a genocide in Rwanda, with targets and perpetrators. We may say both share humanity, but that their roles were distinct.
4. o Just as art may be therapeutic in the recovery of memory, so may it be complicit in its manipulation.
   1. o Great care must be taken in re-presenting genocides, that divisions are not reinforced for partisan purposes, that victimhood is not commercialized, or that denial not be used to cast perpetrators as identical to targets.
   2. (Even the very good may be manipulated: France/Armenia. While on the one hand, some discourse mitigating or denying the genocide emerges from France (as much a matter of internal French politics as bona fide reasoning – the reality/non-reality of the events of ’94 being used to sling mud between parties), France also encourages that denial of the Armenian genocide be made and international crime. On the – third? – hand (complex!) this denial may be part of a strategy to isolate the Turkish government (which does not acknowledge the genocide) en route to that country’s advance into the European Union.)
5. o Identity and narrative are not static states, they are perpetually unfolding. Artists are effective when they listen, especially when they listen to where someone is going. Never again is eschewed in some conversations we have had in Rwanda – the first word is a negative and the second is anchored in the past. Benjamin’s angel faces backwards, implying a forward.

Dehumanization is a prerequisite for genocide. It is pushed through education, the media, all manner of communication.

“Denial does to witnesses what the executioner does to the victims.” (Jean-Pierre Karegeye quoting Frederic Worms.)

Revisionism is a tactic common to virtually all historians – a reconsideration of the past. Negationists cast themselves as revisionists, when actually they are reversing history outright – an ideological perspective, not an historical one.

Claudia Bernardi, in a previous panel (Tuesday) for the Art School, suggest:

Art is first, a tool for listening (this will be repeated throughout the conference).

We do well to repeat ourselves – to work durationally, extensively… -So we remember, so we become shared or extended spaces for the memories of others.

The importance of refugees to the rebuilding of local culture. As an artist, ask – to what are you returning? For what are you homesick? And return becomes your art and mission.

Discover that which holds memory.
Document, articulate architecture of that which holds memory.
Become a place that holds memory.
Intervene in the present.
Predict the future.

Art may be the only apt language for genocide – an event that breaks denotation and can only fit in poetry.

There is spontaneity in a genocidal climate – but it is exigent (improvising survival). Joy is in constructive spontaneity (improvising in a way that liberates, builds). Art can be a bridge between the two… (See Khalil’s work on the zone between subaltern and oppressor.)

The products of our art/documentation are not about our experience; instead about where our experience opens out to the world, where it fails. An individual turns into an audience at the moment of membership (remembering, return) – from self to others. Drama creates a failure of personal experience.

1/26/07

Dance Panel:

SK’s site specific work confirms the impossibility of disappearance, or the ability to resist it – As hawks discover thermals, artists ride on ghosts.

VM: the body as an elemental site… The who of dance and how important that is. A consideration of how the form of dance reflects political power structure; even to position oneself as a dancer in certain contexts reflects privilege (a word that has come up; even in our discussions where we separate the known form the known, the esthetic from the daily, we reflect bias). Her own idea that everything is choreographed, and that dance is a way to meddle with choreography.

KK: Spoke too of the unnecessary barriers between dance/theater/ritual.

Know your position. Use this knowledge to move. Use movement to reclaim the abandoned. Abandon position.

Native Am:

Polly – “We have the creative power to have a healing dance with genocide.” Sometimes we are out of balance with death, and need to counter destruction and mindlessness with creation and mindfulness. In reconciliation, we meet on equal ground.

Hanay – Exhausted by victimhood; quest for balance leads him to search for new characters and narratives. Genocide becomes creatively vital when it is subject to restaging

Hailstorm – The gentle persistence of genocide, and her beautiful poetry.

Art and Justice in Uganda

Charles offered personal reflections – Leaders walked into the footsteps of colonial masters… a cultural bomb was released so that thinking changed.” Can change back – Chinua Achebe. “Art ahs continued to serve as the heartbeat of Ugandan Culture.” Is the work about the makers or the subject? Beware cooptation: “They didn’t arrest me, they didn’t cane me, they took me to dinner.”

Ntare: History. Divorcing the indigenous from the conservative; art that you can enter into/art that enters in. Overcoming enormous stresses out of the passion for identity, to exist, to write/make history.

Lost Tribes

Jed’s knowledgeable overview of enormous identity pressures on Native Americans, and the range of responses. How multiple the casino gambits are. Return of Hanay’s eagle – using the sale of one image to retrieve another.

Deborah and Pauline, senses of tribe

Ugandan history, parallels and differences with Northern Ireland. Tribe as a

colonial projection; the assertion of identity against coexistence.

Plays

A range of approaches, all essential. In one framework they may be evaluated as effective drama, they may/must also be simultaneously appreciated as human events – the will of a particular community to commemorate, to celebrate, to be, at a particular time.

1/27/07

Overview

What we do by our nature – it is political and moral as are all actions; sublimity of intention is no exemption

What we may do – help in framing history, in continuity from the personal to the general

What we must do – we have seen many situations of crisis; mentored by Rwanda, we have looked worldwide and near at hand, seeing situations of acute distress; we have seen and contribute to capacity, and morally well intentioned cultural projects – complicate capacity.

Ways of going forward in action – together, incarnated; through listening. In once sense there is always otherness – a poem is extra-daily (it is not you in cases where it is written; you are not written ins the same way); if we come to a place where there is no distinction between performer, performance and audience – where all of life is a dance – then we will likely invent new ways of interfering with this choreography. Or, unless the world becomes entirely monoform, the life dances of one nation or community will differ from another. The one world seems to want to be many, and artists as history makers are world makers and are stewards of the world’s diversity. So responsible uses of otherness is a key charge. How to act globally and think locally.

Memory is activist. “There is no amendment, no healing to genocide (the leg will not grow back), but there is a way forward.” (CB) Not memorialization, but activation.

Albany Park (beautiful youth!) on their work process – “we have paid attention.”

“The Tamil people are living in a frozen state” (Sitham Kandasamy); art as a tool to unfreeze. Beware art’s use as a refrigerant.

But great care must be taken in rehearsing, reharrowing ghosts/genocides: that divisions are not reinforced for partisan purposes, that victimhood is not commercialized, or that denial not be used to cast perpetrators as identical to targets. In “capturing” an experience -“These words may take away more than they give.” (via CF) Not accidental that we “shoot” pictures; “snapshot” is a hunting terms, and looking at the documentation, we may stand in the shoes of the perpetrator (NW).

Cindy:

a) Performance promotes identity based in practices that install cultural

understanding of the world into our bodies. “Justice and peace will kiss” – being-

with.

b) Identity is intersubjective (genocide is inter-counter-subjective; one denies the

existence of the other, thereby, in a chain of logic, denying one’s own reality).

Polly:

Art in the One World also equals art in the many worlds. (Zapatistas, via Vicki

Grise, attendee/CalArts student: We want a world in which many worlds

fit/Queremos un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos.)

Don’t make victims of plays, deciding in a terminal way what they were. Rather, what life are they a part of, what are they becoming, and what may we become in participating in them?

Plurality vs. dualism (returns to Urizen). Not good or bad but it dances with both. How is it (the situation, the play), and how are we (the makers, the audience – a line that must be blurred) complex and on-a-mission. What are the politics and morality.

Human rights – a perpetually interrogated, examined and utile area – are the grammar of law. Human rites should be likewise vital and result in a body of dramatic literature and experience.

The arts are grammatically identical to human rights – they are trying to express the same thing. They are responsible to the same standards, they are funded the same way, organizing around them disappoints and runs to in-fighting, but in the end are essential to the conduct of a civil, hopeful world. Critics are human rights activists, and are charged with being as joyful, broken and forward looking as any other colleague in the field.

1/28/07

Laurie’s session – flowing the conference into the body. Performances understated and specific; the helical interweaving of first, second and third persons.

Bernardi group (an open space, summary session) –

Nomenclature: U.S.ers vs. Americans

Action fatigue – addiction to misery (perpetually seeking out the adrenalin of

disasterAmericans

Action fatigue – addiction to misery (perpetually seeking out the adrenalin of

disaster)

Importance of humility

Khalil/Julia – papers forthcoming!

Conclusions: We repeat – the importance of repetition. The conference is a rehearsal, one in an open series of rehearsals – we are building an ensemble by appearing to one another over time. Next opportunity – Rwanda this summer. Then – next year’s conference.

Robert O. Ajwang’ is a musician, choreographer, and dancer from Tanzania. He is a graduate of the national College of Arts in Tanzania and also has a B.A. in anthropology from Florida State University. He has taught dance and music workshops for both adults and children in Georgia, Florida, New Hampshire, and Vermont. He has also taught as a guest lecturer at Makerere University in Kampala and choreographed a dance that was performed at the National Theatre of Uganda in 2004. Current projects include a collaboration with Okello Kelo Sam and Laura Edmondson on a performance piece that explores the war in northern Uganda. He lives in Hanover, NH, with his family and teaches African dance at Dartmouth College.

Claudia Bernardi is an internationally known artist who works in the fields of human rights and social justice and who has exhibited her work in over 40 solo exhibitions. In all of her work over the past two decades – whether as an artist through installation, sculpture, and printmaking, as an educator through teaching and lecturing, or as a participant in human rights investigations – she has impacted thousands of people with her integrity, compassion, and truthfulness. She is an artist who has witnessed monstrous atrocities and unspeakable human tragedies, yet speaks of these horrors in ways that communicate the persistence of hope, undeniable integrity, and necessary remembrance. Born in Buenos Aires, Bernardi and her younger sister lost their parents while teenagers during a highly unstable time in the history of Argentina -a time of dictatorship and extreme political unrest. “You do not have the luxury of choosing to be apolitical in Argentina,” says Bernardi. “By simply living in a dictatorship, one is politically involved and constantly at risk.” Argentines lived in perpetual fear that they personally, or someone closely related, would become a desaparecido, a disappeared citizen; 30,000 desaparecidos were documented during the so-called “Dirty War” waged by the Argentine military from 1976 to 1983. She left Argentina for the U.S. in 1979.

In 1984, a forensic anthropology team was established under the new government in Argentina to supply evidence of violations of human rights carried out against civilian populations. The team utilized the rigorous methods of traditional archaeology to examine, document, and publicly expose mass burial graves. Returning to Argentina to work in collaboration with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (AFAT) -a team that included her sister, Patricia, one of the founding members of AFAT -Bernardi learned the meticulous scientific methods of handling human remains. AFAT have conducted exhumations of mass graves all over the world and have reported their findings to the United Nations. Bernardi joined the AFAT in investigations of human rights violations in El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, and Ethiopia. Part of Bernardi’s responsibilities included the creation of the archeological maps and transcribing the testimonies of families of the “disappeared ones.” From here, Bernardi realized the full import of how art could be used to educate, elucidate, and articulate the communal memories of survivors of human rights atrocities.

Bernardi was awarded in 2004 an Honorary Degree, Doctor of Fine Arts, Honoris Causa, by the College of Wooster, Ohio. Bernardi received an MFA from the National Institute of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and an MA and her second MFA from the University of California at Berkeley.

She has taught at the Universidad del Salvador, Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, California College of the Arts, Mills College, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She was a California Arts Council Artist-in-Residence from 1990-1993 and 1994-1995 for the Artist in the Community project directed to the population of political refugees and survivors of torture from Latin America and was an East Bay Community Foundation Art Project Artist-in-Residence in 1993-1994.

She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally: The International World Peace Center in Hiroshima, The Centre for Building Peace, Donegal, Northern Ireland; DAH Teatar in Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro; The University of Haifa, Israel. Locally at the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, Lux Gallery, MACLA, Center for Latin American Studies at UC Berkeley, Thatcher Gallery at University of San Francisco, Artist’s Forum, Palo Alto Cultural Center, Carl Gorman Museum at U.C. Davis, and Berkeley Art Center.

She was the subject of a 2000 documentary directed by Penelope Price Pasa un Angel/An Angel Passes, which screened at New York’s Margaret Mead Film Festival and at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Spire Award for Best Art Film. In 2004, film director Penelope Price, created another documentary about the life and art of Claudia Bernardi called “Artists of Resistance”, which is now touring the film festivals nationally and internationally.

Bernardi is the recent recipient of a prestigious Creative Work Fund award, to support the collaboration with choreographer Kimi Okada of the ODC Dance Company to create “Flight to Ixcan,” a performance exploring personal loss in the context of the rash of political deaths occurring in Central and South America in the 1970s. In 2004, Bernardi has been awarded a Potrero Nuevo Fund Grant to support her project to create an Art School/ Open Studio in Perquin, a rural community in post war El Salvador.

Bernardi is the creator and director of the school as well as the visionary of this new model of art in communities. In March of 2005 the School of Art and Open Studio of Perquin started to operate in Morazán, Northern El Salvador, serving children, youth, adults and the elderly. The approach of this unprecedented art initiative is rooted in the partnership created between art, artists and local institutions and NGOs. The art projects created and culminated in this first year of the School of Art and Open Studio of Perquin were created in response to the demands, hopes and desires of the members of the community. (Please, visit www.wallsofhope.org)

Brent Blair is an actor, designated Linklater voice instructor, and MFT Intern who teaches voice in the BFA program and founded the Applied Theatre Arts curricula at the USC School of Theatre where he is a senior lecturer. He studied Igbo traditional theatre and community engagement on a Fulbright grant to Nigeria in 1992, and cofounded the Center for Theatre of the Oppressed and Applied Theatre Arts, Los Angeles (www.ctoatala.org) in 2001. He has been working and training with Augusto Boal for more than ten years and he leads Cultural Field Worker training seminars across Los Angeles and around the world. He is completing his PhD in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. His research is lately focused on Liberation Arts from a post-colonial model, and he is teaching the fifth year of Liberation Arts and Community Engagement (LACE) at USC.

Ananda Breed has conducted research in Rwanda, Congo, and Burundi regarding justice and reconciliation. Her PhD thesis, ‘Theatre for Reconciliation in Post-Genocide Rwanda’, interrogates the performativity of nationbuilding through the Gacaca courts, Established Theatre, and Grassroots Theatre. Ananda has served as a facilitator for the UN Special Session for Children (New York, USA), the UN Third Water Forum (Osaka, Japan), Forum Theatre and Video Initiative (New York, USA), and Search for Common Ground (Bukavu, Congo). Ananda received her MA in Theatre for Development from New York University and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester. She can be contacted at acbreed@earthlink.net.

Plays by award-winning playwright, Catherine Filloux, include: LEMKIN’S HOUSE (Rideau de Bruxelles, Belgium; McGinn-Cazale Theatre, 78th Street Theatre Lab, NYC & Kamerni Theatre, Sarajevo); THE BEAUTY INSIDE (New Georges/InterAct); EYES OF THE HEART (NAATCO, NYC); SILENCE OF GOD (Contemporary American Theater Festival); MARY AND MYRA (CATF & Todd Mountain); PHOTOGRAPHS FROM S-21 (shown around the world). Filloux’s libretti include: THE FLOATING BOX (Composer Hwang), New World Records and WHERE ELEPHANTS WEEP (Composer Him Sophy), Cambodian Living Arts. Plays published by Playscripts, Inc. and others. Filloux is a co-founder of Theatre Without Borders.

Tessa Hicks teaches action research methods at Pitzer College and team-teaches a Native American Literature course at Pomona College. She has a Masters (and is currently completing her PhD) in Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University. She has also served as the Associate Director of the Anti-Defamation League and Youth Programs Director of the National Conference for Community and Justice. Her community-based research includes indigenous studies in Mexico, Peru and Brazil; immigration/ border studies at the US/Mexico border; critical race theory, social movements and exploring innovative qualitative methods of inquiry. When not busy with community projects and teaching, Tessa can be found doing yoga, capoeira and Afro-Brazilian dance.

Born in 1970, in the former Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo, acclaimed Rwandan filmmaker, Eric KABERA made his studies in psychology, pedagogy and law. After a training offered by Reuters Foundation in London, he became a radio journalist for 3 years with the national broadcaster and a freelancer for the Africa Section of the BBC. He attended one of the major training gatherings in Hollywood (Los Angeles) in directing, production and post production at the Los Angeles International Film Festival with a special course in cinematography by Roger Dickens (the Director of Photography of the Hurricane and famous cinematographer of Denzel Washington). Eric KABERA is now, the official correspondent of GRN (Global Radio Network) in East Africa.

Since 1994, his company, Link Media Production whose production credits range from the first feature length film on the Rwandan genocide 100 Days to multiple documentaries and shorts specializing on the Great Lakes region and Rwanda. He has attended over 40 international film festivals around the world that had received his films. His productions had been acclaimed in prestigious film festivals such as Toronto International Film Festival, Vues d’Afrique (Canada), Milan, FESPACO, Los Angeles,

ZIFF, Göteborg, New York, African Film Festival, Cape Town World Cinema Festival,

etc. Eric has also given talks and presentations at various reputable universities and institutions such as Tufts University (USA), the Dramatic Institute (Stockholm / Sweden), the Göteborg Film Festival the Frontline Club in London which is a coalition of renowned British journalists who cover events around the world.

Eric KABERA’s talent and vision had been recognized by the Director’s Guild of America Inc. chaired by Michael APTED (Gorillas in the Mist) and has been selected among 15 African filmmakers to debate on the new perspective of African cinema, an initiative facilitated by Danny GLOVER (Purple Color, Lethal Weapon I, II, III, IV) with Louvertures Films. Motivated by the lack of human resources in audiovisual in Rwanda, Eric KABERA founded the Rwanda Cinema Centre (RCC) in 2001 with the intention of training and facilitating filmmaking in Rwanda. He is as well a founder member of the East African Filmmakers Forum that covers Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda and he sits on the board of Advisors of Maisha Film Labs alongside with Spike LEE, Raoul PECK, Sofia COPPOLA and Peter CHAPPELL. Maisha Film Labs is an initiative by the acclaimed Indian filmmaker Mira NAIR (Mississipi Massala, Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay,…). He is now the Chairperson of the annual Rwanda Film Festival organized and hosted by RCC.

Chantal Kalisa, Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She teaches courses on Francophone African and Caribbean literatures and cultures with particular emphasis on postcolonial and gender studies. Her research focuses on representation of violence in those literatures. She has published articles on Gisèle Pineau, Ken Bugul, Michèle Lacrosil, Sembène Ousmane, Aminata Sow Fall and Frantz Fanon. She has also published essays and articles on the Rwandan Genocide. Kalisa co-edited Dix ans après: Réflexions sur le génocide rwandais (L’Harmattan, 2005), a volume of essays on the 1994 genocide, with Prof. Rangira Béatrice Gallimore

(U. of Missouri-Columbia). She is also a co-founding member of IGSC (Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center) based in Kigali.

Jean-Pierre Sadi Karegeye, Director of the Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of California at Berkeley in French and Francophone program and visiting scholar at Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. His areas of research include literary representation of violence, literary criticism, genocide studies in dialogue with ethical, philosophical and political discourses. He has coauthored three books and had more than thirty articles published in international journals in Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, the United States, etc. His recent articles include “Leon Mugesera and the perversion of Ethics: dialogue with Kant”. Contact information for Jean-Pierre Karegeye (karegeye@berkeley.edu, jpkaregeye@yahoo.fr)

Stephan Koplowitz is a director/choreographer/media artist known for his work on the concert stage and for creating original site-specific multi-media works for architecturally significant sites. His site work aims to alter people’s perspectives of place, site, and scale, all infused with a sense of the human condition. He is the recipient of an 2004 Alpert Award in Dance, a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography, a 2000 New York Dance and Performance Award, “Bessie” for “Sustained Achievement in Choreography” and six National Endowment for the Arts Choreography Fellowships (1988-’96). In 1994 he was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Wesleyan University where he earned a degree in music (composition). His studies also include an MFA in choreography from the University Of Utah. He has guest taught at universities and communities across the country and while living in New York City, he directed the Dance Program at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights where he taught since 1983.

Since 1984 he has created 53 works (37 commissions) for both sites and the concert stage and recently film. His site works have been seen throughout the United States and Europe in such venues as New York’s Bryant Park (the Internet-inspired “Webbed Feats”), the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, in Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington D.C., two London sites commissioned by the Dance Umbrella Festival: the reopened British Library (‘98), and the Natural History Museum (‘96). In 1999, Mr. Koplowitz premiered “Kohler Korper” (Coal Bodies), at the Kokerei Factory in Essen, Germany and later that year premiered a new version of “Fenestrations”, a critically acclaimed work for the windows of Grand Central Terminal, NYC first seen in 1987. His choreography and company, Stephan Koplowitz & Company (Kop Art, Inc.) have been produced by Dance Theater Workshop (eight separate seasons), Dancing in Center, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Bates Dance Festival, London’s Dance Umbrella Festival (two commissions). Dance Place of Washington D.C. (three seasons), and many other venues. In June of 2004, he premiered his “Grand Step Project: Flight” produced by Dancing in Brooklyn. His latest work, “Revealed” is a site-adaptive installation/performance involving a room size camera obscura and was installed in Battery Park City, presented by Arts & Events at the Winter Garden and the River to River Festival, May 22-June 25, 2006. “Revealed” also generated a portfolio of 22 master images and will have its next installation/exhibition at MASS MoCA in early summer 2007.

Kristin Kusanovich is full-time lecture at Santa Clara University in the Department of Theatre and Dance and the Liberal Studies Program. She is a choreographer, dancer, director and teacher who has collaborated in modern dance, theatre, opera and film. Her community-based projects have focused on youth throughout the Bay Area.She has directed Kusanovich Dance Co of Mineapolis, and international dance projects with Senegal and China. Her research interests are in dance and ethics with an emphasis on creative, transformative experiences for children and teens.

Laurie Lathem is a playwright, screenwriter, memoirist and solo performance artist. She was the founding Creative Director and the Director of Education at the Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, and has taught screenwriting at Stanford Continuing Studies Program. She taught the popular Go Solo Workshop at Highways Performance Space for many years and directed the acclaimed solo show “Old Man in a Baseball Cap,” by Fred Rochlin at Actors’ Theater of Louisville and The La Jolla Playhouse, among other venues. Laurie teaches writing and playwriting to incarcerated youth and has just finished a book of memoirs. She is also an African percussionist, specializing in the talking drum and the sabar from Senegal.

Victoria Marks creates dances for the stage, for film and in community settings. Marks’ recent work has considered the politics of citizenship, as well as the representation of both virtuosity and disability. These themes are part of her ongoing commitment to locating dance-making within the sphere of political meaning. Marks is a Professor of choreography in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA where she has been teaching since 1995. She is a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow and has received recent grants from the Irvine Foundation (Dance: Creation to Performance 2004 and DanceMaker 2002), the NEA (2005) and the Cultural Affairs Council (COLA 2001). In 1997, Marks was honored with the Alpert Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography. Over the course of her career, she has been the recipient of multiple grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the London Arts Board, among others. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship in Choreography, and numerous awards for her dance films, including the Grand Prix in the Video Danse Festival (1996 and 1995), the Golden Antenae Award from Bulgaria, the IMZ Award for best screen choreography and the Best of Show in the Dance Film Association’s Dance and the Camera Festival.

Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine is a first generation Ugandan American working in the mediums of photography, theatre and film. He is the author and performer of BIRO. The play held its world premiere at Uganda’s National Theatre and subsequently premiered in London, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Toronto, Ethiopia, South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe. Mwine currently appears in the feature film BLOOD DIAMOND starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Upcoming projects include a Guest Artist post at Yale University this coming June/July where Mwine helped design and will teach a study abroad program in Swaziland titled; Arts and Public Health in Action: Study of HIV/AIDS in Swaziland.

Dr. Kandasamy Sithamparanathan (Theater Arts Group) – Ph.D in Drama and Theater, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka; M.Phil in Drama and Theater, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. 2003 – To date: Head of the Department of Fine Arts, Faculty of Arts, University of Jaffna. 1993 – 2003: Lecture of Drama and Theater, Faculty of Arts, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. 1995 – Todate : Director, Theater Action Group (TAG)

“Since there are limitations to work on theater issues within the University, I have initiated an organisation called “Theater Action Group (TAG)”. In TAG, ‘T’ signifies theatre as a safe space for people to get together, ‘A’ signifies action of ones own self-deep desires or hidden expressions and imagination about their future, and ‘G’ signifies the bonding they make within the group and formation of close ties. Then they become empowered activists and working with the rest of the society to initiate social changes. TAG’s mission is forming groups of this nature in the villages and create a network between these groups.

“In the 1980’s with the rise of the ethinic conflict, I used theatre as propaganda tool for the Tamil cause. These were mainly in the form of travelling and street theatre. The people discovered it as a novel and inventive experience and sometimes even joined the theatre group as they travelled across villages. People also bean together in larger numbers.

“In early 90’s, the IPKF (Indian Peace Keeping Force) occupation, followed by the Sri Lankan Government economic embargo and the changes in the political context, normal life came to a standstill. I realised theatre again become a significant way of expression for the anger and sorrow of the people. This type of expression from the performers was a shocking experience for the people. These experiences led me to form a group called Theatre Action Group. The TAG worked with the internally displaced people (IDP) in refugees’ camps on various issues like health, etc. in these performances people also engaged and participated (emergence of the concept of ‘participation’)

“In 1995, the Sri Lankan Government proclaimed “War for Peace” on Tamils. Displacement of people occurred in great numbers. The whole of the Jaffna peninsula was displaced in one inght. People faced severe hardships living under trees and road-side and they lived in great fear of their lives. At the same time there were stories fabricated in the South of Sri Lanka that the people (of the North-East) were liberated, etc.

“At this time, our theatre became a place for self-discovery where people started telling their stories and they felt theatre as a “safe space” for them. It was “a place to express our desires”, one participant stated. After they expressed their oppressed emotions, they engaged in a journey in which they imagined about their future. This is the theatre for self determination. TAG engages in theatre for self-determination in which the political participation of people is increased and enhanced at both the individual and societal level.”

Polly O. Walker is of Cherokee and Anglo descent, an enrolled member of the Tsalagiyi Nvdagi and the Cherokee Southwest Township. Polly grew up on a cattle ranch at the foot of the Mescalero Apaches’ sacred mountains and is a passionate supporter of the reintroduction of the Mexican Grey Wolves. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia where her work focuses on conflict transformation between Indigenous and Settler peoples.

Bill Westerman is a folklorist by training but has worked in museums and with immigrant and refugee artists in arts and social service organizations. He currently teaches on refugees and immigration in the writing program at Princeton University. Prior to that he was director of the Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial in Chicago. He works extensively on the issue of imprisonment of asylum seekers worldwide. He just started an organization called Art Knows No Borders to promote the work of immigrant and refugee artists, and the human rights of refugees and migrants through artistic programs.

Denise Woods was a Drama Division faculty member at The Juilliard School for seven years. She currently works as a vocal coach with NBC Nightly News, CNBC, Bloomberg News and the Today Show.

Woods’ work as a dialect coach in film includes Ving Rhames in the HBO features film Only in America: The Don King Story, which earned him a Golden Globe Award for “Best Actor in a Made for Television Movie” and a NACCP Image Award nomination. She collaborated with Rhames on the Warner Brothers film Rosewood and the Miramax film Dangerous Ground . Woods was hired as the acting coach to young actor Miko Hughes in the film Mercury Rising , which stars Bruce Willis. She also instructed Taye Diggs in the 20 th Century Fox film How Stella Got Her Groove Back and has coached Mekhi Phifer, the star of the critically acclaimed hit film Soul Food . Ms. Woods was honored to be the dialect coach for the film Once in the Life , written, starring and directed by Laurence Fishburne and co-starring Eamonn Walker. She was the dialect coach for the film The Hurricane starring Denzel Washington and directed by Norman Jewison. Most recently she has coached Danny Glover, Glen Turman, Stan Shaw and Vicellous Shannon in the TNT television film Freedom Song , directed by Phil Olden Robinson, coached Jeffrey Wright in the Paramount Pictures film Shaft , starring Samuel

L. Jackson, and most recently coached Will Smith in the Paramount Pictures film Ali .

Raised on New York’s Lower Eastside, Denise Woods was the youngest student admitted into the eighth graduating class of The Juilliard School of Drama. She later became the first African-American female faculty member in the Drama Division. To date, Woods’ most rewarding achievement has been the creation of “Express Yourself”, a program she founded in 1996 where she teaches voice, speech and acting to urban teenagers from the Harlem community.