While science gives fire the credit for humanity’s leap from rock painting to space exploration, I would argue that it was the invention of the fireplace, not fire itself, which spurred humanity to its present height. It was in the stories whose telling was enabled by the gathering of people around fires everywhere on earth that mankind found the ideas which spurred our species onward. Different experiences triggered new ideas, new solutions, and new insights ─creativity is fueled by learning. What has any of this have to do with theatre, you might ask. Let’s work that inner eye a little.
Close your eyes for a minute and imagine: what was it really like on the day that cave-dweller rubbed two stones together and accidentally made a fire? What was driving him when he put those two stones together? Was he smoothening one to make it a gift for a loved one? Was he bored and rubbing rocks just to pass the time? Was it a man or a woman? What did he/she do first; did they run and tell someone, burn the forest, or were they discovered by others staring at a strange light glowing in the dark?
If your imagination has gotten this far you can fill out the rest, but right there you have just begun to reinvent one of the commonest origin stories known to contemporary man. Whether or not you believe it, you can never see it again. For you, that story will always begin with the picture you have just created in your mind. Imagine how much more powerful it must have been to be seated in that circle and listen to this storyteller dancing around the fire, animating their body here and there to elicit a reaction, inflecting their voice here and there to shock and awe… is there anything remotely close to that in our modern-day existence? There is just one in my humble opinion ─theatre.
While there may be no fires in a theatre auditorium, theatre is the only space today that evokes this age-old tradition of human beings gathering in one place to listen to stories. In recent years there has been some spirited debate in professional and academic circles about the future of theatre. Everywhere in the world, art critics are worried that performing arts are gradually becoming obsolete. The number of people buying tickets to watch plays is falling at an astronomical rate.
Some have blamed it on the millennial scourge ─their obsession with digital worlds and personas has their eyes glued to phone apps all day long; and when they are not looking at phone apps, someone will complain about their fixation with video games and television. Today’s youth are distracted. Easy as it is to blame them, we mustn’t forget that many of us got our foundation exposure to theatre in schools. You could run to the highest peak and yell at world-governments for not doing enough to support the preservation of this ancient and vital art, but let’s face the truth, nobody really cares. It’s up to the people who care about the preservation of these spaces to use their agency to fight for it, which is why I never tire applauding Deborah Asiimwe for initiating the birth of Kampala International Theatre Festival. We need more spaces that celebrate the power of theatre bringing together plays from around the globe to our narrow streets, and by doing so, reminding us why there can be no substitute for it.
A Bird’s View of #KITF19, the 6th Edition
Kampala International Theatre Festival (KITF) is an annual event aiming to develop professionalism among East African theatre practitioners, and connect the theatre-making community in East Africa. Started in 2013 as a collaboration between Sundance Institute Theatre Program and Bayimba Cultural Foundation, KITF was the brainchild of Deborah Asiimwe, a Ugandan playwright and director working with Sundance at the time. This year’s edition, which run from Tuesday, 26th November 2019 to Saturday, 30th November 2019, was curated by Tebere Arts Foundation, a cultural organisation started by Asiimwe when she returned home after her tenure at Sundance Institute.
By any standard, they were all good productions. Uganda was represented by the playwrights John Rwothomack and Nick Makoha. Both are artists based in the Diaspora, where their productions were created and made, so one might wonder why no local plays made it to this year’s program bill. There have been some good plays staged in Kampala this year.
Alongside Palestine’s Fida Zidan’s Last Day of Spring, Nick Makoha’s My Father And Other Super Heroes and Rwothomack’s Far Gone were one-man acts of this year’s program bill and they were all outstanding. Overstanding, if you like.
Being a theatre practitioner myself, the ‘one-man’ acts were my greatest highlight of the festival. The one-man act is, to me, the holy grail of theatre performance. All the forces that make up great theatre ─design, sound, lighting, costume, and performance─ must be fully embodied by a singular actor who must sustain the audience’s attention for 40 minutes plus, embody all the characters in the play, memorise their lines, and deliver every character in the play just with the use of their body and voice.
It was interesting to see how these three writers, who all starred in their plays, interpreted the dynamic of one-man performance in their productions. Fida Zidan’s use of martial arts postures to mirror the oppressive militant quality of life in Palestinian territories occupied by Israelis sets her child-narrator apart from the adult characters in the play. The consistent use of these postures in Hassra’s monologues sets up a biting contrast between a naïve child determined to wrest her brother’s body from a military cemetery and bury it in their family ancestral grounds (which pass into Israeli hands in a land grab during the play’s events) and her grieving parents whose life is thrown into tumult by the loss of their only son ─a subtle tactic that lightens a sad tragic tale and makes it easier to consume.
Watching this play gave me a much-needed reminder of why theatre is more important today than ever before in our collective history. I have seen many documentaries and news reports about the difficulty of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. Nothing sunk it home as deeply and soundly as the story told in this play. That Fidan Zidan and Director/Co-writer Zizar Zo’ubi wrote in both Arabic and Hebrew and have staged to both communities before is a testament to theatre’s everlasting vitality to the human project.
It is difficult to say who impressed me the most. All three productions gave the style unique interpretations. Nick Makoha brought the world of comics to the stage without the aid of visual or sound effects. All you had was this burly fellow doing impressions of comic book heroes in a child’s voice. It may or may not have been intended, but the contrast between Nick’s heavyset frame and the child’s voice coming of it was both hilarious and clever ─Nick’s play is about a child who fills the absence of his estranged and emotionally distant father with mental projections of his favourite fathers. Another play bringing a light touch to a depressing subject.
John Rwothomack’s approach was the more traditional of the three. Using choreographed movements to give each character a distinct expression, Rwothomack’s narrative of a young boy’s transformation from abductee to murderous child soldier was a much more intense affair involving more characters and more complicated scenes. There were moments where he had to create an entire camp, a battle scene, and unsanctioned dialogue with a prisoner who turned out to be a brother he had forgotten, with just one body to do all this. It was a sumptuous feat of performance.
The Ensembles
Children of Amazi and Les Larmes De Crocodile were the main ensemble acts of the festival. Nairobi Musical Theatre Initiative presented some musicals too, and given that they were all productions still in workshop, I opted to leave them out of this review.
Children of Amazi is a collaboration of artists from Burundi, Rwanda, DRC, Kenya, & Belgium ─a folk tale strung together from folk tales and songs from all the four countries that participated in it. The cast which performed at the festival was all from Burundi. Members from Rwanda couldn’t come because their state had banned border crossings into Uganda. The others were touring in Belgium.
The story behind this play follows a simple structure that anyone could follow. In the talk-back, they would clarify that it was originally created to be performed for children, but judging from the enthusiastic reception it received from both local audiences and theatre-makers taking part in the festival, it is a play for adults too. It was very comic and had many funny moments: the male actor who transformed into a goddess mid-act yet there were women in the cast; the tank-hut audience members had to go through to access the auditorium, reminiscent of visits to traditional spirit shrines; the metallic basin that heated water to a steam by rubbing one’s palms against its handles (many audience members tried a hand at it after the play); the fighting sequence in which trees tried to threaten a ‘water-thief”… It left me very nostalgic for the yesteryears of high school drama competitions.
Les Larmes De Crocodile deserves an honourable mention. It was without a doubt my favourite production of the festival. Many audience members will agree with me. I am not a big fan of dance theatre. Being a man of letters I often have difficulty deciphering the language of dance theatre, and given that I like my dance to have less acrobatics and more MJ/Usher-Esque choreography, I tend to avoid dance theatre altogether. Les Larmes De Crocodile dismantled my pretentions. Not only was the storytelling in the choreography as lucid as daylight, but it was also acrobatic and entertaining. By the time the moderator called it a night, I had gotten every point they wanted me to make (and missed some because it showed only once) and was thoroughly enthralled by the energy of this group. The way this play used its groups and lines reminded me of Philip Luswata’s recent reproduction of 30 Years of Bananas, a play by the legendary Alex Mukulu. Both plays adapt the concept of the ever-moving, ever-evolving group to create a sense of motion that suspends reality and draws you wholesomely into the play. I couldn’t get enough of this play.
In the play Hard Stuff, a collaboration between Kenya’s Victor Otieno Oluoch and Germany’s Fine Brit Frohlich, I was introduced to a form of experimental theatre that lit up some cerebral lobes in my curious brain. The program bill advertised it as puppet theatre, a form I had only ever seen in films so I came in expecting to see string figures dancing around on a miniature stage, only to find a completely different direction. Masks.
Hard Stuff is a work of what I call ‘streetside philosophy’ ─perspectives on grand ideas by characters in ordinary or unsophisticated settings. The play is made of abstract stuff. In one skit, a lion and lioness search for happiness and find it under the sheets, then become unsure if that is happiness. In another, a bird laughs at human labours as we do at insects; a child ‘muppet’ raises many questions about modern-day parenting; an ape kidnaps a woman (I think) and tries to make her his.
Speaking to Fine Brit after the show, it became clear why some parts of it had been hard to understand. Abstract theatre relies heavily on precise movement and minimalist sets/storylines. Hard Stuff is still being workshopped, which is why it had so many ideas. Both artists were testing the concepts they want to bring into the main production. I hope they keep the lion, bird, and muppet skits. Those were the easiest for me to understand.
The BIG Picture: How Does KITF Feed Uganda Theatre?
In a blog piece, I penned for the opening night of #KITF19, I made an argument that KITF’s existence alone could help save Uganda theatre from what I feel is a gradual decline to certain death. Some of the people who responded to it asked why I was charging a singular event with such a huge mantle. Let me clarify that I do not. No singular individual, organisation, or festival can fix the problems theatre faces in Uganda single-handedly. They are systematic, complex, and require deliberate intervention from government and practitioners. However, in countries like ours where arts-proper is seen as a waste of time, one has better luck flying to the moon than waiting on the kind of state intervention that would produce the changes our sector needs. Between then and now, those problems will continue to exist until individuals and organisations with agency begin to use their influence to make space for the professional practice of theatre. The only platform doing this in Uganda (and possibly East & Central Africa) is KITF. If there is another, I’m happy to be sent in its direction.
My take is that theatre is struggling because many independent practitioners do not want to invest in learning or understanding the technical aspects of delivering the art form. Platforms like KITF cannot save a struggling sector as Jesus did for his Christian flock, however, their insistence on holding up certain professional values has the effect of creating ripples which later on cause big changes. There is no need for them to try to save the world. All they need to do is continue existing and keep promoting the value of professional theatre to both audiences and practitioners, and as the industry evolves and begins to grow, transition into some form of standard bearing/celebration of standard-setters. Not all change comes from crusades and rallies. Spaces like KITF provide an opportunity to learn from colleagues in an unthreatening environment. That is the value they provide. The more we embrace them, the more they grow, the better they perform.