Project 1: The Amnesty International Human Rights Arts Festival

This April, I will be conducting two workshops about my work as a writer and artist at the Amnesty International Human Rights Arts Festival. There will be two one hour workshops over the course of the weekend and in these workshops, I plan on discussing my piece The Gulf: Rwanda 1994, showing clips of the performance, opening the floor for questions and then getting everyone on their feet and having them work on a new poem that I have written specifically for the festival. It'll be a fun, high energy, high impact, full and fulfilling workshop where people of all walks of life get to put their own spin on something that they may have never done before.

What is The Gulf: Rwanda 1994?
 My senior year of my undergrad, we theatre students had to produce our own two evenings of art and live performance as our thesis project. For this, I studied and developed a piece about the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. This travesty in 1994 is something that has always fascinated, horrified, and motivated me to be the change I want to see, so I found stories of survivors. Stories of men, women, children, sisters, mothers, and fathers who all found ways to survive. And through their scars, they tell these harrowing stories about healing and hope and salvation. All I did was take these stories and put them into my own language. I wrote a collection of poems based on these stories, then with a cast of four, I set them to dance and other forms of movement. It developed into a 20 minute performance art piece about the healing and acknowledgment of  a horrifying scar on world history. I wrote it as a testament to the healing powers of forgiveness and the staining powers of forgetting where and what we come from. The project taught me so many things about myself as an artist, the power of art to say something critical and do something with purpose, the importance of thinking globally and acting locally.


The New Piece?
The new piece for the festival is entitled Cherish Bowl. There is a copy of the poem on my writing blog, cutediterewind.blogspot.com if you feel like checking it out. This piece was inspired by a woman who is part of Rwanda's healing process. For Christmas, my grandmother gave me a hand woven Cherish Bowl from Rwanda from a coalition called Rwanda's Path to Peace. This coalition of women offer economic trade for the country and have all come together to heal in the wake of the genocide. I researched and found the story of one woman, and drew from that to create the poem. This is the poem that we will work on in the workshops. Participants will be given images from many random sources and asked to find one that fits the sensation, smell, taste, and sound of the section of poem they are assigned. They will then be given five movements that they have to integrate into their telling. They will then recreate the image with the movements and the words. If there is enough time, all the groups will come together and do the whole poem as a performance. The goal is to work together, integrate other art forms with the words, tell the story fully and passionately, and have fun! My hope is that we can all learn and grow together, give voices to the muted, and really work together through art to come together in art.

The next few posts will be research and other information about the workshops and discussion panels that I will be a part of this year. Check back for updates and information on me and my work!

~tse