Mother Africa Laughs: The Rwandan Folk Tale Project

Rwandan Folk Tale Project participants warm up with students from the School for the Deaf at the beginning of workshop on day one. All photos by Meghan Sharer

He approached me quietly at first, uncertain of his moves, his spotty English. “You do the comedies.” I thought he was asking for money. In this small city in southern Rwanda, it is not uncommon for children from the street to drop their games when they spot your pale face and run to you, palms outstretched, hoping for a coin or even a cool Fanta. I dismissed the boy and continued on.

Again: “You do the comedies.” I paused to consider his words, and the dots suddenly connected. He had seen me work, perhaps, or had heard from someone else about me. It was odd that this young boy should have taken any interest. I stopped my team and walked back. “Yes, I do the comedies.”

Judd Hardy and Kaya Chwals demonstrate a movement exercise called “the mirror.”

His chest puffed up with 13-year-old pride. “I want to do them!” I shot a glance to my colleagues, then turned back to the boy. “All right, we meet at five at the Center for the Arts.”

“I know,” he declared triumphantly and returned to the game of stickball with his friends.

We were well into our project when Joseph approached me on the street. In early September 2005, I had arrived in Butare, Rwanda, dazed, jetlagged and anxious to get started as soon as possible on something I had been planning for over a year-and-a-half while finishing school in New York. My team consisted of myself, my co-teacher Kaya Chwals, and our project’s producer, Meghan Sharer. Early in its inception, the project was generously taken under the wing of a fledgling arts organization, Quo Vadimus Arts, in New York City. We raised funds independently for over a year to get ourselves to Rwanda. Once there, the plan seemed simple enough: Locate the university, locate the university students, make theater. Easy, right?

My endeavor was titled “The Rwandan Folk Tale Project.” I explained it both to friends and potential benefactors as my attempt to approach delicate issues such as reconciliation and forgiveness with artists in Rwanda by helping them to deconstruct and recreate age-old parables in their own voices. On paper, I was more prepared than a lawyer prepping for her first case. In my head, I knew I was just plain nuts. I had lived in Africa before, Kenya specifically. I understood all too well how Mother Africa enjoys taking those best-laid plans of yours, dangling them over your head for comic effect and tossing them far into the Indian Ocean. I knew everything would change once I was in Rwanda. The project would develop through the discoveries that come from having my plans upended.

A scene from the children’s new version of an old Rwandan folk tale: The young boy is dead and on his way to a family funeral.

Everything went wrong from the beginning, just as planned. We had difficulty finding housing. We had a tough time even securing an initial meeting with our university participants. Our first major blow came when we discovered that the Rwandan government had recently shifted to a new school schedule (we wazungu had not been informed) and school would end in October, not November, cutting our project literally in half. It was frustrating; I could hear Mother Africa giggling.

Once we began working with a solid team of actors, it was painfully obvious that three languages needed to be translated in order to accomplish anything. We slowed down every time I would try to explain something in English and wait for the sentence first to reach French, then Kinyarwanda, then have its meaning debated for several minutes.

When we did connect, it was magic. We based our acting training method largely on physical experimentation, using the body to tell a story. Our performers’ bodies were graceful, agile, surprising. In much the same way we were trying to adapt to each new challenge, their bodies would weave and dive, trying to find a new way of engaging an audience in an old tale. Often, traditional dance moves would find their way into a story, adding a depth of symbolism I think was truly only appreciated by our participants and their Rwandan audience. And our audience grew! By the time Joseph, my young friend, officially joined our ranks, we had created a wide following of Butare’s citizens, fascinated to see us practice yoga poses as we warmed up, or sing traditional Rwandan songs with us, or laugh together as we each told a new version of an old story.

Participants in the workshop improvise fixing a bus.

Two weeks into the workshop, my team and I were stranded in the backwoods of Rwanda. Back in the States we had been in correspondence with a children’s group located in Mayaga, a collective that supported child-orphans of the genocide who were now faced with the daunting task of raising their own siblings. This orphan collective seemed the perfect fit for the finale of our project: We would bring our participants out to where these children lived and give them a set time — three days or so — to turn around and teach these children tools similar to those we’d imparted. They would then work with the children collectively to create modern plays from ancient myths. But there was one problem. There were no children. The orphans were nowhere to be found. For three weeks I had been banging on doors, demanding to speak with as many people as I could. My team had been working frantically to try and solve the mystery with me: Where was Mayaga and who were these children? Our search had finally narrowed to a grueling three-hour bus ride deep into Rwanda’s interior, where we found out that Mayaga was not a village but a province. Again, Mother Africa laughs. Standing on a dirt road on a hot, dusty afternoon in September, it became painfully clear that there were no such orphans, and if there were, we had no chance in hell of finding them. My team grimaced and began to fume, turning to direct their anger at me. Instead, I was grinning goofily ear-to-ear: “Let’s ride motorcycles back this time!!”

Workshop participant helps two children create a character based on a lion.

Two days later, at a party, I was approached by a charming older Welsh lady. She’d been told that we “do the comedies.”

“How delightful,” she said. She had a dilemma. She’d recently begun working with a school for deaf children, the only one in existence in Rwanda, and the children seemed starved for some sort of creative play. “Only trouble is,” she bubbled, “haven’t got anyone to play with.”

I explained what we did and her face fell. “But they’re deaf. They won’t be able to hear what you’re saying.”

“Well, there we’ve got something in common because my students can’t understand a word I say either.” She chuckled and invited us to meet with the students.

The workshops were silly at times, playful and, every so often, touching. These children who spend their lives on the periphery of their culture stretched to the full potential of their artistic voices, creating stories about shoes or boxes or bad men who stole mama’s bananas — simple things. But I could not get over the children’s look of wonder that college-age students, my own participants, were taking such a keen interest in them. I remember Joseph, the young boy who had initially approached me to act. He showed up the first day of the workshop at the School for the Deaf wearing a suit and tie, his only. He was one of the first in line to take a group of kids and he treated them lovingly, like his own. He was possibly one of the most skilled of all the facilitators, but they were all memorable in their own ways, each creative body diving, weaving, recreating and deconstructing their reality. Witnessing firsthand the strong, almost inseparable bond that immediately formed when my student participants began making theater with these kids (and hearing how it has continued to cultivate over the last year) remains one of the highlights of my life, and one of the most welcome detours in my journey.

At the end of the day, participants decide to have team members hug one another as a gesture of goodwill.

To this day, I still swear that Mayaga exists, if only in my mind. It was the catalyst for my actions, the impetus to stand up and say, “Hey, I can make a difference and here’s how I’ll do it,” knowing that it would look very different when I came out the other end. Sometimes that’s all you need: a plan, something with enough fiber to get you up in the morning and inspire you to try again, but with enough flexibility that you can bend it, stretch it, rip it to shreds, tape it or just throw it out altogether. In the end, I have to acknowledge that I probably had very little to do with how this all came to be. Maybe we never do. But the day that I started laughing along with Mother Africa was the day the ride became a whole lot more fun, I can promise you that.

Judd Hardy is a graduate of New York University/Tisch School of the Arts’ Experimental Theatre Wing. He is a playwright, composer and performer, and has taught theater workshops in throughout the United States, Africa and the Caribbean. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Original CAN/API publication: December 2006